Maybe it’s just me, but frankly, I’m tired of the nonstop bashing of the Millennial generation.

I wrote about this in March in my Last Word column (“Millennials at the Gate”), and I marveled then at how so many managers seem to want to demean and dismiss the youngest (born between 1980 and 2001) and largest (80 million) generation in the workforce as nothing more than a group of self-involved, unmotivated slackers.

My experience as a father to three Millennials and a college professor who teaches writing to a classroom full of them each semester at a local university is that they are no better, or worse, than any other generation. And although they have their own unique generational issues, the Millennials I deal with reflect what you would find in society as a whole—some are good, some average, some clueless.

That’s why the latest survey by career site Jobfox of more than 200 recruiters about their perceptions of job performance across generations is so maddening. According to the survey, only 20 percent of recruiters considered Millennials as “generally great performers.”

 By comparison, 63 percent of the recruiters polled said baby boomers (43 to 62 years old) were great performers, 58 percent gave high marks to Gen X (29 to 42 years old) and 25 percent for traditionalists (63 and older). Gen Y was also classified as “generally poor performers” by the largest number of recruiters polled. Thirty percent of recruiters classified Millennials as poor performers, followed by 22 percent of recruiters who classified traditionalists as poor performers, 5 percent for Gen X and 4 percent for baby boomers.

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t surprised by these numbers, given that Millennials are the youngest and least experienced employees in the workforce. Is it any great shock that this Jobfox survey shows an inverse relationship between age/experience and performance? My guess is that the baby boomers who fare so well in this survey would have been rated about the same as Millennials if a similar survey had been done, say, around 1978.

Rob McGovern, the CEO of Jobfox, also believes that Millennials get a bad rap, and that it is corporate leaders—not Gen Y professionals—who need attitude adjustments.

“Businesses must shed negative perceptions and learn new ways to incorporate Gen Y views into the workforce,” McGovern said in a press release about the survey results. “The companies that succeed over the next two decades will be the ones that can most inspire Gen Y. This is the most educated and technologically savvy generation ever.”

It’s also the generation that’s going to drive innovation and practices in the workplace for the next 50 years. It is actually a little larger than the baby boomer generation that has dominated things for the past 25 years, and so it will slowly ease those workers out of the picture.

We wrote about how to get the best out of Millennials earlier this year here at Workforce Management, and it’s a good article to reread in light of the Jobfox survey. But more than that, we need to have an attitude adjustment about these younger workers. For better or worse, they are our future. And are they any worse than any of us were at the same age? That’s the real question I wish these surveys would get to.

I’ve long held that you can learn a lot more from bad management practices than you can from good ones, and people like Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell and former Circuit City chairman Phillip Schoonover are living proof of that. They offer lessons on the dark side of workforce management and how NOT to get the most out of people, and in my experience, those kinds of horror stories speak louder and resonate longer than the good ones do.

And, that’s why even the long-anticipated firing of Oakland Raiders coach Lane Kiffin, who was given his walking papers this week, is a situation worth examining.

Here are the elements: A 79-year-old control-freak owner (Raiders managing general partner Al Davis) who has gone through eight head coaches in the past 14 years looking for a puppet who can read his mind and do his bidding without question, hires a 31-year-old college assistant coach with a reputation as being too cocky for his slim résumé, and, makes him the youngest head coach in the history of the National Football League. The cocky young coach isn’t a yes man or a puppet, however, and soon he is butting heads with the control-freak owner.

Guess where this one ends—with the nasty, public firing of the cocky young coach, of course, but only after many months of media speculation on when the control-freak owner would actually get around to it. And over the many months of media speculation, the cocky young coach turns into a mouthy young coach who seems to relish giving the media many of the details of his situation with the control-freak owner. That’s what makes the public firing all that much nastier.

“Al Davis did the worst thing possible,” wrote San Jose Mercury News columnist Ann Killion. “He dumped all the dirty, disgusting laundry out in front of the television cameras and microphones and notebooks. And the stench was awful. … Davis confirmed it all. Not only all the rumors and whispers that have been building for the past 20 months about his deteriorating relationship with Kiffin and all the little grudges held. But Davis also confirmed the Machiavellian, paranoid nature of his rule. He is an owner who sends his coach—a man who was in his office from dawn to dark every day—a Federal Expressed three-page letter of accusations to create a paper trail so as to have evidence in court. … Davis has hated Kiffin for a long time … yet he allowed the situation to fester and grow and distract his team while he was Fed Ex’ing letters and documenting ‘lies and propaganda.’ ”

Coaches get fired all the time, as do business executives and managers at organizations big and small. Sometimes those terminations are there for all to see, but usually the protocol is that these departures are about “leaving to pursue other interests.” That’s not how Al Davis does it. “It didn’t have anything to do with winning,” Davis said in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It had to with personality. It’s the first time I ever let anyone go based on what I call just being a flat-out liar.”

Is this how to fire a person? Of course not, but don’t think that this kind of over-the-top abusive behavior is confined to professional sports. I once worked for a guy who rivaled Al Davis as a control freak. He was an entrepreneur who also wanted yes men and puppets, and he hired and fired generations of managers who tried to exercise a little independent thinking. He wouldn’t stand for that, of course, and he seemed to revel in the power he had to fire people and make them feel powerless.

 There’s a special place in hell for people like that. It makes me wonder: Why would anyone want to publicly make it clear that he is a bully and control freak, more consumed with revenge and hurting someone than he is with building character and strength in his organization?

If anyone has a good answer to that question, I’d love to hear it.

As much as we write about workforce trends here at Workforce Management, it’s hard sometimes to get a good feel for how they are affecting real people who are trying to cope with finding and keeping real jobs.

That’s why this story in Florida’s Palm Beach Post is so instructive, and at the same time, so frightening. “These are not happy times in the marketplace,” the story notes, “as anybody who bothers to get out of bed in the morning to float a résumé on Monster can tell you.”

The story gives you some sense of what this all means in one county, in one state, in a previously booming part of the country:

“[Florida’s] unemployment rate hovers at a 13-year high of 6.5 percent,” the Post reports. “The country is coping with cataclysmic financial news, the state is down 99,100 jobs over the same period a year ago, and Palm Beach County’s three job banks are filled to bursting with job seekers.”

 Yolanda Mendez, a 57-year-old grandmother and National Guard veteran who broke her nose in a bomb explosion in Iraq and now helps people find work at the Workforce Alliance career center in West Palm Beach, tells the Post: “People say, ‘Give me anything.’ They don’t say, ‘Well, I’m looking for this type of job or that type or I need to make $20 an hour.’ They say, ‘Anything, anything, anything.’ ”

With the financial turmoil on Wall Street and in Washington threatening to turn an economic downturn into a full-blown recession (or worse yet, potentially a depression), the anxiety is spilling over to job seekers or people who may soon become job seekers. They’re getting increasingly desperate as they reach the point where, in a terrible job market, any job is better than no job.

“I’ve actually had to give a few of them a hug,” says Stephanie Ross, a receptionist at one of the Palm Beach job banks. As the Palm Beach Post story notes, “She tries to keep her cool as she directs jobless customers to the computers and counselors and, once in a while, to the tissue box. ‘Yes, they come crying,’ she says. ‘It’s always been busy, but it’s becoming progressively worse. Yesterday, we saw 195 people in this room alone, and that was a light day. I try to tell them they’re not alone,’ she says—which is decidedly accurate, with more than 600,000 Floridians unemployed.”

My guess is that you will soon be reading many more stories like this one from Palm Beach, and that the clear sense of fear and desperation that is evident in this one will become less noteworthy and more commonplace.

That’s why it is always good to remember that even if you have a good job you need to hope for the best but always prepare for the worst, because as is becoming all too clear in this turbulent economic environment, the worst generally happens when you least expect it.

No matter where you work or what role you might be in, here’s something you never want to hear from the CEO: “We’re bringing in an outside consultant because to get fit as an organization, [we’re] actively looking for ways to make process and structural changes to our business that will allow us to work more efficiently, with more scale.”

So it goes at Yahoo, where Chief Yahoo (yes, that is his real title) Jerry Yang has enlisted the services of Bain & Co. to look at the business and give some advice on what can be done.

Yang clearly needs some new ideas because the old ones, like putting the company through a massive reorganization, haven’t done all that much to prop up a business model that’s struggling to compete against the likes of Google.

As the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog noted, this exercise seems to be the preamble to Yahoo getting rid of more people. It points out the many euphemisms in Yang’s memo, such as “improve and accelerate our performance” and “be more agile in a competitive marketplace,” as tipoffs to Yang’s ultimate goal. It’s also worth noting that when Bain was invited in for a similar benchmarking project at Intel, the consultancy quickly became know as the “TaliBain” for the headcount whacking that ensued.

In fact, Yahoo watchers and Silicon Valley blogs are having loads of fun with this, especially Yang’s notion that the company “needs to get fit as an organization.” One went so far as to hilariously parody Yang as a Richard Simmons wannabe, and put Yang’s “getting fit” pronouncement in the “Grand List of Asinine Corporate Layoff Euphemisms.”

Here’s my problem with all of this: Why does a major company like Yahoo need to bring in consultants to help it do what it already knows it needs to do? As I’ve noted previously, I’d hire a top-notch consultant in an instant to give me some practical, focused business advice. But to just confirm what I already know? What’s the point?

Maybe Bain & Co. consultants will bring something other than a layoff plan to the table, but it’s more likely that they’ll merely reinforce a management decision that’s already been signed and sealed—and just needs to finally be delivered.

“Yahoo really needs to downsize its staff,” said Jeff Lindsay, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley. “At some point, they’re going to be forced to have to take a few thousand staff out.”

If layoffs are that obvious to people on the outside of Yahoo, why can’t Jerry Yang and team just buck up, get some backbone and do the tough stuff that comes with a management role? I’ve written about that before, and my guess is it’s because Yang is spending far too much time agonizing over a decision that he knows he needs to make, but that he doesn’t have the huevos to actually pull off.

Maybe that’s really why Yang has the title Chief Yahoo after all.

Recently, I’ve been telling people how thankful I am for people like Tribune Co. Chairman Sam Zell, because without terrible, shortsighted managers like him, I’d have a whole lot less to write about.

And in that spirit, I have to say a silent prayer of thankfulness and a fond goodbye to Phillip J. Schoonover, the now-former CEO of electronics retailer Circuit City, because like Zell, Schoonover’s idiotic business strategy helped to fuel this blog with no end of wonderfully bad management decisions and practices.

Schoonover was canned by the Circuit City board on Monday, as I predicted they would do last December. As The Wall Street Journal noted, Schoonover was brought in from industry leader Best Buy some four years ago to turn around the troubled Circuit City chain. “Instead, the 48-year-old executive, who was named CEO two years ago, presided over a further decline in the company’s fortunes. He attracted criticism for decisions that backfired, such as dismissing veteran workers to cut costs.”

I love the understated simplicity of The Wall Street Journal, but saying Schoonover dismissed veteran workers to cut costs doesn’t really capture the full idiocy of Schoonover’s “management” decision. He didn’t just dismiss veteran workers, he purposely fired his most senior, highest-paid (and most experienced) floor workers and replaced them with lower-paid employees in some misguided cost-cutting experiment that not only demoralized his workforce and damaged customer service, but led to a number of age bias lawsuits as well.

Schoonover never admitted the terrible mistake he made despite withering criticism of his decision in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and here in the Business of Management blog. Even a big drop in sales and a sinking stock price failed to dissuade Schoonover of the folly of his decision, and his singular denial of any responsibility for his terrible people-management strategy led me to award him and Circuit City as the winner of the 2007 Workforce Management Stupidus Maximus Award “for the most ignorant, shortsighted and dumb workforce management practice of the year.”

The Journal’s story on Schoonover’s ouster quoted Colin McGranahan, a retail analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., who noted several of Schoonover’s blunders over the years, such as replacing the highest-paid, most seasoned staff in the company’s stores in an attempt to recoup losses caused by falling TV prices. “He underestimated the disruption that would cause,” McGranahan said. “If you worked at Circuit City, the only way to interpret it was that if you do well, you will be fired. It led to bad morale and staff disengagement.”

Yes, it is remarkable that a business strategy that rewards the best in your workforce with involuntary termination would be seen as anything but bad, but that’s why Schoonover won the Stupidus Maximus Award. How could anyone with any sense see it as anything other than dumb and foolish?

So, farewell, Phillip Schoonover. I’m sorry to see you go, because now there is one fewer shortsighted and idiotic manager to write about. But don’t worry about me. I’ll make out just fine. After all, I still have Sam Zell and his gang to keep me busy.