Yesterday I had one of the most interesting interviews of my career: I was interviewing a candidate for a DevOps Engineer role, and the most curious part was that the candidate was a representative of Gen Z. I have nothing against any generation, I manage some great people in that age group, and I (almost) do not suffer from ageism, but…

The candidate said something that could have been copied straight from Instagram Reels about zoomers: 'If I don’t like a task, I won’t do it.'

To the perfectly reasonable question, 'And what if the team is small and nobody wants to take it?', the candidate replied, 'Then the company is not interesting and I will quit.'

On one hand, there is a fair point in that. On the other hand, it raises a lot of questions, especially about how people with this mindset imagine teamwork at all. Did Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and other great scientists and inventors only do tasks they found interesting?

Of course not. This approach is infantile and, unfortunately, shows up not only at work but in everyday life. Any meaningful achievement always includes routine and monotonous work that you simply cannot avoid.

Even if you decide to build your own startup, you will not escape boring and unexciting tasks: bureaucracy, accounting, approvals and paperwork will wait for you at every step. And what about daily chores? I doubt anyone genuinely loves washing the dishes or paying bills, but adult life is made up of exactly these small things.

Real maturity is the ability to find a balance between what is 'interesting' and what is 'necessary'. The people who accept this reality are the ones who succeed not only in their careers but in life as a whole.