5 ms·

Even if the people being supervised might often be a bit immature, the term "adult supervision" seems to me very condescending.

throwaway613834 9y ago
> Even if the people being supervised might often be a bit immature, the term "adult supervision" seems to me very condescending. In fact, it was Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page who popularized the concept in a 2001 interview with Charlie Rose. When Rose asked the pair, then still in their 20s, why they had brought in 46-year-old Sun Microsystems and Novell Networks veteran Eric Schmidt as CEO earlier that year, Brin responded, "Parental supervision, to be honest."
- flukus 9y ago
  > Sun Microsystems and Novell Networks That resume would be much less impressive today.
  - throwaway613834 9y ago
    > That resume would be much less impressive today. Maybe because Eric Schmidt got taken away from them?
  - havetocharge 9y ago
    Well, today he also has a decade of being a CEO of Google, and a bunch of more years being Alphabet's executive chairman. Is that more impressive today?
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  I don't see how that changes anything. They didn't create the term, and most people who use it don't know who popularised it.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I think what it changes is that it isn't necessarily condescending. It can also be an ironic recognition of a real dynamic. Effective startups focus their innovation on a limited number of things. If you're really innovating in areas A and B, you pick the safe, boring choices in C-Z. That means that in C-Z, you benefit a lot from experience. The people with lots of experience are older. It can feel weird to turn over a lot of power to people who are much older, especially when a) the nominal progression to adulthood involves getting away from that, and b) it involves admitting there are important things you don't really understand, which is a hard admission for founders who have spent their lives mainly distinguished for being super smart. That has to be uncomfortable, and so I admire Page and Brin for using humor to deal with uncomfortable truth rather than sweeping it under the rug.
    - jamesrcole 9y ago
      It can be ironic, but it doesn't generally seem to be used in that way to me.
beager 9y ago
It could also be a bit ageist, indirectly. By qualifying older hires as adult supervision, companies might unconsciously avoid hiring older employees for positions where there is not a perceived lack of maturity, or hire workers only for the purpose of addressing deficiencies in maturity.
- taneq 9y ago
  "Adult supervision" refers (at least in my experience) more to guidance from people who are focused, results-oriented, practical, and experienced in using process and procedure to drive quality and efficiency. One example I know personally is a company where the senior staff were all in their 60s but have been winging it since their late 30s and had very little documentation and no real method. They hired an operations manager in their 40s who managed to reduce the amount of overtime required to produce the same result by about 30%, purely by eliminating busywork and making sure everyone knew what they were doing. In this case, the operations manager was the "adult supervision" required.
cafard 9y ago
There is the old joke about the difference between the USMC and the Boy Scouts: the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

throwaway613834 9y ago

> Even if the people being supervised might often be a bit immature, the term "adult supervision" seems to me very condescending. In fact, it was Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page who popularized the concept in a 2001 interview with Charlie Rose. When Rose asked the pair, then still in their 20s, why they had brought in 46-year-old Sun Microsystems and Novell Networks veteran Eric Schmidt as CEO earlier that year, Brin responded, "Parental supervision, to be honest."

flukus 9y ago
> Sun Microsystems and Novell Networks That resume would be much less impressive today.
- throwaway613834 9y ago
  > That resume would be much less impressive today. Maybe because Eric Schmidt got taken away from them?
- havetocharge 9y ago
  Well, today he also has a decade of being a CEO of Google, and a bunch of more years being Alphabet's executive chairman. Is that more impressive today?
jamesrcole 9y ago
I don't see how that changes anything. They didn't create the term, and most people who use it don't know who popularised it.
- wpietri 9y ago
  I think what it changes is that it isn't necessarily condescending. It can also be an ironic recognition of a real dynamic. Effective startups focus their innovation on a limited number of things. If you're really innovating in areas A and B, you pick the safe, boring choices in C-Z. That means that in C-Z, you benefit a lot from experience. The people with lots of experience are older. It can feel weird to turn over a lot of power to people who are much older, especially when a) the nominal progression to adulthood involves getting away from that, and b) it involves admitting there are important things you don't really understand, which is a hard admission for founders who have spent their lives mainly distinguished for being super smart. That has to be uncomfortable, and so I admire Page and Brin for using humor to deal with uncomfortable truth rather than sweeping it under the rug.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    It can be ironic, but it doesn't generally seem to be used in that way to me.

beager 9y ago

It could also be a bit ageist, indirectly. By qualifying older hires as adult supervision, companies might unconsciously avoid hiring older employees for positions where there is not a perceived lack of maturity, or hire workers only for the purpose of addressing deficiencies in maturity.

taneq 9y ago
"Adult supervision" refers (at least in my experience) more to guidance from people who are focused, results-oriented, practical, and experienced in using process and procedure to drive quality and efficiency. One example I know personally is a company where the senior staff were all in their 60s but have been winging it since their late 30s and had very little documentation and no real method. They hired an operations manager in their 40s who managed to reduce the amount of overtime required to produce the same result by about 30%, purely by eliminating busywork and making sure everyone knew what they were doing. In this case, the operations manager was the "adult supervision" required.

cafard 9y ago

There is the old joke about the difference between the USMC and the Boy Scouts: the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.