Missing Perspectives

I am listening to many people talk about their perspectives. There’s two enormous gaps in the perspectives even considered. There is a great deal of concern from parents and small business employers regarding the legal restrictions or opportunities for employment for young people. There are people trying to be understanding or critical of youth and their relationship to work. There is some recognition that situations and circumstances now are entirely different than in their own youth, but incomplete.

There is absolutely no attempt to understand from the youth perspective, and there is no comprehension of what has changed from the perspective of the human resources departments, the institutional or job searching mechanisms that do the applicant evaluation.

From the youth perspective, it is not normal these days for anyone to be seeking some job in a bar or working in the neighbor’s yard. These are not career paths for the vast majority of people that do engage in them. Only the very few, regardless of merit or work, end up running a restaurant or owning their own successful small business. There aren’t enough businesses to run. That’s silly. It’s statistically impossible. And at the present, working for low wages at a retail store or in a restaurant is highly unlikely to be a job that anyone would even dream or pursuing when young and imagining the future their lives could manifest. It’s a ridiculous oversight.

Just think about it… for every restaurant owner or successful chef, how many dishwashers and servers are stuck in their low-wage unstable positions, working multiple jobs that do not engage their minds or interests at all just to barely make the rent and pay for gas in the car? Most of them!

In the current working world, these jobs are completely useless as work experience. If you are interested in doing anything interesting with your life, you require academic training or dedicated long-term apprenticeship, neither of which is easy to pursue or have opportunity to do.

On the employer end, if your goals in life are greater than menial labor or you have some expectation of running your own business employing other people’s menial labor, as I would hope any youth aspires to be, how do you get noticed or find work? At this point, all such institutional employers use multiple layers of Large Language Model filtering, entirely ridiculous previous work requirement filters, and simply pick the best looking resume, likely also assisted by LLM, with the snazziest garbage language on it that ticks all the right boxes before even bothering to call or email an applicant. These days, employers don’t even send an email letting you know that you have been denied, and if they do it can take a month or two! I’m sure the applicant screening people are quite happy with themselves, doing much less work than they did previously. How many have lost their jobs?

It’s an inhumane, immoral, disheartening system, with almost no benefit that compares to what the judgmental critics of the older generations received in their youth, while they complain about the youth of today being lazy or downright stupid.