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Let's take this in context? Here's what he said in the interview. I have a lot of confidence in young people, and I have a lot of confidence in everyone’s abi

• w1ntermute 11y ago
  > Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune. If you manage to start a company that could make a fortune, then you don't have to hire people the market is overlooking - everyone will want to work for you. You're putting the cart before the horse.
  • nailer 11y ago
    All companies 'could make a fortune' Actually making one is not a sudden event, but a slow one. Absolutely: hire for skill, and there's a shit tonne of it being ignored outside young men in Silicon Valley.
    • w1ntermute 11y ago
      You're missing my point: hiring skilled, older employees as a strategy is not going to make or break your company. It's just probably not relevant to the ultimate success of the company, because you will be able to hire skilled employees in general if you are on a strong growth trajectory.
      • arcticfox 11y ago
        Employees are one of the most important factors in a company's success, obviously, and if you believe in the 10x developer then it could easily be a winning strategy. If you believe the difference between a great employee and a mediocre employee is marginal, then I see your point, although I don't subscribe to that view.
      • nailer 11y ago
        > hiring skilled, older employees as a strategy is not going to make or break your company. Totally agreed that hiring skilled people isn't, on its own, going to make or break your company. > It's just probably not relevant to the ultimate success of the company. Disagree. Hiring is super critical. You have a limited runway. You need people who can get shit done, and while there's a bunch of skilled SV middle class Americans, there's value being left on the table: - People outside SV are overlooked. Get a PhD from Cambridge with who just wrote a book on machine learning for the same price as an SV grad. Or someone from Warsaw (Poland has awesome CS fundamentals). - Women are overlooked: we all have unconscious biases: I originally thought one of my go-to crypto people was a front end developer, for mostly dumb reasons, even being aware of this stuff it's hard to not do. - Poor people are overlooked: same reasons as women. We look at stupid stuff like mannerisms and decide "that's not how a programmer sounds". - People who don't buy into 'nerd culture' are overlooked. See above. Dress nicely and people think you're a salesperson. - Old people who keep up to date rock. I bet 55 year old Ruby guy in this thread a) knows how to make shit on a current stack as well as a younger Ruby programmer b) brings with him a bunch of experience - not making him a better Knuth-style programmer, but making him a better get-shit-done-ship-it programmer. Having been the oldest dude in my e.f. cohort (I'm 35), people look to me for: a) Network arch, load balancing, Unix, regexs, other non webdev stuff. b) decisions. I've started and failed and succeeded more often and am faster at making decisions. c) Shipping. Telling people to get their shit out to customers even if they manually do X and Y because they haven't written the code yet. d) node, just because I started node earlier than they did.
• mikestew 11y ago
  He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated". And he's right, if his claims are prefaced with "can be". Kids "can be" capable of more than the credit given. No one is a whiz kid just because they're young. In fact, most aren't. Most are wet-behind-the-ears welps that can do go work with a little guidance. Experience "can be" really overrated. As I told a former manager of mine who was tasked with managing my test team because he'd done it before, "just because you've done something doesn't mean you did it well". [0] And twenty years of doing CRUD in COBOL with no source control probably won't give you a huge leg up in a Django shop talking to a MongoDB data store using git to keep it all sane. [0] (Lest you think me rude, this was after the umpteenth jillion time he'd remind me that he'd "managed test teams before", and role he proved time and again he didn't have the first clue about.)
  • kafkaesq 11y ago
    And twenty years of doing CRUD in COBOL with no source control Just curious, are bringing up the 20 years of COBOL with no source control because that was your manager's background? Or is that your impression is of what the typical older tech worker has under their belt?
    • mikestew 11y ago
      EDIT: apparently I didn't answer the question asked. Too deep to reply, so I blew away this one and rewrote it. I brought it up because "experience" in and of itself doesn't mean anything. 20 years of COBOL and practices from that era only means you were paid to do "work on a computer", and probably is not an indicator that you're going to walk into that Django/git/agile shop and set the world on fire. Just as some tire of the stereotype of the older tech worker, I tire of the assumption that "experience" automatically means someone has something to bring to the table. Bring me a resume of someone who has been doing primarily FoxPro for the last twenty years, and watch how fast I can dash to the shredder. Bring me another resume with experience writing apps in Turbo Pascal, and later moving to Delphi, with a brief stop in FoxPro during its heyday before moving on to .NET and mobile work, and watch how fast I type that email begging them to come in for an interview.
• xiaoma 11y ago
  Yes, let's take it in context: >Brian Halligan, explained to the New York Times that this age imbalance was not something he wanted to remedy, but in fact something he had actively cultivated. HubSpot was “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” because, “in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said. Had he said that he'd actively cultivated a race imbalance and was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and maintain white and Asian employees", would you still be cool with that? This seems pretty open and shut to me and it's pretty discouraging to see people defend an openly bigoted statement.
  • marcosdumay 11y ago
    That phrase literally means "I think younger people are discriminated against, so I'm making a company that hires them at bargaining prices". That may be true or not, but is not discriminatory by itself.
    • xiaoma 11y ago
      So you think it's cool to offer "bargain prices" (i.e. lowball) when hiring people from discriminated groups? I understand the moneyball angle, but in this case it's not one I'd be comfortable with.
      • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        It is one of those behaviors where we think it is cool to do it, but uncool to admit you are doing it. In a lot of human interactions, there are things that are fully accepted and cool to do, but if you try to point it out (or if you can't naturally do it and poorly attempt to emulate it), it becomes very uncool if not downright creepy.
• nashequilibrium 11y ago
  I literally just finished reading an article on Hubspot by Dan Lyons: My Year In Startup Hell " Another reason to hire young people is that they’re cheap. HubSpot runs at a loss, but it is labor-intensive. How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room for $35,000 a year. " http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
  • jlebar 11y ago
    You and I may choose not to work at such a place, but is it morally wrong? Is designing your business in this way equivalent to racism, as the author explicitly claims?
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Yes, its morally wrong to take advantage of young workers (arguably in violation of labor law).
      • jlebar 11y ago
        If you think "making work fun" so you can pay people less is "taking advantage" of workers, I encourage you to hang out with some food-service workers, or retail workers, or migrant farm workers, or...basically anyone who makes minimum wage (or less).
        • toomuchtodo 11y ago
          Don't get me wrong; I'm an advocate for all labor, not just underpaid office workers.
      • trav4225 11y ago
• anexprogrammer 11y ago
  > and that experience is "really overrated". That's not the same thing as saying that he won't hire "old" people, or that given an "old" person whom he thinks will perform better than a young person at the same salary, he'd prefer the young person Why would any sane CEO prefer young, or old at the same salary? I can understand reluctance with someone a year or two off retirement - extra recruiting costs on the horizon, but... If it were me employing say 10 people on identical salary I'd want as diverse a mix of age, gender, race, background and interests as I could manage. The young un will perhaps have fresh new ideas; some stupid, some naive, some hopefully genuinely fresh and exciting. The old git will have seen it all before and perhaps can warn why doing it that way is a silly idea, maybe you should try this first. Maybe they have a bit of business or other non-tech in their history so can bring other relevant knowledge to bear. Of course some older folks can be set in their ways. So can freshly minted degree holders. Some 23 year olds think they know everything. It's later you realise you don't. It is the tendency of youth after all. I may have experienced this too. ;) Of course both age groups can repeatedly tell you how great they are at something. So can CEOs. They can all be lying/deluding themselves about this. OK, sweeping generalisations time. The CEO perhaps prefers young people because they're still wet behind the ears and believe "Just another push this weekend" (the 10th this year) "and we'll see you right come end of year/IPO/share options". Or he just wants folks that do what he says, however stupid. With the terrifying ex-designer produced PHP codebase with copy/pasta where functions should live. Old fart might point out how shite/insecure/slow/whatever the code is.
  • deleted 11y ago
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  • freshhawk 11y ago
    > If it were me employing say 10 people on identical salary I'd want as diverse a mix of age, gender, race, background and interests as I could manage. Dead on, especially if you are relying on creative solutions to anything at all. > The CEO perhaps prefers young people because they're still wet behind the ears and believe "Just another push this weekend" (the 10th this year) "and we'll see you right come end of year/IPO/share options". Nailed it. Another factor is the behaviour of homogeneous groups, often you want groupthink to occur if you need work pushed along a fairly static assembly line. And homogenous groups get along and cooperate with much less work, it's a quick way to get to a local maxima. The bias against people who are different from you is, unfortunately, present in everyone to some degree. Left unevaluated that means a lot of well meaning people can be very racist/sexist/ageist/etc and feel like all they are doing is building an agreeable, likeable, cooperating team.
• kafkaesq 11y ago
  Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim. If you reduce everything that Lyons is saying that that one quote from the CEO, perhaps the evidence is slim. But if you take the observations he's making together, as a whole, a different picture emerges: The place was like a frat house, with refrigerators stocked with cases of beer and telemarketing sales “bros” drinking at their desks while hammering away on the phones. Thirty-something employees were considered “old people.” And of course the quote about HubSpot “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” also attributed to the CEO.
  • jlebar 11y ago
    If you reduce everything that Lyons is saying that that one quote from the CEO, perhaps the evidence is slim. But if you take the observations he's making together, as a whole, a different picture emerges I guess I don't see the fact that there's beer in the fridge or that people drink at work as evidence of the CEO's ageism. It seems to be evidence of a relaxed attitude towards alcohol. Similarly, calling thirty-somethings "old" is...maybe insensitive? I dunno, maybe it's ageist. I'd think it would be hard to say without being there. Clearly the author feels discriminated against, because his CEO doesn't see how amazing he is at his job. It's definitely his right to feel that way, and who knows, maybe he's right, but in any case I'm not inclined to take his observations as direct evidence of discrimination.
    • jazzdog 11y ago
      Maybe just track the employees and their ages? Objective enough?
    • kafkaesq 11y ago
      Similarly, calling thirty-somethings "old" is...maybe insensitive? I dunno, maybe it's ageist. I don't know if I'd want to dignify it by calling it "ageist." But it's definitely a very callow, naive thing to say.
      • jlebar 11y ago
• cylinder 11y ago
  I am so tired of grown, 20 something adults being called "kids" in American culture. Why so much infantilization?
  • p4wnc6 11y ago
    Well, as a cohort, this group (to which I belong) seems extremely willing to let employers infantilize them and happy to be seen that way. - They agree to work in open-plan surveillance offices with maybe 2 lateral feet of personal space and no privacy. - They seem to care more about office trendiness, amenities like roof deck, climbing wall, ping pong tables, than about adequate working conditions. - They allow paternalistic ideas like "unlimited vacation" [0] instead of demanding such things as stated, negotiated, and protected parts of an employment agreements. - They are willing to devalue their labor to accept start-up wages and worthless equity to obtain the above items, mostly so they can pursue social status, particularly tied to living in certain special places. I don't think this is necessarily my generation's fault as much as it has been a concerted effort on the part of organizations like YC to actively influence naive young people to believe they must value these things. But whatever the cause may be, I think it's quite reasonable for people outside of my generation to view us as hilariously infantile for essentially trading away all possible negotiation power for a craft beer at work and the chance to buy $7 coffee. [0] < http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlimited-vacation-only-what-you-need.html http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlimited-vacation-onl... >
    • cylinder 11y ago
      I agree. I've been bouncing around the idea of creating a "Millennials[1] Union" blog to promote more collective bargaining and expose how my generation's getting fooled. [1] I hate this word
    • serge2k 11y ago
      > But whatever the cause may be, I think it's quite reasonable for people outside of my generation to view us as hilariously infantile for essentially trading away all possible negotiation power for a craft beer at work and the chance to buy $7 coffee. As opposed to when the last generation sat around while the government made unpaid OT legal?