Not trying to make this a rant, but I really just don't understand how there are wildly different barometers for what is “productive” for Boomers vs EVERY following generation. My wife (millennial) manages a boomer – she cannot get her to do her job. She took two years to learn simply how to right click with a mouse, despite my wife begging her to take computer literacy classes. She shows up late or doesn't even come in to work, and when she does she just makes other people do work for her, and shops online during the work day. Then complains that she's working so hard and deserves a raise. And in the end, she's going to get one! All this is happening while my wife quite literally runs the business, and when she asked for an ample raise to just under market rates, she was laughed directly to her face and scoffed at. I get this is one experience, but frankly on my own end I've experienced the exact same thing. Boomers show up to work, and they think that “work” means “talking to your coworkers” while all the younger team-members have to do all the work and manage up to these people who quite literally have no idea how to do their jobs. Every few days I get asked questions that are fundamentally base level knowledge for my industry by boomer leadership, and it just boggles my mind as if I or my associates asked those questions, we would be fired on the spot. I work on marketing, and I hear stuff like “what is an ad? How do those work?”
They often tout statistics of “productivity” that they are the most productive of us all, but the definition of “productivity” in these studies is outputs/input costs. Which means that when as a generation, when you are hired at a manager level right out the gate, and you outsource most all of your work to cheap labor, yes, in theory you are “increasing productivity” but that is completely misleading the point that there was NO WORK DONE on their end besides telling someone else to do it for them.
tl;dr; why do we collectively accept the delusion that many boomers have that they are performing at a high capacity in the workplace? And why is the barometer for “experience” and “education” in the field simply “years of existing in a role” vs actually being capable of getting work done that has ANY effect on the bottom line?