The Boomer Blockade

Years ago, when I was first starting to blog, I wrote a small thing about how the 2008 recession was good for the status quo , because it kept a lot of Boomers in place longer than they maybe would have stayed, due to fiscal reasons (i.e. they lost money, the value of their home, what have you). As time has passed since that 2014 post, increasingly I think Boomers stay in place simply because they want to work and fear retirement = death. I may be speaking predominantly about men here, but I am a man, so that’s a bit more of what I know conditionally. I personally dislike most forms of work and find it to be a means to an end and nothing more, but I also cry at romantic comedies, so perhaps I’m not much of a guy as is.

This term “Boomer Blockade” I largely attribute to Paul Millerd, and it appears like his January 18, 2020 — pre-pandemic! — newsletter is where it began. To wit:

Millenials and Gen Xers are hitting a wall at work. They have been promoted several times but due to low rates of organic growth and long-tenured senior leaders, they don’t really see a path for future progression or promotion. They start to play the lateral game — jumping around to different jobs and hoping they can find a firm growing fast enough where there might be more opportunity. They may have a good title, but are still doing the same work they were doing 5 to 10 years ago and there doesn’t appear to be anyone retiring or planning on leaving anytime soon.

That newsletter is accompanied by a couple of graphs related to age of law partners, age of CEOs, age of equity partners, etc. — then the next week, he did another newsletter that went pretty deep on the concept, including:

Here’s a fuller long-form he did on the concept.

Then, finally this past weekend, Millerd sent an email featuring quotes from 1955 tome Organization Man, including this passage:

“We are a young group without mature leadership,” explains a rising young banker, “so we are forced to take on responsibilities that older people usually assume. For the last two years I have been chairman of the board of the church, a job held by a fifty-five or sixty-year-old man in most communities. This gives me a training valuable in business. The church is a corporation with a $50,000 budget, and we’ve had to think about a $100,000 capital loan. How else could people our age get a chance to deal with that much capital? We’re forced ahead of our time.”

Let’s now marry all this together

It’s hard to straight-up make a “Boomers are holding the rest of us back” argument, even tho this video does it pretty hysterically in the context of the vaccine:

The reason it’s hard? We live in a very ageist society, at least in North America, where the young are revered and the big money is associated with young tech minds. That’s obviously not the real picture, and if you’ve ever driven through the old-money neighborhood of any metropolitan area you’d know that, but that’s a central narrative. So it feels like we have all this “entrepreneurship!” and “opportunity!” and “innovation!” — despite the 22.5 million jobs that went poof in about 2–3 weeks last spring — and thus it’s hard to come out and say “Well, Boomers are holding us all back.” I get it.

Now, that final pull quote above (the one from 1955) I think is interesting. It’s maybe not so much that Boomers are holding us back as that, younger people are largely coming into 2–3 tiers of work. Tier 1 is the stellar professions we’ve revered for years, and those young people are doing fine, even though a lot of law work in the young-career levels will eventually be fully automated. Tier 2 is Graeber’s bullshit jobs, and people becoming “account managers” and “marketing coordinators” and the like. CEOs see those line items and grimace. Tier 3 is people entering service/retail or having kids early and opting out of the professional game altogether.

Those are broad tiers and not meant to be fully inclusive. And after that first wave of tiers, you have a lot of people switch tiers, graduate school, child-rearing, passion projects, self-employment, etc.

But what Boomers are blocking is … except in some urgent project example or some context where software needs to be shipped overnight and only a 25-year old can do it (a big example in many Forbes articles that roughly equate to toilet paper), the opportunities for growth are not there as much because Boomers still control many of the levers of power, especially in legacy orgs. Opportunities for growth are tremendously important to a person’s perception of how their career is unfolding. A Boomer, who stereotypically (not all of ‘em!) demands loyalty above all and rarely understands the full scope of work being done in the org, will often respond to employees who want more responsibility with busy work, i.e. “Look into this for me” or “Create me a deck.”

That’s a blockade. In 1955, that guy was running fiscal point for his church. Now, a 2021 church is a different example, because we’ve seen declines in religion and I bet young people are actually running stuff in many churches — I’m barely that religious and I run three or four things tied to my church. But go into Widgets Inc. and will a young man or woman be thrust into a high-responsibility role early in their career? Probably not. And that’s the essence of the Boomer Blockade.

But if the game for generations has been “wait your turn and pay your dues,” is this such a bad thing? Or just how we understand work?

Largely it’s the latter, and that’s fine. What’s different now is a few things, of which I’ll only elaborate briefly. First, we are coming up on a Baby Boomer exodus. The housing market and the stock market have been hot, even as the broader economy was deeply questionable. Boomers will get out of working with housing + stocks = hot, although there are questions about what that means for long-term renting, because some Boomers will sell and not be able to get back into the subdivision they want, which means you may see more and more multi-families going up near where you live. (Also: multi-families are something that rich guys who aspire to be richer guys love to park money in.) If we have a Boomer exodus and the tiers below them don’t really know how to execute on big projects because they’ve never been given the opportunity, that’s a potential concern, and the best answer we have is “Well, human beings rise to the opportunity!” That is true, admittedly, but it’s something to consider.

The other thing different is tech and the job market and the various intersections therein. In 50 years, I’d argue the job market will ostensibly run age 17–34. It kinda already does , and we don’t actively discuss or admit that, but as low-skill, lower-wage, monotonous stuff gets piped out to automation, there will be less pathways and more general confusion about how you enter and move through companies, and I think at some point world-builders are going to just say “Fuck it, we’re 75% automated and then I need the top talent for the other 1 in 4 roles.” You can screech all you want about “human-to-human roles,” but the reality is most companies are built by cost-cutters, and the moment we’re entering will be more pronounced than at any time in history.

So I do wonder what it will look like when current 20-somethings, who had a tumult of an early-to-mid career ride, see their own children with less and less entry-level opportunity and less and less conventional pathways. They might look back at Boomers, RIP by then, and say “You bastards wrought all this!”

Or, conversely, nothing at all will change and the only thing any generation will be concerned about is their salary, their home valuation, their amount of children, and the traditional markers of success, and even jobs that could be automated won’t be in pursuit of those things.

I ain’t no futurist, but I do see a Boomer jam-up as a potential problem. You?