Jamie Dimon’s reality check for ambitious workers: ‘There’s going to be a grunt part to every part of a job. Get over it’

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon didn’t mince words in his message to workers: Get over the fact that work is hard.

Speaking with Patricia Devine, JPMorgan’s global head of corporate sales, at the Female Quotient lounge in Davos, Switzerland, Dimon laid out the harsh reality for workers striving for instant gratification: “There’s going to be a grunt part to every part of a job. Get over it.”

Dimon’s advice stands out in an era of growing disengagement among young workers, a demographic that recently showed notable declines in workplace engagement, according to Gallup, with Gen Z employee engagement dipping five percentage points between 2024 and 2025. A 2025 report from recruitment firm Randstad also shows the average tenure at a company for a Gen Z worker in their first five years of work has shrunk to just 1.1 years. This stands in stark contrast to the 2.9-year average tenure for baby boomers when they were early in their career. While the Randstad study attr...