There seem to be two factors at work:

1. Life stage. Gen Z is most frequently defined by birth years 1997 to 2012, i.e. aged 12-27. I got fired from my weekend cleaning job when I was a teenager because teenagers are invincible morons who think they know everything.

2. Silicon Valley Hustle Culture: when you teach ship in two weeks, every task can be performed by a five-person team as the ideal, you get shitty products. Most products and services, right now, are absolutely terrible.

That fake-it-till-you-make-it culture has youngsters clamouring for promotions after just a year or two, when they don't have the knowledge, skills and experience for the role they're even in right now. For them to even be in associate-level roles 15 years ago would have been unthinkable, and they hire others like themselves who have never known things to be different.

That 10-15 year timeframe is also the time when I kept hearing about ageism and how you're "past it" when you're 40 or even 30, which would have been the minimum age for any kind of management role just because of the sheer amount of time it takes to learn how to do anything well.

Now companies are scrambling to hire over-40s because they're almost the only people who know how to do anything well any more.

Almost: I've worked with many absolutely brilliant people in their late 20s but they are very much the exception, and they've been trained and mentored for years by highly-skilled seniors.

That's the missing piece in our current workplace habits: when people worked in functional teams, juniors learned from seniors and everyone got better. This is not something you can teach in a presentation, but the daily practice of working on a project with someone who knows how to do it better.

As a junior, I worked at product level, and my boss worked at portfolio level, and her boss worked with the C-suite.

The Director's projects were huge and important, so the rest of the team supported him, so we learned to work his way. I even said to the boss before him (long retired) that she was still leading, in a way: when I coach a manager, they're benefiting from her knowledge, skills and experience.

We need to bring that skills transfer system back, for everyone's sake.