One thing I have noticed is how prevalent the hustle culture has become among Millennials. LinkedIn is a hotbed of narcissism, and Twitter has a ton of self-proclaimed business superstars who have made money by having companies entirely dependent on using foreign labor and providing shitty service for customers. It's quite appalling how often you hear fellow Millennials go on and on boasting about their own "successes" or try to sell themselves without an ounce of honesty.
The hustle of creating "passive income" means that we are going to see a lot of sociopaths becoming landlords and doing the bare-minimum for those who rent from them, and the quality of services will continue to decline across all companies as there is no value in providing a good service, merely making money. The decline of quality we have seen from the boomer generation onward (yes, that includes you, Generation X, you aren't exempt from being self-destructive narcissists like your parents and your children) is going to ramp up significantly.
Some people will say, "blame the system, not the person," but for god's sake, eventually someone has to stand up and refuse to operate as basically a scam artist. For as many supposed "leftists" there are among Millennials, they sure have no qualms about taking the worst aspects of human greed and using that as their core business model.
Am I over-exaggerating here?
Unfortunately that's because narcissism is what gets rewarded in the labor market. Having powerful friends, err I'm sorry, networking is the be all end all of getting work these days, because fuck having skills. Narcissism just makes it easier to obtain what really matters.
Networking is what matters because regulators, certification, academics, and HR have all entirely failed to do their jobs, and everyone is lying.
Companies simply can't believe anything they see, and even if you have the correct mertiocratic qualifications, your psychological conditions may prevent you from working effectively in the environment or with the team.
As a result, the level of work required to suss out a good candidate whom you can employ for 3-5 years is neigh-on-impossible.
Therefore, what most places value is trust. If a person that they trust, says that you can be trusted; that's worth it's weight in gold because they don't have to work nearly as hard to analyze you, judge you, watch you, even after you're hired for the next 90 days.
It's no joke, I've seen the data. Referral hires have the best track record because the person referring them already knows whether or not they'll actually meet the real qualifications of working at a place every day with a set of people.
We built a materialistic, low-trust, fraudulent credential, economy and as a result trust has become the single most valuable asset that a person can have.
I don't disagree with you for the most part, especially the part of about fraudulent credentials (hello woke degree mills!). I just have first and second hand accounts of "trust" meaning "in the club" in reality, and that part shields them from having to actually be competent. Companies never seem to complain about the well connected fuck ups they employ, so when the well connected part is taken out of the equation it's difficult to sympathize with their concerns.
The problem is they're not really interested in selecting for good candidates outside the networking process because that takes real work on the part of the hiring manager. My mom told me a story about how her company hired a finance major for a rudimentary accounting job. The guy was retard who couldn't figure out basic credits and debits and their takeaway was that they needed to stop interviewing non-accounting majors for jobs like that instead of, you know, taking basic steps to filter out retards. For anyone reading that isn't aware: All majors in the school of business (accounting, finance, marketing, etc.) take the same "business core" as part of their major that teaches basic stuff like that. A finance major with an IQ above 85 would have been able to figure out that job.
This is a bit of rant, but it's born out of frustration with employers who whine about how hard finding good people is when they use their inability to find a networker as a pretext to hire the cool bullshit artist since he'll be fun to be around at least. It's all that not dissimilar from women who whine about not being able find men with ABC when they're selecting for men with XYZ.
I dislike handing out blackpills, but... depending on the type of job you're talking about, it gets even worse.
Most government jobs, you'll find really quickly, have no meritocracy whatsoever. It's pure nepotism above a certain level of authority. You might find a diamond in the rough every so often(and said guys tend to be REALLY fucking good at their jobs), but most often it's all about how many dicks you've sucked to get where you are.
Of course, there's a flip side to that - because they've sucked so many dicks to get where they are, they expect everyone else to kneel down and fellate them. And when you don't, they get really pissed off. Ask me how I know!
Thankfully, I've only ever had to deal with this from the outside looking in, but it's hilarious watching how they break when you refuse to bow down to thier little kingdom. Sadly, you can only do this in certain situations. I doubt people would appreciate, for instance, me pointing out how service went straight to shit when they started hiring on a bunch of black women to fill the positions for all the white men who were retiring...