If you live in London with a mildly fanatical supporter of Arsenal football club, as I do, you would have heard a lot lately about Max Dowman, the 15-year-old who just became the second youngest Premier League player in history.
He would have been the youngest except his Arsenal team-mate Ethan Nwaneri was 54 days younger when he played his first league game in 2022.
Controversially, both have faced league safeguarding rules banning them from changing with the rest of the team in the main dressingroom on match days, which a lot of Arsenal fans think is nuts.
Age limits have also upset 16-year-old Kairan Quazi, another gifted teenager who was in the news this week, having landed a job at the trading firm Citadel Securities.
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Quazi made headlines two years ago, when he was hired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX at the age of 14, only to discover he couldn’t boast about his new job on LinkedIn like a normal person because the platform requires its users to be at least 16 years old.
“This is the illogical, primitive nonsense that I face constantly,” Quazi said at the time. SpaceX, he added, was a “rare company” that didn’t use his age as an “arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability”.
One feels his pain, up to a point. But one had also best get used to it because, although these prodigies are outliers, they are part of a generation that looks set to shake up the workforce in ways that few have before.
I say this knowing that much stereotypical rot is written about the different sensibilities that supposedly set millennials, boomers and other generations apart. On the face of it, Dowman and Quazi are very different people, despite having spent a similar number of years on the planet.
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Being aged between 13 and 28 makes them part of a Generation Z cohort that is hard to ignore, not least because of its size.
In countries such as the US, Gen Z employees now outnumber baby boomers in the workforce. In Australia, the recent federal election was the first in which Gen Z and millennial voters outnumbered boomers in every state.
Many Gen Z workers have also had two defining experiences that would have seemed unimaginable to their older colleagues: online university life devoid of daily human contact, followed by a first job in offices emptied out by remote and hybrid working.
This is not necessarily dire. But it is a shaky start, which may explain why some research suggests that, once Gen Z workers land a job, they can harbour a distinct urge to get ahead.
Gen Z workers are more than twice as likely to want to be chief executive as Gen X-ers in their forties and fifties, according to consulting firm McKinsey, which puts the gap at 38 per cent to 18 per cent respectively.
Ambition does not equal fruition but still, for those who cannot bear the thought of working for a younger boss, it may be time to adjust. Speaking as someone who has done this for years, I can assure you it is no big deal.
Ultimately, I wish Gen Z great luck, given they face a third experience that also would have seemed improbable to their older colleagues: having their first job taken by a robot.
Imagine being on the brink of graduation and reading this week’s news about a Stanford University study on whether jobs have been affected by the widespread adoption of generative AI.
The paper is based on US payroll data from tens of thousands of companies and shows that workers in their early 20s in the most AI-exposed jobs, such as software developers and customer service workers, have already suffered a 13 per cent decline in employment.
It’s a different story for older workers in the same fields, and workers of all ages in less exposed jobs, such as nursing aides and labourers, where employment rates have stayed stable or grown. This is not definitive proof that AI is killing jobs for the young, but still.
Should you find yourself with a 20-something boss any time soon, rather than feeling resentful or miffed, perhaps you should be pleased to see them in a job at all.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
