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Part of the competitive advantage of the technology industry may be that young people can be management. It could be, indeed, the exact opposite of what you're

Part of the competitive advantage of the technology industry may be that young people can be management. It could be, indeed, the exact opposite of what you're saying. In literally everything else, hierarchy is by age. Consider that a bad computer program business can still make a bajillion dollars. Maybe the fact that its CEO is young enough to understand the problem matters. Or maybe it's as simple as, young people who are more skilled than older people, and now can be in charge. Most of the value may be tied up in something else, but most of the competitive advantage may be tied up in the age. My feeling is, the ability for young people to be in charge is similar to (but not as impactful as) other historic opening-of-opportunities for people in the workforce.

tomc1985 8y ago
Hardly a good thing, though. The last thing we need are inexperienced leaders
jerf 8y ago
"In literally everything else, hierarchy is by age." Hierarchy is by age because ability to lead and make good decisions is heavily correlated with age, because that's heavily correlated with experience, one of the most relevant metrics. It is so heavily correlated with age that many companies and/or unions have in various ways institutionalized that connection and reified it beyond what is justified by the facts. There are young people who can lead. I suspect in the vast bulk of those cases a lot of that leadership is the wisdom to listen to more experienced people, and adapt it to their local circumstances. There is nothing wrong with that; it legitimately would put them ahead of their peers and bring great value to both them and whoever hires them. I suspect the number of cases of a brilliant young leader who is truly just doing it on their own is so small as to be not something worth worrying yourself about. Probably a lot of young would-be leaders have been hurt by the idea that it is some Platonic aspect of their youth they should be pursing and the fogies should just be ignored if not actively contradicted; that's very rarely a way to get ahead. The cases I can think of where some young founder "showed them" are not cases where they tore up the old rule book and did everything in a fresh new way, but more cases where they identified a particular inefficiency in the old ways and exploited that, because you really can't make progress by simply doing the opposite of whatever worked in the past. "My feeling is, the ability for young people to be in charge is similar to (but not as impactful as) other historic opening-of-opportunities for people in the workforce." No, I wouldn't think so. Those other "historic" opportunities all revolve around things that are attributes of people that are immutable. Your age is not such an attribute. Indeed, many wish it were immutable. But it's not. Certainly we want to make sure that young people have a path forward into leadership and management, because society's ongoing existence requires it, but they don't need any sort of special management affirmative action program or anything. Time will take care of your youth, in all senses of the term, whether you like it or not.
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  > Hierarchy is by age because... heavily correlated with... Listen, the same exact things were said about women, or Jews, any number of groups of people who were excluded, by whatever means, coercive or not, from opportunities of employment, in various societies in the industrial world. I'm not saying we should throw out applications of people over 30. I'm saying that management is now open to young people, and it turns out businesses make tons of money despite being full of young people, so all your god-damned correlations are really just a bunch of fucking folk wisdom that doesn't add up to anything. It's basically the best time, ever, in the history of the world, to achieve prestige or power as an 18-21 year old, ever, a benefit that is available to everyone's kids, including yours, and you're never going to want to change that, even if it personally sometimes results in less prestige or power for older people.
  - jerf 8y ago
    "Listen, the same exact things were said about women, or Jews, any number of groups of people who were excluded, by whatever means, coercive or not, from opportunities of employment, in various societies in the industrial world." And the reason why that was a bad thing isn't that it is just always wrong to say that skill is correlated with various attributes. Those things are wrong because skill isn't correlated with those things. Leadership skill is correlated with age. The alternative is, as I said in another post, to say that as a young person, you are currently as skilled as you will ever be. You will never learn anything more. You will never get any better. You will never deserve a raise because you're bringing more value to the business. You are almost certainly not going to agree to this about yourself. Even if you do, I'm going to tell you right now that I think you're saying it just to be argumentative on the internet, and that you don't really believe it. Particularly the raise bit. If everyone's getting better with experience, age can't help but be correlated with skill. It's a bit weaker mathematically, but in practice, it'll happen the other way too. The reason we can even entertain the idea that experience doesn't matter is that there was a relatively recent event in which the environment changed so completely and quickly that a great deal of practical experience was rendered irrelevant. However, by "relatively recently", I mean, the mid-to-late 1990s, when we went from mainframes and "big iron" terminals to commodity computers and the web. Since then, there has been no similar sea change. "you're never going to want to change that" What I "want" is utterly irrelevant. I certainly do not want a world in which people celebrate failure to learn from experience. But that want is also irrelevant to what actually happens, seeing as there are still a lot of people working very hard to produce a cultural environment in which we studiously fail to learn from the past. (That's not a crack at you; I'm more taking a crack at modern academia there, which to my eye is to a large degree devoted to precisely that.) I would advise you to lose the chip off your shoulder, try to learn from people who have already learned the hard way, and stop thinking you've got it all figured out, because ironically, if you do in fact want to displace the older fogies, it is precisely thinking that you've got it all figured out and that you don't need to listen nobody, nohow that will prevent you from doing that. The correct path is to A: listen to the people with experience B: think about it a lot C: think about it in your local context and then D: tweak it as appropriate for your local environment. I would also advise you to carefully distinguish between people like me, who include step D, and those who don't. That D is all the difference. By no means would I expect advice from those who have gone before to apply 100% in a changing world. However, the world does not generally change discontinuously, nor does it change as much as the tech industry sometimes fancies itself changing. It's still going to apply 98%. That 2% can still be a big deal; it's the difference between Uber/Lyft and a conventional taxi company. But it's a lot easier to get there with the procedure I outlined in the previous paragraph than to try to reconstruct the entire knowledge base from scratch. If, on the other hand, you want to start a business where you don't focus on customers because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry too much about revenue because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry about how you're going to get repeat customers because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry about complying with the local laws because "move fast and break things" is more important than listening to your old fogie advisors, and you don't ask anyone for advice on how to hire properly because it'll just be old fogie advice, etc. etc.... well... I did my part here. It's on you. One less "young person" to worry about upstaging me in the future, I guess. Ironically to me personally, even as I write this, my wife and I are watching a relatively young person basically throw their financial future away, against the advice of all of their family and friends. In this case not because of an active rebellion against the old fogies, just someone not used to taking advice, and who takes the advice not to do something as a personal criticism, rather than an attempt to help them. It's not an HN-type of situation either. A tech startup may be a lottery ticket, but there is a chance of winning, and as long as you don't hang on to a failing business too hard, the worst case scenario isn't really all that bad; you made a living, you got a heck of a lot of great experience, and you can walk into any number of jobs or even perhaps another startup if you still impressed your investors even so. In this case, the best case scenario is that after 20 or so years of exceedingly hard work, they'll catch up to where they could have been if they just got a normal (non-tech) job, and both the average and worst case scenarios are substantially worse. Failing to learn from other's experience isn't just an academic problem. It's a real problem.

tomc1985 8y ago

Hardly a good thing, though. The last thing we need are inexperienced leaders

jerf 8y ago

"In literally everything else, hierarchy is by age." Hierarchy is by age because ability to lead and make good decisions is heavily correlated with age, because that's heavily correlated with experience, one of the most relevant metrics. It is so heavily correlated with age that many companies and/or unions have in various ways institutionalized that connection and reified it beyond what is justified by the facts. There are young people who can lead. I suspect in the vast bulk of those cases a lot of that leadership is the wisdom to listen to more experienced people, and adapt it to their local circumstances. There is nothing wrong with that; it legitimately would put them ahead of their peers and bring great value to both them and whoever hires them. I suspect the number of cases of a brilliant young leader who is truly just doing it on their own is so small as to be not something worth worrying yourself about. Probably a lot of young would-be leaders have been hurt by the idea that it is some Platonic aspect of their youth they should be pursing and the fogies should just be ignored if not actively contradicted; that's very rarely a way to get ahead. The cases I can think of where some young founder "showed them" are not cases where they tore up the old rule book and did everything in a fresh new way, but more cases where they identified a particular inefficiency in the old ways and exploited that, because you really can't make progress by simply doing the opposite of whatever worked in the past. "My feeling is, the ability for young people to be in charge is similar to (but not as impactful as) other historic opening-of-opportunities for people in the workforce." No, I wouldn't think so. Those other "historic" opportunities all revolve around things that are attributes of people that are immutable. Your age is not such an attribute. Indeed, many wish it were immutable. But it's not. Certainly we want to make sure that young people have a path forward into leadership and management, because society's ongoing existence requires it, but they don't need any sort of special management affirmative action program or anything. Time will take care of your youth, in all senses of the term, whether you like it or not.

doctorpangloss 8y ago
> Hierarchy is by age because... heavily correlated with... Listen, the same exact things were said about women, or Jews, any number of groups of people who were excluded, by whatever means, coercive or not, from opportunities of employment, in various societies in the industrial world. I'm not saying we should throw out applications of people over 30. I'm saying that management is now open to young people, and it turns out businesses make tons of money despite being full of young people, so all your god-damned correlations are really just a bunch of fucking folk wisdom that doesn't add up to anything. It's basically the best time, ever, in the history of the world, to achieve prestige or power as an 18-21 year old, ever, a benefit that is available to everyone's kids, including yours, and you're never going to want to change that, even if it personally sometimes results in less prestige or power for older people.
- jerf 8y ago
  "Listen, the same exact things were said about women, or Jews, any number of groups of people who were excluded, by whatever means, coercive or not, from opportunities of employment, in various societies in the industrial world." And the reason why that was a bad thing isn't that it is just always wrong to say that skill is correlated with various attributes. Those things are wrong because skill isn't correlated with those things. Leadership skill is correlated with age. The alternative is, as I said in another post, to say that as a young person, you are currently as skilled as you will ever be. You will never learn anything more. You will never get any better. You will never deserve a raise because you're bringing more value to the business. You are almost certainly not going to agree to this about yourself. Even if you do, I'm going to tell you right now that I think you're saying it just to be argumentative on the internet, and that you don't really believe it. Particularly the raise bit. If everyone's getting better with experience, age can't help but be correlated with skill. It's a bit weaker mathematically, but in practice, it'll happen the other way too. The reason we can even entertain the idea that experience doesn't matter is that there was a relatively recent event in which the environment changed so completely and quickly that a great deal of practical experience was rendered irrelevant. However, by "relatively recently", I mean, the mid-to-late 1990s, when we went from mainframes and "big iron" terminals to commodity computers and the web. Since then, there has been no similar sea change. "you're never going to want to change that" What I "want" is utterly irrelevant. I certainly do not want a world in which people celebrate failure to learn from experience. But that want is also irrelevant to what actually happens, seeing as there are still a lot of people working very hard to produce a cultural environment in which we studiously fail to learn from the past. (That's not a crack at you; I'm more taking a crack at modern academia there, which to my eye is to a large degree devoted to precisely that.) I would advise you to lose the chip off your shoulder, try to learn from people who have already learned the hard way, and stop thinking you've got it all figured out, because ironically, if you do in fact want to displace the older fogies, it is precisely thinking that you've got it all figured out and that you don't need to listen nobody, nohow that will prevent you from doing that. The correct path is to A: listen to the people with experience B: think about it a lot C: think about it in your local context and then D: tweak it as appropriate for your local environment. I would also advise you to carefully distinguish between people like me, who include step D, and those who don't. That D is all the difference. By no means would I expect advice from those who have gone before to apply 100% in a changing world. However, the world does not generally change discontinuously, nor does it change as much as the tech industry sometimes fancies itself changing. It's still going to apply 98%. That 2% can still be a big deal; it's the difference between Uber/Lyft and a conventional taxi company. But it's a lot easier to get there with the procedure I outlined in the previous paragraph than to try to reconstruct the entire knowledge base from scratch. If, on the other hand, you want to start a business where you don't focus on customers because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry too much about revenue because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry about how you're going to get repeat customers because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry about complying with the local laws because "move fast and break things" is more important than listening to your old fogie advisors, and you don't ask anyone for advice on how to hire properly because it'll just be old fogie advice, etc. etc.... well... I did my part here. It's on you. One less "young person" to worry about upstaging me in the future, I guess. Ironically to me personally, even as I write this, my wife and I are watching a relatively young person basically throw their financial future away, against the advice of all of their family and friends. In this case not because of an active rebellion against the old fogies, just someone not used to taking advice, and who takes the advice not to do something as a personal criticism, rather than an attempt to help them. It's not an HN-type of situation either. A tech startup may be a lottery ticket, but there is a chance of winning, and as long as you don't hang on to a failing business too hard, the worst case scenario isn't really all that bad; you made a living, you got a heck of a lot of great experience, and you can walk into any number of jobs or even perhaps another startup if you still impressed your investors even so. In this case, the best case scenario is that after 20 or so years of exceedingly hard work, they'll catch up to where they could have been if they just got a normal (non-tech) job, and both the average and worst case scenarios are substantially worse. Failing to learn from other's experience isn't just an academic problem. It's a real problem.