Your Gen Z Co-Worker Is Hustling More Than You Think
Ambitious 20-somethings are trying to knock down the stereotype that they aren’t into hard work
4 min
Being young and ambitious right now often means proving that you can be both of those things at the same time.
That applies even to 25-year-old Charu Thomas, who earned an engineering degree in 3½ years after completing high school in three years. She founded supply-chain software firm Ox at age 18, raised $3.5 million in funding and, in 2020, made it onto Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list.
Yet in a breakfast with investors in the fall, she said they wanted to discuss “quiet quitting” and the motivation of younger entrepreneurs.
“They had this impression that Gen Z and younger founders were non responsive, were less legitimate, or lazier,” said Ms. Thomas on a recent morning from her Bentonville, Ark., office. She had just spent much of the night in the office to oversee a Fortune 500 client’s software deployment, she said, then attended a 9 a.m. staff meeting still in the T-shirt she’d worn the day before.
Such is life for many ambitious 20-somethings. Barely in the workforce, they are pushing long hours, building businesses, striving for promotions—even for their more-senior co-workers’ jobs. At the same time they are running into perceptions that their age cohort cares more about work-life boundaries and rejecting “hustle” culture than scaling the career ladder.
Like Ms. Thomas, many say they are intent on knocking down the stereotype. “I don’t want to be a representative of that kind of culture,” she says.
Gen Z, typically defined as being born between 1997 and 2012, isn’t the first generation to be typecast as it enters the workforce. Not long ago employers were hand-wringing over what they viewed as entitled millennials who, some bosses joked, wanted trophies just for showing up.
A growing body of survey research echoes the idea that workers in their early to mid-20s want control over how much they work. In a survey of nearly 5,000 adults by Prudential Financial last year, 43% of Gen Z workers said they went above and beyond in their jobs. More than half of millennials said they did, as did 62% of members of Gen X and 69% of baby boomers. A 2022 Gallup survey of about 15,000 U.S. workers shows younger millennials and Gen Z respondents reported declining levels of job engagement and higher rates of stress than other workers.
To show colleagues she works hard, 22-year-old Brianna Chang says she chooses to put in as many as 60 hours a week as a supply-chain planner at Microsoft Corp.
Ms. Chang said her work ethic was forged as a teenager, when she waited tables in her parents’ Chinese restaurant in Bellingham, Wash. She’s driven in part by the goal of making money to one day support her parents and says she’s disheartened when she sees peers on social media saying they don’t work hard.
But, she adds, that makes it easier for her to stand out.
“A lot of people my age, they are just stuck,” she says.
Managers and recruiters say that remote work made it tough for some young workers to find mentors and learn professional norms in the office. As a result, many of these young workers struggle with resourcefulness, professional networking and communications with clients and co-workers, says Julia Lamm, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Workforce Transformation practice. Some also had to navigate layoffs at the start of the pandemic and are now on their second or third job since.
Jorge Tapia, a 26-year-old software engineer in Indianapolis, said he lets his work speak for itself as he wakes up at 6 a.m. to get to work an hour later. He’s given priority to building relationships with colleagues since starting his position last year at a logistics technology and software provider. On his first week of work, he sat down with a man he didn’t know in the office cafeteria.
The man turned out to be the company’s North America chief executive, who told him how he approached his own career.
It was a valuable lesson, Mr. Tapia said: “If I could talk to my CEO, I could talk to my co-workers, my managers, openly.”
Mr. Tapia said he is working hard in hopes of getting a promotion, which would raise his salary and allow him to better help out his mother and three siblings, ages 23, 15 and 8.
Financial security is important to Gen Z workers, according to interviews with and surveys of about 100 Gen Z workers between November and January conducted by the Conference Board. About half of Gen Zers and millennials said in a 2022 Deloitte survey that they live paycheck to paycheck, and about 30% of each group say they don’t feel financially secure.
Last year, Brandi Jones was working as a dance teacher and at the front desk of a dentist’s office, making about $25,000 and living with family, she said. She quit both roles in July to find a job that would cover her health insurance and pay enough for her to move into her own apartment.
To get that job, Ms. Jones, now 26, got certified in Salesforce’s customer-relationship management software, so that she could work at a nonprofit that uses the tool. She studied sometimes 10 hours a day to pass the exam, she said. After passing, she applied for more than 20 jobs over six months.
Aware of common stereotypes about young professionals, she says she asked questions in job interviews about company culture to get a sense of employers’ generational diversity and how they defined a successful employee. She says she eventually found a job at a nonprofit that pays about $100,000 a year.
No longer working weekends, she marvelled at having more free time at first. Then she started studying cybersecurity tools because she is considering a master’s degree. She wants to advance further, she says.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
For affluent homeowners, the laundry is no longer a utility space. It’s becoming a performance-driven investment in hygiene, longevity and seamless living.
2 min
In high-end homes, the most telling upgrades are no longer the obvious ones.
It’s not just the marble in the kitchen or the view from the terrace. Increasingly, it’s the rooms you don’t see, and how well they actually work.
The laundry is a perfect example.
Once treated as a purely functional space, it is now being reconsidered by architects and homeowners alike as a zone where performance, hygiene and design need to align.
And for buyers operating at the top end of the market, that shift is less about aesthetics and more about control.
Because in a home where everything is curated, inefficiency stands out.
ASKO’s latest “Laundry Care 2.0” range leans directly into that mindset, positioning the laundry as a long-term investment rather than a basic appliance purchase.
Built on more than 75 years of engineering, the Scandinavian brand’s latest systems focus on durability, precision and what is becoming a defining luxury in modern homes: quiet.
One of the more telling innovations is something most buyers would never think to question until it fails.
Traditional washing machines rely on rubber seals that trap dirt and bacteria over time. ASKO replaces that entirely with a steel solution designed to maintain a cleaner, more hygienic drum.
It’s not a headline feature. But it is exactly the kind of detail buyers tend to notice.
Then there is the issue of noise.
As open-plan living has become standard in prestige homes, the background hum of appliances has gone from unnoticed to intrusive.
ASKO’s suspension system is engineered to minimise vibration almost entirely, allowing machines to run without disrupting the wider home environment.
In practical terms, that means a load can run late at night without carrying through the house. In lifestyle terms, it means the home functions as intended.
The same thinking extends to the drying process. Uneven loads, tangled fabrics and repeat cycles are treated as inefficiencies rather than inconveniences, with technology designed to keep garments moving evenly and reduce wear over time.
For buyers, this is where the value proposition sharpens.
It is not about having more features. It is about removing friction.
Less maintenance. Less noise. Less time spent correcting what should have worked the first time.
In that sense, modern laundry is no longer just a utility. It is a reflection of how a home performs behind the scenes, and whether it lives up to the expectations set by everything else.
Because at this level, luxury is not just what you see.
It is what you don’t have to think about.
Pure Amazon has begun journeys deep into Peru’s Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, combining contemporary design, Indigenous craftsmanship and intimate wildlife encounters in one of the richest ecosystems on Earth.
Travellers are swapping traditional sightseeing for immersive experiences, with Africa emerging as a must-visit destination.
