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.
The problem with CEOs watching the clock
Jason Walker, an associate professor of industrial-organizational and applied psychology at Adler University, saw the situation as problematic for the CEO.
“If a CEO is watching the clock instead of the horizon, that is the story,” he said. “Ten minutes is not a performance problem, it is a symptom of something further upstream.”
Walker’s first instinct was the question the CEO skipped: Why was the person leaving early? It could have been that they had a sick kid at home to get to, an appointment, or their work was already done.
“Leaders who skip that question have already decided the answer, and their people know it,” he said. “We hire adults. We should trust them like adults and measure what they produce, not when they walk out the door.”
Habitual clock-policing, he added, also usually means an organization has no real way to measure contribution, “so it counts the one thing it can see,” and it “rarely travels alone.”
Etiquette expert Nick Leighton, cohost of the podcast Were You Raised by Wolves?, put it in terms of what a workplace is rewarding.
“If an employee is meeting expectations and delivering their work, a CEO chastising them over 10 minutes isn’t necessarily enforcing standards,” Leighton said. “It’s just saying that the theater of it all matters more than results.”
To be sure, he recognized some jobs come with a hard end-time baked in, like a flight attendant who can’t leave the plane early and a bartender who stays until close.
If coverage is the point, staying is the job. But for most jobs, he argued, clock-watching should be a last resort.
“If the only measurement tool you have is the number of minutes an employee is sitting in the chair, that might say more about the measurer than the measured,” Leighton added.
The dissent: This is about ‘entitlement’
But not everyone saw it from the employee’s point of view. Kim Bode, founder and CEO of communications agency 8THIRTYFOUR, aimed directly at Gen Z
“This isn’t about someone leaving 10 minutes early or watching the clock,” Bode said. “It’s about a much bigger issue with early-career professionals: entitlement.”
“They didn’t ask if it was okay, they just did it. And when you do that, someone else has to pick up what you didn’t do,” she continued. The minutes aren’t trivial, she argued, because they compound. “Before you know it, it’s a full day of not showing up, not being available, not delivering.”
Loren Margolis, the founder of leadership-development firm Training & Leadership Success, who spent nine years coaching leaders at Columbia Business School, was a little softer, but still made a point leaving early once could cause a pattern of bad behavior.
She called it a failure of “impression management.” Had the worker flagged it in advance—”I have to leave early today, but I’ll come in early tomorrow”—it would have signaled emotional intelligence instead.
“Leaving 10 minutes early in front of the CEO shows poor judgment,” Margolis, who now teaches career strategy in the State University of New York’s Women in STEM program, told Fortune.
But it could just simply be a misunderstanding between two very different generations. A 2024 survey of more than 1,000 adults by the meeting platform Meeting Canary found nearly half of those aged 16 to 26 considered arriving five to 10 minutes late as essentially on time, but tolerance of that fell to 20% among baby boomers.
The experts Fortune spoke with were wary of leaning too hard on age in this debate.
“No matter how old you are, us humans have a long tradition of complaining about the people we work with,” Leighton said. “Nothing new there.”
Gen Z treats output as separate from hours, while older workers still see chair time as proof of effort, Walker said. But plenty of them felt the same friction—they just paid a higher price for saying it aloud.
“The values gap is smaller than we think,” he said. “The willingness gap is enormous. The objection is not new. What is new is that it now has an audience.”
