7 Reasons Boomers Say They Hate Working With Gen Z (And Why They’re Kind Of Right)
Before you roll your eyes, hear this out. Yes, generational workplace complaints are tired. Yes, every older generation has griped about the younger one since the dawn of employment. And yes, a lot of boomer criticism of Gen Z is just thinly veiled resentment of people who refuse to suffer the way they did.
But not all of it. Some of the frustrations boomers express about working with Gen Z point to genuine friction—real differences in values, communication styles, and expectations that create actual problems in shared workspaces. Dismissing all of it as “ok boomer” misses legitimate issues that both sides would benefit from understanding.
The goal here isn’t to validate every boomer complaint or trash an entire generation. It’s to look honestly at where the friction lives—and acknowledge that sometimes the older generation has a point, even when their delivery is terrible.
1. The communication gap is real
Boomers want phone calls and face-to-face meetings. Gen Z wants Slack messages and async communication. Neither preference is objectively wrong, but the mismatch creates genuine workflow problems.
Here’s where boomers have a point: some conversations actually do require real-time, voice-to-voice communication. Nuance gets lost in text. Tone is ambiguous. Complex problems that could be resolved in a five-minute call turn into hour-long message threads where meaning gets mangled.
Communication research supports the idea that richer communication channels—voice, video, in-person—convey more information and create fewer misunderstandings. Gen Z’s preference for text-based communication is efficient for simple exchanges but can genuinely impede collaboration on complex tasks.
That said, boomers’ insistence that everything requires a meeting is equally problematic. The answer is somewhere in the middle, and both sides could stand to flex.
2. Boundaries can become rigidity
Gen Z has embraced workplace boundaries in ways that are largely healthy. They don’t answer emails at midnight. They use their vacation days. They push back on scope creep. After watching boomers and Gen X burn themselves out, this correction was overdue.
But some boomers observe—not entirely unfairly—that boundaries sometimes calcify into inflexibility. The coworker who won’t stay fifteen extra minutes to finish a time-sensitive project. The team member who treats any request outside their exact job description as a boundary violation. The employee who clocks out mentally at 4:59 regardless of what’s happening.
Healthy boundaries protect your wellbeing. Rigid boundaries protect your comfort at the expense of collective function. The distinction matters, and some Gen Z workers haven’t quite found the line.
3. Feedback tolerance has genuinely decreased
This is the complaint boomers bring up most often, and the data partially supports it. Managers across generations report that younger employees are more likely to have strong emotional reactions to constructive criticism, to interpret feedback as personal attacks, and to need more positive reinforcement alongside correction.
Some of this is healthy—the old model of brutal, uncompassionate feedback wasn’t productive either. But workplace resilience does require the ability to hear “this needs improvement” without spiraling. A manager shouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes cushioning a simple correction.
Boomers overcorrect by being needlessly harsh. Gen Z overcorrects by being needlessly fragile. The functional middle ground—direct feedback delivered with respect—shouldn’t be this hard to find.
4. Job-hopping creates real costs
Gen Z changes jobs more frequently than any previous generation at the same career stage. From their perspective, this is rational—companies don’t reward loyalty, raises come from moving, and stagnation is a real risk.
From the boomer perspective, and from the perspective of anyone managing a team, constant turnover is genuinely expensive and disruptive. Training new employees takes months. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Team cohesion suffers. Projects lose continuity.
Employment research confirms that turnover costs organizations significantly—often 50-200% of the departing employee’s annual salary when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity. Boomers aren’t wrong that this matters. They’re just wrong about whose fault it is.
Gen Z didn’t break the loyalty contract. Corporations did. But the consequences are still real, and the people left behind feel them.
5. Not everything is a mental health crisis
Boomers are wrong to dismiss mental health entirely. They’re not wrong to notice that the language of mental health has expanded to cover an enormous range of human experiences, some of which used to just be called “having a bad day.”
When every stressful week becomes burnout, every nervous moment becomes anxiety, and every sad afternoon becomes depression, the terms lose diagnostic meaning. This isn’t gatekeeping mental health—it’s acknowledging that clinical conditions exist on a spectrum, and conflating normal discomfort with disorder doesn’t help anyone.
Boomers went too far in one direction—ignoring mental health entirely. Some Gen Z workers have gone too far in the other—medicalizing normal emotional fluctuation. Neither extreme serves people who are actually struggling.
6. Digital dependence has real workplace costs
Boomers notice something that’s genuinely true: many younger workers struggle with tasks that require sustained attention without digital tools. Writing a long document without switching tabs. Sitting through a meeting without checking their phone. Working through a complex problem without Googling every step.
Research on attention and technology confirms that constant device use fragments attention span over time. This isn’t a moral failing—it’s a neurological adaptation to an environment that rewards rapid switching. But it creates real limitations in work that requires depth and sustained focus.
Boomers overstate this problem and ignore their own digital distractions. But the core observation—that deep work capacity has decreased among people raised on smartphones—has research support.
7. Confidence sometimes outruns competence
This is the complaint that gets boomers in the most trouble, because it sounds like “kids these days think they’re so special.” But there’s a kernel of truth underneath the condescension.
Gen Z entered the workforce during a period of extreme labor scarcity. Many received significant responsibility, titles, and compensation earlier than previous generations. This created some calibration issues—expectations about advancement speed, role scope, and compensation that were shaped by unusual market conditions.
Now that the market has normalized, some younger workers are discovering that the trajectory they expected was contextual, not guaranteed. The boomer frustration isn’t with confidence itself—it’s with confidence that hasn’t been tested by adversity or earned through sustained performance.
Research on competence calibration shows this isn’t generational—it’s developmental. Everyone overestimates their abilities early in their career. Gen Z just happened to have that overestimation reinforced by a historically weird job market.
None of this means boomers are right about everything, or that Gen Z needs to fall in line. The boomer workplace had its own massive problems—rigid hierarchies, suppressed emotions, performative suffering, discrimination that was systemic rather than exceptional. Nobody should want to return to that.
But dismissing every boomer complaint as generational jealousy misses an opportunity. Some of the friction is genuinely about differences that create real problems. Communication mismatches slow down work. Turnover disrupts teams. Feedback sensitivity complicates management. These aren’t imaginary issues.
The most productive path isn’t for either generation to win the argument. It’s for both to recognize that their way of working has strengths and weaknesses, and that the best workplaces find ways to integrate rather than choose sides.
Boomers could stand to loosen up. Gen Z could stand to toughen up. And everyone could stand to stop treating their generation’s preferences as universal truths.
