If we hated being exploited at work, why are we so determined to call it character building when it happens to someone younger?

I watched a TikTok from Delaney Feezell having one of those workplace conversations that is painful precisely because nobody is screaming.

Everyone is calm. Everyone is being reasonable. Everyone thinks they have explained the problem.

And somehow they are still talking about two completely different jobs.

Delaney had originally applied for a full-time marketing director role. That job went to someone else. She was offered a part-time supporting role instead. Later, the person in the full-time position was let go, and Delaney says she absorbed much of that work while remaining part-time.

That distinction matters.

Her remit had become social media, influencer marketing, email, paid ads, events, partnerships, multiple locations and the broader marketing strategy sitting behind all of it.

Her employer's position was that the agreed scope already covered those responsibilities, not every responsibility had to be completed every week, and the visible output did not justify increasing Delaney's hours.

I can actually see how you get there as an employer.

If I am paying for 20 hours and I do not think I am seeing 20 hours worth of progress, my first instinct is not necessarily going to be, terrific, let me buy another 20.

That part is fair.

What irritated me was what happened next.

Delaney said she was doing the hours. She said those hours were being swallowed by approvals, reworking the same things, too many active projects and a lack of systems. She was trying to explain that the reason the work looked unfinished was partly because the machinery around the work was not functioning.

And the answer kept coming back to the unfinished work.

There is the loop.

You cannot justify more capacity because there is not enough output.

There is not enough output because the existing capacity is being spread across too much work.

At some point, this stops being a debate about whether somebody is working hard enough.

It becomes a design problem.

The job you need and the job you are willing to pay for are not the same job

Marketing is particularly bad for this because people still use the word as if it describes one activity.

It doesn't.

A small company can absolutely have one person overseeing marketing. Plenty do. That person may touch social, email, paid media, creators, events, partnerships, websites and content.

But touching all of those things and executing all of those things are different propositions.

I can own the strategy for an email programme without personally building every email.

A marketing director can be responsible for paid media without sitting inside Ads Manager every afternoon.

One person can oversee multiple locations while agencies, freelancers, coordinators or shared resources are doing some of the actual production.

This came up in Delaney's conversation when her employer referenced people at much larger organisations who appeared to manage marketing across several locations by themselves.

Delaney's answer was immediate: there may be one marketing lead, but that does not mean there is one pair of hands.

Exactly.

You cannot look at the title on LinkedIn and assume you understand the operating model behind it.

There may be an agency doing paid.

A contractor editing video.

A designer producing assets.

A CRM already configured.

An established content library.

A coordinator chasing approvals.

Or, frankly, a functioning process where someone makes a decision once and everybody gets on with it.

All of that counts.

And this is where my generation gets on my nerves

I am Gen X.

I know how this conversation goes.

We had terrible bosses too.

We stayed late.

We did things outside our job description.

We fetched things, fixed things and figured things out because somebody senior said so.

And then we called it paying our dues.

There were useful things in that.

I do not want to rewrite history and pretend every difficult workplace experience was abuse. Sometimes the work genuinely was hard. Sometimes we needed to become more resilient. Sometimes you did have to stop complaining and learn how to solve the problem.

I am grateful for some of that training.

I am also old enough now to recognise that some of it was complete nonsense.

The Devil Wears Prada is funny because Andy Sachs is constantly being asked to do ridiculous things and somehow the answer is always that she should be grateful to have the opportunity.

Fetch the coffee. Find the impossible thing. Solve somebody else's personal crisis. Sacrifice your evening.

And underneath it all sits that old workplace belief: if you really want this career, you will put up with it.

We absorbed quite a lot of that.

Which is fine.

What is less fine is using our survival as evidence that everybody after us should have to survive the same thing.

That should not be controversial.

And yet.

We confuse endurance with wisdom

This may be the Gen X trap.

Something was difficult for us, therefore it must have been character building.

Sometimes it was.

Sometimes it was just difficult.

Those are not the same thing.

I have no interest in romanticising Gen Z either. Some young employees will absolutely test your patience. Some older employees will too. Age has never cured incompetence.

But younger workers do seem more willing to ask questions that many of us were trained to swallow.

Those questions can sound almost offensive if you came up in a workplace culture where commitment was measured partly by how much ambiguity you tolerated.

I don't think they are offensive.

I think some of them are overdue.

Deloitte's 2025 global survey of more than 23,000 Gen Z and millennial respondents found money, meaning and well-being were all strongly connected to how younger workers think about careers. It also found that many younger workers want more development and support from managers than they feel they are receiving.

You can roll your eyes at that if you want.

But “I suffered more at your age” is not much of a retention strategy.

Reciprocity is not a dirty word

Delaney also said something much more practical.

The compensation was not enough for her to make ends meet. She had told the business she was interested in moving into a full-time role and needed an answer because otherwise she needed to find other work.

I found that refreshingly straightforward.

She wasn't asking the employer to rearrange the company's finances around her feelings.

She was explaining her situation.

The employer was equally entitled to say she did not yet see enough output to justify increasing the hours.

Okay.

Then we have an answer.

The company wants one arrangement.

The worker needs another.

That is not a moral failure. It is a commercial mismatch.

A workplace should have reciprocity in it.

The business gets to expect people to do the work they agreed to do, meet standards, communicate properly and be accountable.

The person doing the work also gets to expect a job that can reasonably be performed in the hours being purchased.

Neither side is doing charity.

What I particularly liked was that once it became clear the arrangement was not going to change, Delaney did not stage a dramatic exit. She said the relationship no longer appeared beneficial for either side and even offered to recommend agencies.

In other words: perhaps what you need is not me working harder. Perhaps what you need is a different model.

That is a fairly grown-up conclusion.

Management also has to keep learning

This is the bit we do not talk about enough.

We expect workers to update their skills constantly.

Imagine hiring someone in accounting in 2026 who announces that they do not understand spreadsheets, cloud accounting or modern financial software because accounting worked differently when they started.

You would not admire their commitment to tradition.

You would wonder why they had not kept up.

Management deserves the same scrutiny.

The workplace changed.

Marketing certainly changed.

You can now put social, paid advertising, email automation, CRM, video, search, creators, content, analytics, events, partnerships and websites under one lovely little heading called “marketing” and convince yourself you have described one job.

You haven't.

The work expanded.

The tools expanded.

The number of channels expanded.

The day stubbornly remained 24 hours.

If your management model has not adjusted to that, the problem is not necessarily that younger people need a better work ethic.

Maybe you need a better calculator.

And that is where I land on Delaney's conversation.

Not with Gen Z is right.

Not with employers are awful.

Certainly not with everybody should be able to refuse work they do not enjoy.

I landed somewhere much more irritating for my own generation.

We cannot keep treating “I had it worse” as management experience.

Some of what we learned was valuable. Keep it.

Some of it was just somebody else's bad behaviour handed down like office furniture.

Leave that behind.

No one cares that your boss made you pick up dry cleaning at 24.

Well, perhaps a little. I hope it was a fabulous coat.

But if the only justification for asking the next generation to tolerate a bad arrangement is that somebody once made us tolerate one too, we are old enough to know better.

Grow up.