Generation Z has long faced criticism for being lazy, though some research suggests otherwise. More accurately, they tend to bring a different approach to professional environments and work-life balance.

One Gen Z employee recently ignited a compelling debate in a now-partially deleted Reddit post: should they have been directly reprimanded by their company's CEO for leaving the office 10 minutes early?

Other news outlets obtained and preserved screenshots of the Reddit post showing the exchange between the CEO and the employee, posing a straightforward question: "Is this normal?"

What Made the Post Go Viral

What propelled the post to virality was not the 10 minutes itself, but everything beneath the surface. The employee claimed that managers routinely disappeared for hour-long breaks and colleagues took 30-minute breaks without comment, while the new hire rarely took a proper break at all. They also described paying work expenses out of pocket and waiting 17 days for reimbursement. Additionally, the employee alleged that a supervisor had pressured them to recruit an unpaid social-media intern, or else they would have to produce all of the company's video and social content single-handedly.

While the exchange was anonymous and essentially unverifiable, it likely reflects a workplace dilemma many employees have encountered. It also divided the workplace experts Fortune consulted—some placed the CEO under scrutiny, while others identified fault in the employee. The broader question behind the reaction was not just whether 10 minutes mattered, but what kind of workplace norms are being enforced when attendance is monitored more closely than output.

The Problem with CEOs Watching the Clock

Jason Walker, an associate professor of industrial-organizational and applied psychology at Adler University, viewed 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 had skipped: Why was the person leaving early? The reason could have been a sick child at home, an appointment, or simply that the work was already finished.

"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, typically signals that an organization lacks a genuine 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?, framed the issue in terms of what a workplace chooses to reward.

"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."

He acknowledged that some positions come with a fixed end-time—such as a flight attendant who cannot leave a plane early or a bartender who stays until close. When coverage is the core function, staying is the job. But for most roles, 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: A Question of 'Entitlement'

Not everyone sided with the employee. Kim Bode, founder and CEO of communications agency 8THIRTYFOUR, directed her criticism squarely 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 are not 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, founder of leadership-development firm Training & Leadership Success, who spent nine years coaching leaders at Columbia Business School, took a somewhat softer stance but still emphasized that leaving early once could set a pattern of problematic behavior.

She characterized it as a failure of "impression management." Had the worker communicated in advance—"I have to leave early today, but I'll come in early tomorrow"—it would have demonstrated 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.

A Generational Disconnect?

The situation could also reflect a misunderstanding between two very different generations. A 2024 survey of more than 1,000 adults conducted by the meeting platform Meeting Canary found that nearly half of respondents aged 16 to 26 considered arriving five to 10 minutes late as essentially on time, but tolerance for that fell to 20% among baby boomers.

The experts Fortune spoke with were cautious about attributing the conflict too heavily to age.

"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 view chair time as evidence of effort, Walker noted. But many from older generations felt the same friction—they simply paid a higher price for voicing it.

"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."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.