worked in open offices in London for ten years - would happily take a 10% pay cut to never do that again. The volume levels were through the roof, constant interruptions and - worst of all - the smell. Sandwiches, microwave meals and the constant undertone of sour milk as half finished cups of tea ferment in the collective body and computer heat. Always noticed that the Senior Managers had their own offices though.
 
The last place I worked 'evolved' into hot desking, because .. well fuck I don't know. So everything gets packed up every evening into a locker and the next day you work wherever there is space. Which is the same space everyday because human beings are like that. When my manager objected to my team 'constantly huddling in their own little cloister' I suggested (jokingly) that we randomly assign places every day. He actually sent out an all office email about it...
 
Marx was right. The aim of capitalism is to alienate workers from the products of their labour. You can blow sunshine up everyone's ass all day about how wonderful the company is and how amazing your products and services are. But if you are structurally committed to maximising efficiency (and reducing the effect of human needs, desires and behaviours from your bottom line), you end up treating people like furniture - and their human-ness like a problem that needs to be worked out of the equation.

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, d.j.s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things. Many ordinary decisions, moreover—such as choosing between Goldman Sachs and Partners in Health—also touch on the question of who we aspire to become.
 
Callard distinguishes between aspiration and ambition. Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A. From the first day, they know what they value: their grades. (“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher,” Callard notes.)

Average wages for people between the ages of 18 and 35 have remained stagnant for nearly four decades.
In 1980, 78.9 per cent of all Canadians between the ages of 18 and 35 were employed in some sort of job, according to Statistics Canada. In 2016, it was 81.2 per cent.
In 1980, the average price of a house in Canada was $203,972.86 — or about six times average annual salaries, once adjusted to account for today’s dollar values, the Canadian Real Estate Association says.
By 2016, the average home price hit $506,760.01 — or 14.8 times average annual wages.

According to the Canadian Federation of Students, as many as 300,000 millennials were working in unpaid internships in a bid to further their careers by collecting relevant on-the-job experience, in 2016.
The issue with unpaid internships is that most millennials in those jobs are also working in another position, likely one that pays minimum wage, in order to make ends meet, according to the CFS.

“Jobs are becoming obsolete on a monthly basis. New jobs are taking over. As we move to AI (artificial intelligence), robotics, all these kinds of things, certainly jobs are going to be replaced. New jobs are going to be created, mostly at the high scale end,” said Carleton’s Duxbury.

In fact, between 2016 and 2026, the largest wealth transfer in history is expected to take place as older generations pass on as much as $1 trillion to younger generations in Canada, according to Toronto-based research firm Strategic Insight.
Foster predicts that millennials are likely to push for things such as increased estate taxes in order to ensure that some of the wealth that is transferred from older generations is redistributed throughout all of society.