Gen Z has long been chastised for being lazy, even though some research begs to differ. It’s moreso that they just have a different approach to professional settings and work-life balance.
But one Gen Z employee recently brought up a genuinely interesting debate in a now-partially deleted Reddit post: whether they should have been directly chastised by their company’s CEO for leaving the office 10 minutes early.
Other news outlets had obtained and kept screenshots of the Reddit post showing the exchange between the CEO and the employee, and posed a simple question: “Is this normal?”
What made the post go viral wasn’t the 10 minutes. It was everything underneath. The employee claimed managers routinely vanished for hour-long breaks and colleagues took 30 minutes without comment, while the new hire rarely took a proper break at all. They also described covering work expenses out of pocket and waiting 17 days to be paid back, and claimed a supervisor had pressured them to recruit an unpaid social-media intern or they’d have to produce all the company’s video and social content alone.
While the exchange was anonymous and essentially unverifiable, it’s likely a workplace conundrum other employees have faced. It also split workplace experts Fortune spoke with. Some put the CEO on trial, while others saw fault in the employee.
