If you’re reading this article voluntarily, you’re probably not a millennial, because everyone knows millennials don’t read news. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance you look down on millennials. Perhaps you consider them entitled, indulgent, needy and a little too much to bear — or maybe you’re simply skeeved by their weird headgear, strange hieroglyphs and intricate courtship rituals.

I can predict all this because I work in the news media, and one of the primary functions of the media these days is to traffic in gleefully broad generalizations and criticisms of millennials, the more than 75 million Americans born about 1980 to 2000. Although millennials are now the largest demographic group in the country (sorry, boomers), and though they are more racially diverse than any other generation in American history, they are often depicted on TV, in movies and music, and in the news (including The New York Times) as a collectively homogeneous cliché.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in corporate America, especially in the technology industry, which has long been obsessed with the dubious idea that young people are in the cultural vanguard.

Corporations like LinkedIn and Oracle are now hiring an army of “millennial consultants” who charge as much as $20,000 an hour for their expertise on how to manage and market to young people, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. The consultant bonanza follows a trend that has been shaping the business world for the last few years — millennials, executives believe, are coming for every industry, and businesses that do not appease them risk being trampled by them.