Millennials and zoomers are becoming the backbone of the American work force, and they are delivering some labor pains for the rest of the country. In order to understand the full picture of what in the world is happening in the labor force, you must remember that the boomers, the largest generation, are retiring in droves and leaving a giant shortage. The millennials are poised to initially fill the void, and there are pros and cons to that situation:

Everyone has their favorite millennial stereotype that they’re lazy, that they’re entitled, they got their first job at 27 that they think they’re gonna be CEO in three years, that their mom still drives them to work, assuming they show up, they sleep until 11.

You know, all these things are totally true for about half the millennials. About half the millennials do match the stereotype, and they are an issue. There’s no question about that. But the other half do not match the stereotype. The other half did everything that they were supposed to. They entered the workforce immediately upon leaving college. They never took an extended vacation, and they worked their fingers to the bone.

But from worker quality point of view, these two different groups of millennials are actually pretty similar because the millennials who did everything right, got screwed as they were coming of age. They were entering the workforce just as the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis hit, which meant that they were the last people in the door. So they were the first people who got fired, and they lost several years of prime constructive work experience that you normally get at the beginning of your career. They missed out on that for three, four, five years at the same time that the lazy millennials were missing out on three, four or five years of work experience, by choice. So regardless of how you look at it, the millennials today are behind compared to every generation in the workforce that has come before.

On the plus side, millennials bring real skill in collaboration, which means they perform well in management roles and dynamic, fluid environments and do not cave under the stress.

The zoomers, the following generation, come with a completely different approach: they’re hyper competitive and fairly anti-social.

And the sort of mass touchy feely work that the millennials are capable of and competent at and famous for, the zoomers just can’t compete in that field. So anything that requires a team effort like management, blue collar work, construction, they just don’t do.

They just wanna lock themselves in a closet and code, which means this next generation cannot contribute to the sort of labor shortages that we’re seeing right now in trucking, in agriculture, in upper management, in finance.

If all of this sounds bleak, you should know America is in a pretty good situation compared to the rest of the world.