Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy made headlines by reiterating his own 70-hour workweeks at the company – “I used to get to the office at 6:30 AM and leave at 8:30 PM, that’s a fact. I have done it,” he told the audience. The remark, along with a similar comment from L&T chief S.N. Subrahmanyan about working 90-hour weeks, ignited a firestorm online. Murthy clarified that no one can force anyone to work these hours, but encouraged it as a personal choice or sacrifice for “success.” But as the older business leaders of India and the world still cling to the narrative of “work as worship” and “hustle culture,” a very different reality is brewing beneath.
People born between 1997 and 2012 fall under the label of Generation Z, or Gen Z, and they now account for a huge chunk of the Indian population, where 65% of people are under the age of 35. While the average Gen Z may be around 20 years old at this point, they have already started entering the workforce in other countries, and soon enough, will dominate workplaces by numbers. Even apart from that, India is a very young country in terms of its population: the median age of India is just 28. In the USA, Gen Z represents 25% of the population and is poised to become the largest generation globally. They are also unique in the sense that they are the first ones to grow up with the Internet, thus imbuing them with an in-depth and intrinsic understanding of the digital world, a direct edge as professional workers.
Despite all that, employers are sceptical of hiring Gen Z workers. Many surveys reveal that Gen Z’s “unique” preferences, including their “anti-hustle” philosophy, make them an employer’s “nightmare.” In the USA, it was revealed through a survey that 1 in 6 companies were hesitant to hire Gen Z workers, citing lack of motivation and professionalism, sense of entitlement, poor work ethic, and difficulty in responding to feedback. Further statistical analysis reveals that Gen Z workers change jobs every 2.3 years on average, 134% more frequently than pre-pandemic levels. Each move typically brings salary increases and skill development that internal promotion tracks couldn’t match. When 77% prioritise work-life balance and 72% leave jobs without flexible policies, they are not just making personal choices but forcing an institutional challenge.
There is then a disparity between what the higher-ups, such as Narayan Murthy or Elon Musk, who called “working the weekend” a “superpower,” expect from the new lot of workers and how the new generation of workers understands “work”. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, were generally seen as the prime proponents of corporate culture, advocating for a professional and dedicated work ethic. Gen Z are seen as more focused on maintaining a work-life balance. Gone are the days of the glorification of “the grind”, the belief in the myth of meritocracy or blind company loyalty. Now, the growing trend is to treat work as work and not your whole life, and not be bound to any company by a false sense of unity.
The question then comes up: where did this radical change in attitude emerge from, within just one generation?
The critique of Gen Z’s work ethic usually fails to take into account the economic reality and circumstances that the generation inherited. Millennials entered the workforce with sky-high expectations, with promises that academic qualifications and professional dedication would deliver fulfilling careers and financial security. However, the machinery of capitalism that prioritises cold, hard, and direct profit over anything else is simply incompatible with the promise that it made. Millennials instead received exhaustingly long work days, little to no equity, and overwhelming student debt. Housing was out of reach, the cost of living was unaffordable, and even simple luxuries remained aspirational for many.
Numbers back this story: In India, 83% of engineering graduates and 50% of MBA holders finished in 2024 without job offers despite their advanced qualifications. Globally, 58% of recent graduates remain unemployed, compared to just 25% of older generations at the same career stage. This isn’t simply a gap in skills or a decline in work ethic — it’s a structural collapse of the employment promise that underpinned previous generations’ career expectations.
Gen Z witnessed this breakdown firsthand. They watched millennials burn out chasing promotions that never materialised, saw the 2008 financial crisis devastate their parents’ retirement plans, and lived through a pandemic that exposed how quickly “essential” workers could be discarded. Early Millennials often saw overwork as a badge of honour – a path to middle-class stability and success. However, that ethos coincided with great job security and clear promotions in many sectors. For Gen Z, the context is very different: job growth has slowed, competition is fierce, and costs, like housing and education, are much higher than before. By the time Gen Z begins to enter the workforce, the illusion of a social contract between the employers and the employed has been shredded. They realised that their company or boss is not going to hold any obligations towards them. Why then would you go out of your way to maximise shareholder profit when you get nothing in return?
Ironically, Gen Z’s confident stance emerges amid genuine economic strain. The promise of a booming economy has faltered for many. Despite India’s $5-trillion growth ambition, high unemployment weighs on young people’s minds. India’s Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy reported a staggering 44.5% jobless rate among 20–24 year olds in early 2024.
The breakdown of the job market coincides with an overall societal rehaul in the face of AI and other landmark socio-political events. This, along with a greater awareness of mental health issues, has shown a rise in the psychological toll on young workers. Nearly half of Gen Z, 46% to be exact, has received a mental health diagnosis, with 42% struggling with depression and hopelessness—rates nearly double those of people over 25. When 47% of an entire generation reports feeling anxious “often or always,” we’re not dealing with individual weakness but systemic failure.
The mental health crisis and workplace attitudes are not simply cause and effect but are deeply interlinked with one another. They are not separate, but directly drive each other. Unlike previous generations who compartmentalised personal wellbeing, 92% of Gen Z graduates want to discuss mental health at work, while 60% expect managers to actively care about their wellbeing. They’ve witnessed the human cost of hustle culture and refuse to pay it. Instead of HR team bonding activities or pool tables, Gen Z desires real effort at mental health care.
Further, while millennials saw job stability as a foundation for success, Gen Z sees it as stagnation. An extraordinary 74% believe that changing jobs drives career development, with nearly half expecting to switch employers within the next year. Many call this fickleness and the inability to commit, but others defend it as a strategic adaptation to a job market that doesn’t reward loyalty. Consider the statistics: 70% of Gen Z expect promotion within 18 months, but traditional corporate structures move at a glacial pace. Rather than wait for systems to change, they’ve created their own advancement mechanism through strategic job-hopping. What older generations interpret as disloyalty, Gen Z views as self-advocacy.
This transformation extends beyond mere workplace attitudes — it is a philosophical shift. The working-class, to a larger extent, no longer accepts the glorification of hustle culture or deludes themselves into believing that if they just worked a little harder, if they put a few more hours in, they would be fairly rewarded. Hustle culture, as critics note, is “inherently privileged and undeniably classist,” assuming everyone has the luxury of passion-driven work while ignoring systemic inequalities. Gen Z, more diverse and socially conscious than any previous generation, recognises these contradictions. It isn’t about individualistic self-care but a collective effort towards professional boundary setting. Companies that ignore these demands face talent exodus, creating market pressure for systemic reform.
This is essentially a reset in values, or a “values revolution” — while capitalism had historically succeeded in convincing workers that company success and personal success were aligned, Gen Z has severed that connection, or more aptly, they have been forced to see the reality by virtue of the economic conditions that they have inherited. They are better able to distinguish between working for survival and working for someone else’s wealth accumulation and refuse to conflate the two, as the illusion of meritocracy has collapsed with the failure of the machinery of capitalism.
The narrative that Gen Z is “unhirable” reveals more about employers than employees. When 75% of companies report Gen Z hires as “unsatisfactory,” the disconnect isn’t about capability but expectations. Gen Z enters workplaces expecting transparency, flexibility, and meaningful work—reasonable requests that expose how many employers have relied on desperation rather than a genuine value proposition.
The “unhirable” label is particularly ignorant as it refuses to acknowledge the broader socio-economic context within which the new batch of workers has begun their careers. An entire generation isn’t lazy or unmotivated, or even if they are, there have to be systematic pitfalls behind the same. Unemployment or worker dissatisfaction isn’t about individual unemployability but structural unemployment. Despite higher education levels than ever before, they encounter higher unemployment rates. Among 30,000 Gen Z professionals surveyed, unemployment persists despite advanced degrees from prestigious institutions. The disconnect between educational investment and employment returns has created a generation sceptical of traditional career advice.
With the digital revolution, new, unprecedented avenues of making a living have emerged. More and more young people are finding new ways of sustaining themselves through content creation, freelancing, and remote work. Traditional office jobs are no longer the only way to have a career or earn money. A growing number of young workers have started to prefer working for start-ups rather than well-known conglomerates, due to their flexibility. Big companies like Canva and Netflix remain popular among Gen Z workers for their flexible work hours, diversity, creative freedom, and autonomy.
Remote work, also known as “work-from-home”, has also completely changed the game. Since the pandemic, young workers have realised that there isn’t much sense in spending hours commuting to offices when the same work can be done from the comfort of their home or workspace at their preferred hours. It is a virtual overhaul of traditional corporate work structures. When the old rules don’t guarantee success, why follow them? Gen Z’s apparent “entitlement” to work-life balance and meaningful employment, and aversion to traditional careers, isn’t narcissism—it’s pragmatism in the face of economic uncertainty.
So when Murthy or Musk say the secret to their success is putting in the hours and working hard, Gen Z doesn’t see that as inspiration; they see it as a myth from a different era—out of touch with today’s realities, where hard work alone no longer guarantees success or well-being.
Author: Disha Bharti