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.