Over the past week, Elon Musk has been engaged in a near wholesale takeover of key areas of the U.S. federal government. Working under the newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency” aka DOGE, Musk and a group of young Gen Z loyalists have begun wreaking havoc on our institutions. Online culture journalist Ryan Broderick joined me to break down who exactly these young men are, what their backgrounds say about the people Musk is hiring, and what the billionaire is currently doing to the U.S. government.
It’s scary because I remember that as a 20-something entering the job market, I was really quite impressionable and I would easily go with anything my boss would tell me.
Of course I was nominally an adult and I had critical thinking abilities, but I didn’t have the benefit of “having been around” to tell whether my boss was talking out of his ass, bullshitting the workforce or making bad decisions. Now I know, but back then I didn’t.
Luckily, my first employer was a pleasant, decent small business owner whose potentially bad decisions were inconsequential beyond the survival of his business. He wasn’t a maniacal egostistical sociopathic billionaire with no regard for the well being of others. But I can imagine that if my first employers had been one, I could very well have agreed to, and done things I would never agree to today.
deleted by creator
I never was a pain with my coworkers - I think… maybe? 🙂 But I remember being an insufferable know-it-all. My older coworkers put up with me because I actually did get shit done, but some of the things I said with the absolute certainty of someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about… Sheesh, I too cringe today.
Funnily enough, now I’m the old fart and I hear the same thing coming from some of our younger recruits. I mean they’re nice and all, but they regularly spew out absolute statements that immediately shut off the conversation and they won’t listen to more nuanced arguments. And I know better than to counterargue because I was like that too and I know it doesn’t work - which is probably why my coworkers back then also didn’t say anything back to me. More cringe 🙂
But there’s hope: one of the younger engineers swore by MS VSCode and would regularly tell me my text terminal and VI were “total shit” and “Welcome to 2025 grandpa”. But every once in a while, we have to work together on a problem in my office, where all the cool hardware lives, and he sees me work the terminal much, MUCH faster than he does his GUI tools. I don’t even say anything anymore: I do my things and he watches.
And the other day he meekly said “Well, your command line gobbledygook probably took you way too much time than it’s worth to learn, but it sure is quicker than what I do…” To which I replied “Then maybe it is worth taking the time to learn it eh?” The more I think about it, the more I think I’ll convince him by example rather than by proselytizing.
I almost got fired for refusing to change out the locks on our office doors so that my boss couldn’t be evicted when he stopped paying rent. Sounds like the main differences between you and I were that I became curmudgeonly at an early age and that my boss was easier to immediately identify as a dangerous asshole.
Well, I got lucky because my first bosses were good people, so I didn’t have to do stuff I would object to today. Then later, as I gained experience and my resume got long enough for me to be more picky about whom I work for, I made extra-sure to select decent employers I would be “compatible” with.
I only worked for 2 slightly sketchy employers: the former didn’t really ask me to do anything I didn’t want to but they did run away with the company’s money. The latter asked me as a manager to lie to my team members and fuck their career prospects in order to extract a few extra months of work from them when they know they’d be firing them. I refused and instructed my boss that I would be suing the company for unfair dismissal if they moved against me. They didn’t and I left eventually, so I came out of that one feeling good about what I did.
Other than those two, my working career has been fairly peaceful. So I never really had a reason to turn curmudgeonly 🙂
That truly feels good to hear that kind of story. I started working when I was 16 and almost all of my bosses were abusive assholes creating horrifically toxic environments. I got my first decent boss when I was nearly 30 and I’ve stayed with them for around a decade.
