Zoomers and work: why young employees demand boundaries and payment for overtime

18+ This material (information) was produced, distributed and (or) sent by a foreign agent Media project “New Tab” or relates to the activities of a foreign agent Media project “New Tab” Author Vasilisa Kotova June 18, 2026 diaries read: 7 min.

“When a zoomer came for an interview,” “when I hired a zoomer,” “when the boss scolds you, but you’re a zoomer”—such videos appear in my feed with unenviable regularity. The trend for comparing generations on social networks is most often not in favor of zoomers 1 : young people are ridiculed for being too emotional in their response to criticism, irresponsible and even stupid. I’m already used to such videos, but it upsets me when my peers themselves unwittingly distort the idea of ​​our generation. Yes, young people have less experience, but why is agreeing to work for free valued almost more than the competencies themselves?

In the “ Diaries ” section we publish author’s columns in which journalists share their own experiences. These are personal stories in which the nerve of time is felt. The time in which we all live now.

In the summer of 2025, I decided to find a part-time job before the new school year and get a job as an administrator at a child development center. At the interview, I told potential boss Ekaterina about my little experience working in other places and explained that I was studying at a university for a different specialty. I honestly admitted that I view this position more as a temporary job in order to depend less on my parents.

For an eight-hour shift, they promised to pay me about three thousand rubles; I had to come three days a week. Before that, I worked as an administrator at a medical massage center with a salary of 2,500 rubles for 12 hours, and at a boxing club they offered me 1,900 rubles for a shift of 7-8 hours, so the stated conditions suited me.

Something else raised doubts. It turned out that you need to regularly attend training to improve your skills - outside working hours. In the job description, they apparently were hidden under “the desire to learn and be involved in the processes of the center.” Since I did not intend to connect my life with children’s education, I did not want to listen to educational webinars after classes at the university and shifts at work.

After the interview, I went to think about how to more gently express my doubts to Ekaterina, but I didn’t have time, because a couple of days later she wrote to me herself and invited me to help prepare the children’s center for work after the summer holidays. This surprised me greatly. In addition to me, there was at least one more candidate, and the risk that after the cleaning was done they would not hire me was not so small. Taking into account such unscheduled assistance and unpaid training, the proposed working conditions no longer looked so attractive.

Having decided that Ekaterina and I did not agree on expectations, I wrote to her that this time I could help, but then for a year I would only be able to come during work shifts, since I was studying. I didn’t want to deceive and create a false feeling that I was ready to come at any moment.

In response, I received a voice message lasting four minutes, in which Ekaterina expressed doubts about my “involvement”, since I am not eager to equip the premises of the children's center. “Of course, we have agreements on how many days you work, but unexpected things always happen: renovations, the opening of a camp, a festival... It’s just called life. And this is the responsibility of teachers and administrators,” she explained. But if these are job duties, why are they asked to perform them outside of working hours, and before the start of the probationary period? And this happens all the time. As recent studies have shown, two-thirds of Russians face overtime.

In the same message, Ekaterina decided to appeal to my sense of moral duty and said that, although she cannot force anyone, other “girls” from the team are helping and this time several employees will also come. Listening to the potential employer’s messages a year later, I’m still surprised how well her monologue sounds. And behind what beautiful words - responsibility, involvement, a sense of comfort - are hidden, in fact, unpaid overtime.

As you listen, a slight nostalgia for school awakens, when at the end of August our whole class came with buckets and rags and prepared the office for the new school year. I remember the stern look and words of the class teacher, which contained the same edifications, plus a reproach: “If you don’t come, then who are you in the eyes of your comrades?”

Somewhere deep down, having already agreed to help clean up the center, I begin to get angry. To their future weak-willed colleagues who allow themselves to be treated this way, and to their failed employer. Why does her reluctance to spend money on cleaning turn into us, a crowd of adults long out of school, ashamed of our collective responsibility, doing something as a “thank you”?

Pressure on feeling interested in work is a manipulation that many employers use. When my friend Sophia from St. Petersburg was 20 years old, she got a job as a copywriter in a company where she had to write descriptions for cards on marketplaces. In 2023, with a schedule of 5/2, Sophia was paid 45 thousand rubles. But due to the pile of reports and card approvals, we often had to work on weekends. Sofia even helped the company prepare an exhibition for the forum for free, but after the probationary period they said goodbye to her, saying that she was not a sufficiently involved employee.

Ekaterina thought the same about me: she said that if I had the desire and motivation, I would find an opportunity to help. I eventually refused this job, remaining, probably, in the eyes of Ekaterina, an insolent zoomer who works only for money.

Disagreements between generations began long before the term “zoomers” came into use. As one sociologist explained to me, nostalgia for one’s own youth makes older people idealize the past and fear change. They consider the attitudes of young people to be a consequence of their failure and therefore criticize them. But, according to the sociologist, the attitude of zoomers towards work is not their innate trait, but the result of adaptation to a changing labor market, where the lack of social guarantees and a stable career has become the norm.

The truth is that there is a job that interests me, but for now it does not allow me to support myself. For her sake, I am ready to sit down at five in the morning to write an article in front of a couple, not even knowing whether they will pay or not. And there is work that I need to live - buy groceries, pay utilities, please myself by replacing a broken kettle with a new one after a week of boiling water in a pan.

In this list there was not even a place for buying bubble-ti 2 and ordering new clothes from marketplaces, which bloggers like to joke about in videos: “When your colleague works to feed three children and pay for the mortgage, and you work for the sake of coconut raf and cosmetics.”

At work, I want to get the money I deserve, not the realization that my boss opened a new branch thanks to my sales. To be honest, I don’t understand what kind of involvement and vocation we can talk about in the service industry, where you just have to satisfy the needs of clients.

My calling is to brew coffee for 15 hours straight and kick out the annoying stranger who snuck onto the second floor of the cafe and began offering guests some prayer books while I was running around with cups on the first floor? Or in a massage center for two hundred eight rubles an hour to listen to my grandmother’s stories about her youth and reproaches to my generation? Or answering a drunk man on the night shift in a hostel who starts the conversation with the words: “I know where you work, and I will come to take revenge if you don’t find me a free room now”? I would like these cases to be fiction, but, unfortunately, these are real stories from my life.

Working in the service sector is always a transaction on both sides. As an employee, I appreciate the flexible schedule, the lack of much responsibility, and the opportunity to work without years of training. The employer gets my time, cheap labor and often tax savings by giving my salary in an envelope. Why, after work, does this boss expect me to be eager to undergo additional training, and is surprised: “Are you not interested in anything at all?” Oh no, what are you talking about, I just dream that after a twelve-hour shift, which allows me to buy a set of groceries for a week, I can continue to think about work.

Yes, some people are negligent in their duties, for example, they are late. And more often the schedule is violated by young people. When I worked part-time as an administrator in a hostel, my shift worker was constantly one and a half to two hours late because he could not get up on the alarm clock. Was he fired? No. The company did not have enough employees.

Of course, a low salary is not an excuse for being rude to people or not fulfilling your duties. But if they pay a lot, this does not mean that after the shift the waiter has to wash the floors in the coffee shop.

Instead of silently agreeing to overtime and patiently waiting for praise, young people are increasingly evaluating their work not with a sense of involvement in a great mission, but in harder currency.

This makes them not the most convenient employees. Hence the ridicule and attempts to put pressure both on the part of employers and on the part of the older generation, which is applying for the same jobs. But the same irresponsibility and infantilism that is attributed to zoomers, in fact, often turns out to be simply a response to manipulation and attempts to force a person to do more for less money.

It would be strange to finish a text about unpaid labor and not say: such columns should also be paid.

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Notes

1. Zoomers are a generation of people born, according to various classifications, from approximately the second half of the 1990s to the mid-2010s. ↩︎
2. A Taiwanese drink that combines tea, milk and tapioca gummies or fruit jelly. ↩︎