5 ms·

Old People

97 points by bitsweet 14y ago

wmat 14y ago
Fantastic!
petercooper 14y ago
This was published over at PandoDaily the other day with the title: "Hiring old people: The dangerous but necessary steroids of the startup world." http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/04/hiring-old-people-the-dangerous-but-necessary-steroids-of-the-startup-world/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/04/hiring-old-people-the-dange... .. got me thinking back to the rather hectic HN thread the other day :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838215
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bjpcjp 14y ago
Old guy here. Musing about the reaction if I reblogged this post with "younguns". Don't get me wrong, the points are valid. But I'd bet an equivalent post about what could happen to a startup when a young new hire comes in would get uber-flamed. Just sayin'.
- Mz 14y ago
  I am old-ish. My read on it: We iz intimidated. Left-handed compliment. So it didn't really bother me, and I am kind of quick to be offended and high handed about something like that. Also just sayin'.
- jimfuller 14y ago
  Agree with your sentiments, I won't be so nice though ... this article is stunning in its naivety and ignorance. Perhaps the author realizes that for every successful startup there are thousands of failures; young people are being convinced (usually by clever older people with money) to use up that most precious commodity e.g. time. An analogy I see is in the stock market; where hiring young (malleable) young guns to work 24/7 ... most of these people don't get wealthy, most of them burn out or used as responsibility fodder. Most of them don't enjoy their youth and end up regretting it. as for the age bias in the article ..., lets hope a few decades from now that his article will be preserved for pleasurable reading later on in life as much wincing will ensue.
- njr123 14y ago
  > But I'd bet an equivalent post about what could happen to a startup when a young new hire comes in would get uber-flamed. Because thats not the equivalent. The equivalent would be an old established company hiring someone young to come in over the top of all the older more experienced managers to try and shake things up and force some innovation. Which is an article I would actually be very interested in reading. I imagine the culture clash could cause the company to completely implode if it was not done right.
derleth 14y ago
> You don’t know the job as well as they do – in fact, you are hiring them precisely because you don’t know how to do the job. So how do you hold them accountable for doing a good job? Kind of like using a high-level language and/or a framework: Are you using it because you don't know how to do what the software does, or are you using it to automate a task you could do 'by hand' if you had an infinite number of hours in a day? Only in the second case are you qualified to tell if the tool you just brought in is doing a good job.
sharkweek 14y ago
Worked at a startup with about 20 or so people. The cofounders decided to bring on a "COO" to, in essence, whip the company into shape for scaling. This person was considerably older than a lot of the staff (but I'm not sure age was relevant). The person was a terrible cultural fit and was the reason three of our best employees left, dynamically changing the structure of the co. I think this person made some decent operational changes, but the culture value that was lost didn't make up for it. (don't really have much followup to where they're at now, left a while back and haven't heard much from former coworkers).
- dia123 14y ago
  Ya early in startups culture & skill are soo important.
- bbotond 14y ago
  Why was he a terrible cultural fit? Also, do you think it was because he was older or for some other reason? (honest questions, no sarcasm intended)
- rickmb 14y ago
  Said person may have only been the catalyst. The reality is that company culture changes as it scales up, whether you bring in outsiders or not. It's easy to blame a specific person, but in fact it is perfectly normal for some of "the best" people to leave because they no longer feel comfortable in the changing company.
evelyn1204 14y ago
in fact, you are hiring them precisely because you don’t know how to do the job. http://www.magicdress.co.uk/ http://www.magicdress.co.uk/
codeonfire 14y ago
No one is afraid of older people. they are afraid of not having the upper hand. This business speak about culture is lame. Say what you mean. Don't say culture when you mean power. Yes, the problem is that more experienced, wiser, and older people are scary and will take control of your company if you hire them and will ignore all your power games. They are not going to respect your "culture" (power). Scary stuff. In reality, the powerful don't work for the weak so you don't have to worry about it.
adrianhoward 14y ago
The mistake I've seen a few companies make is hiring in the wrong kind of experience (and I'm gonna use that word instead of "old" since I don't think the "old" bit is actually the issue). For example - say you want to "build a worldwide sales channel". Go find somebody who's running a worldwide sales channel and poach 'em... right? Nope. Coz running a successful worldwide sales channel is a very different process from building a worldwide sales channel. There are folk who are very good at the former who are lousy at the latter. The mistake I've seen multiple times is folk going out to hire the people who work at the companies they want to be like, rather than going out and hiring the folk who were there while those companies were growing. That growing bit is darn hard. Find folk who've done it before.
- Tichy 14y ago
  Also, I don't know, wouldn't somebody who built a sales channel (whatever that is) in the past have done so with completely outdated methods? Presumably fax machines and telephones?
  - rthomas6 14y ago
    Maybe if they built it 25 years ago. People that did said thing 10 or 15 years ago I'd think would have used similar methods that could be updated easily. 10 years ago was only 2002.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    A sales channel is a system of business relationships through which you sell your product; for instance, partnerships with consulting firms and VARs that themselves have salespeople. An agreement with Best Buy would be a channel relationship. AT&T is key channel for Apple. The methods you use to build a channel largely revolve around meetings with other companies, so, no, I don't think age matters as much as knowing how to sell a product to a reseller; how that deal is structured (markups, inventory, spiffs for hitting numbers, sales support, subsidized marketing, &c), how you generate and groom channel leads (pilot programs, pull-through from shared direct customers, tie-ins to services or 3rd party products, &c). Channel sales managers are more like bizdev than like salespeople (although really, bizdev, channel, and account manager salespeople all share most of the same DNA).
dmk23 14y ago
I think it is important to draw clear distinction between "hiring senior people" and "turning over control". If you hire a VP Sales and they do not work out you can rollback the change with pretty limited amount of pain and start over. If you decide to hire CEO or COO you could be irreversibly transforming your entire organization and a subsequent "pivot" may kill you. You might hit a jackpot with an Eric Schmidt or a Jim Barksdale or you could be stuck with a turkey that ruins your company (which is a lot more likely outcome). There is nothing wrong with hiring senior talent (for whatever role) as long as everyone is clear about the chain of command, responsibilities and expectations. Whether you want to make the top decisions or let someone else do that be sure you know what you are getting into.
nicholassmith 14y ago
I've heard before startups saying "yeah, but once you're a bit older you can't commit to the 14 hour days, you have family and stuff". 14 hour days are bad and wrong anyway, no one should do them, and no one should expect them. Grumpy grownups have probably done them before, but have enough knowledge of the languages that the 14 hours can be squeezed into 9. Anyway, startups should hire the right person for the right role. Is that the 21 year old kid who can sling code like a ninjarockstarboss and cut her teeth when she was 12? Maybe! Or is it the 40 year old dude who's seen the rise and fall of titans and has 10 years experience in the domain? That depends entirely on what your business needs when you hire someone, and what the business is going to need long term.
- davedx 14y ago
  > have enough knowledge of the languages that the 14 hours can be squeezed into 9. Or enough knowledge of the English language to be able to tell the people trying to get us to work those hours what to do. ;)
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  14 hour days are bad and wrong anyway, no one should do them, and no one should expect them. Can you explain this claim? For what value of N are N hour days not "bad and wrong"?
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    If you're expected to work 14 hour days as anything other than a one off then it's not sustainable. Don't get me wrong, some developers are very capable of being able to grind 14 hour days out over and over, but for the average person your quality level is going to dip off rapidly, you end up overly stressed and it ruins your health. I say this as someone who has gone his time in the pits doing 14 hour days, and whilst I throw the occasional one in when needed it's a rare outlier.
  - sophacles 14y ago
    Well, for the expected day-to-day case: S = number of hours an employee needs to sleep to be useful (this varies person to person) C = commute time to the work location M = maintenance time (how much time a person needs to do minimal human maintenance, eating, relaxing, showering etc) So the upper bound on N should be: N <= 24 - (S + C + M) Now this doesn't take into account burnout etc. So another factor B, should be put in the equation. It represents the time an employee needs to spend on non-work things (hobbies, family, friends, going to the pub, whatever) to refresh themselves for work and prevent burnout. The average person seems to have these sorts of values: S = 8 M = 2 C = 1 so assuming no B (extremely unlikely), this puts 13 as an upper bound on N for long term. However a normal 13 hour day is a LOT. I know for me B is around 2 or 3 and a lot of people think I'm nuts on how much time I spend doing work. I should note, in my case, B is actually higher, however aspects of my work also count towards B - I love my job, and so can spend more time at it in a sustained way because of the "fun" or "paid hobby" aspects of it.
pauljburke 14y ago
" for engineering managers the comprehensive knowledge of the code base and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than knowledge of how to run scalable engineering organizations" I know many people who can get productive with a code base very quickly; the number of people I've encountered capable of managing those people is substantially less.
microcentury 14y ago
Slightly off topic: Are there no male executives left in the world? All that politically admirable use of 'she' was linguistically very jarring, and an unnecessary distraction from a fine article. Have we not pretty much agreed on 'they' as being the gender-neutral acceptable alternative to 'he'?
- sophacles 14y ago
  If the idea of female executives it that shocking to people, it's probably a good idea to sometimes use a female gendered "generic" executive. Had the author said "he" rather than "they" I highly doubt that anyone would have made this comment. Further if they had, any complaints about it would be ridiculed as overly feminist or sensitive. A lot of people fine the use of a collective pronoun (they) for a singular generic to be extremely jarring. The argument against using "they" is actually pretty good - as when it is unexpectedly countered it can cause confusion in the reader, causing her to re-read the sentence wondering what this group that suddenly appeared is. Even when readers know the modern usage of they/them, they will be caught off guard. Until we all can read "she" in a "male role" and notice it as odd, or until there is a singular, gender-neutral, non-dehumanizing pronoun (calling people "it" is bad too), the use of "she" for generics is a darn good idea. Well - except in traditionally female roles, then perhaps we should use "he" as the generic pronoun. (e.g. talking about daycare providers, nannies, nurses, etc as "he" in the generic gets equally weird responses).
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Using "she" is confusing in a similar way as using "they" - just to a lesser degree. If typical executive is a male, then using "she" needlessly attracts reader's attention due to the unexpected word usage. Granted, using "she" helps making overall idea of female executive more acceptable, but main focus of this article is "hiring experienced/old employees", not "shifting cultural norm to making females more acceptable for executive roles".
    - sophacles 14y ago
      This is disingenuous to an appalling degree. How does shifting the cultural norm happen if not by doing things that aren't (currently) the cultural norm? Why does one have to toe a line when she doesn't find that OK? Equally disingenuous is the notion that the author must strip out everything not related to the point as you dennisgorelik sees it (as opposed to the author keeping exactly what the author wants to keep in the article). Perhaps in an article about finding the right experienced employee, where a major theme is "you have to look at it a bit differently than you'd expect", the use of the unexpected gender is a subtle reinforcement point. But sure, people who write never try to use multiple methods to get the idea across - that would be silly and go along with everything most writing courses/books/guides suggest. It must be a political agenda.

97 points by bitsweet 14y ago

wmat 14y ago

Fantastic!

This was published over at PandoDaily the other day with the title: "Hiring old people: The dangerous but necessary steroids of the startup world." http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/04/hiring-old-people-the-dangerous-but-necessary-steroids-of-the-startup-world/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/04/hiring-old-people-the-dange... .. got me thinking back to the rather hectic HN thread the other day :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838215

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bjpcjp 14y ago

Old guy here. Musing about the reaction if I reblogged this post with "younguns". Don't get me wrong, the points are valid. But I'd bet an equivalent post about what could happen to a startup when a young new hire comes in would get uber-flamed. Just sayin'.

Mz 14y ago
I am old-ish. My read on it: We iz intimidated. Left-handed compliment. So it didn't really bother me, and I am kind of quick to be offended and high handed about something like that. Also just sayin'.
jimfuller 14y ago
Agree with your sentiments, I won't be so nice though ... this article is stunning in its naivety and ignorance. Perhaps the author realizes that for every successful startup there are thousands of failures; young people are being convinced (usually by clever older people with money) to use up that most precious commodity e.g. time. An analogy I see is in the stock market; where hiring young (malleable) young guns to work 24/7 ... most of these people don't get wealthy, most of them burn out or used as responsibility fodder. Most of them don't enjoy their youth and end up regretting it. as for the age bias in the article ..., lets hope a few decades from now that his article will be preserved for pleasurable reading later on in life as much wincing will ensue.
njr123 14y ago
> But I'd bet an equivalent post about what could happen to a startup when a young new hire comes in would get uber-flamed. Because thats not the equivalent. The equivalent would be an old established company hiring someone young to come in over the top of all the older more experienced managers to try and shake things up and force some innovation. Which is an article I would actually be very interested in reading. I imagine the culture clash could cause the company to completely implode if it was not done right.

derleth 14y ago

> You don’t know the job as well as they do – in fact, you are hiring them precisely because you don’t know how to do the job. So how do you hold them accountable for doing a good job? Kind of like using a high-level language and/or a framework: Are you using it because you don't know how to do what the software does, or are you using it to automate a task you could do 'by hand' if you had an infinite number of hours in a day? Only in the second case are you qualified to tell if the tool you just brought in is doing a good job.

sharkweek 14y ago

Worked at a startup with about 20 or so people. The cofounders decided to bring on a "COO" to, in essence, whip the company into shape for scaling. This person was considerably older than a lot of the staff (but I'm not sure age was relevant). The person was a terrible cultural fit and was the reason three of our best employees left, dynamically changing the structure of the co. I think this person made some decent operational changes, but the culture value that was lost didn't make up for it. (don't really have much followup to where they're at now, left a while back and haven't heard much from former coworkers).

dia123 14y ago
Ya early in startups culture & skill are soo important.
bbotond 14y ago
Why was he a terrible cultural fit? Also, do you think it was because he was older or for some other reason? (honest questions, no sarcasm intended)
rickmb 14y ago
Said person may have only been the catalyst. The reality is that company culture changes as it scales up, whether you bring in outsiders or not. It's easy to blame a specific person, but in fact it is perfectly normal for some of "the best" people to leave because they no longer feel comfortable in the changing company.

evelyn1204 14y ago

in fact, you are hiring them precisely because you don’t know how to do the job. http://www.magicdress.co.uk/ http://www.magicdress.co.uk/

codeonfire 14y ago

No one is afraid of older people. they are afraid of not having the upper hand. This business speak about culture is lame. Say what you mean. Don't say culture when you mean power. Yes, the problem is that more experienced, wiser, and older people are scary and will take control of your company if you hire them and will ignore all your power games. They are not going to respect your "culture" (power). Scary stuff. In reality, the powerful don't work for the weak so you don't have to worry about it.

adrianhoward 14y ago

The mistake I've seen a few companies make is hiring in the wrong kind of experience (and I'm gonna use that word instead of "old" since I don't think the "old" bit is actually the issue). For example - say you want to "build a worldwide sales channel". Go find somebody who's running a worldwide sales channel and poach 'em... right? Nope. Coz running a successful worldwide sales channel is a very different process from building a worldwide sales channel. There are folk who are very good at the former who are lousy at the latter. The mistake I've seen multiple times is folk going out to hire the people who work at the companies they want to be like, rather than going out and hiring the folk who were there while those companies were growing. That growing bit is darn hard. Find folk who've done it before.

Tichy 14y ago
Also, I don't know, wouldn't somebody who built a sales channel (whatever that is) in the past have done so with completely outdated methods? Presumably fax machines and telephones?
- rthomas6 14y ago
  Maybe if they built it 25 years ago. People that did said thing 10 or 15 years ago I'd think would have used similar methods that could be updated easily. 10 years ago was only 2002.
- tptacek 14y ago
  A sales channel is a system of business relationships through which you sell your product; for instance, partnerships with consulting firms and VARs that themselves have salespeople. An agreement with Best Buy would be a channel relationship. AT&T is key channel for Apple. The methods you use to build a channel largely revolve around meetings with other companies, so, no, I don't think age matters as much as knowing how to sell a product to a reseller; how that deal is structured (markups, inventory, spiffs for hitting numbers, sales support, subsidized marketing, &c), how you generate and groom channel leads (pilot programs, pull-through from shared direct customers, tie-ins to services or 3rd party products, &c). Channel sales managers are more like bizdev than like salespeople (although really, bizdev, channel, and account manager salespeople all share most of the same DNA).

dmk23 14y ago

I think it is important to draw clear distinction between "hiring senior people" and "turning over control". If you hire a VP Sales and they do not work out you can rollback the change with pretty limited amount of pain and start over. If you decide to hire CEO or COO you could be irreversibly transforming your entire organization and a subsequent "pivot" may kill you. You might hit a jackpot with an Eric Schmidt or a Jim Barksdale or you could be stuck with a turkey that ruins your company (which is a lot more likely outcome). There is nothing wrong with hiring senior talent (for whatever role) as long as everyone is clear about the chain of command, responsibilities and expectations. Whether you want to make the top decisions or let someone else do that be sure you know what you are getting into.

nicholassmith 14y ago

I've heard before startups saying "yeah, but once you're a bit older you can't commit to the 14 hour days, you have family and stuff". 14 hour days are bad and wrong anyway, no one should do them, and no one should expect them. Grumpy grownups have probably done them before, but have enough knowledge of the languages that the 14 hours can be squeezed into 9. Anyway, startups should hire the right person for the right role. Is that the 21 year old kid who can sling code like a ninjarockstarboss and cut her teeth when she was 12? Maybe! Or is it the 40 year old dude who's seen the rise and fall of titans and has 10 years experience in the domain? That depends entirely on what your business needs when you hire someone, and what the business is going to need long term.

davedx 14y ago
> have enough knowledge of the languages that the 14 hours can be squeezed into 9. Or enough knowledge of the English language to be able to tell the people trying to get us to work those hours what to do. ;)
yummyfajitas 14y ago
14 hour days are bad and wrong anyway, no one should do them, and no one should expect them. Can you explain this claim? For what value of N are N hour days not "bad and wrong"?
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  If you're expected to work 14 hour days as anything other than a one off then it's not sustainable. Don't get me wrong, some developers are very capable of being able to grind 14 hour days out over and over, but for the average person your quality level is going to dip off rapidly, you end up overly stressed and it ruins your health. I say this as someone who has gone his time in the pits doing 14 hour days, and whilst I throw the occasional one in when needed it's a rare outlier.
- sophacles 14y ago
  Well, for the expected day-to-day case: S = number of hours an employee needs to sleep to be useful (this varies person to person) C = commute time to the work location M = maintenance time (how much time a person needs to do minimal human maintenance, eating, relaxing, showering etc) So the upper bound on N should be: N <= 24 - (S + C + M) Now this doesn't take into account burnout etc. So another factor B, should be put in the equation. It represents the time an employee needs to spend on non-work things (hobbies, family, friends, going to the pub, whatever) to refresh themselves for work and prevent burnout. The average person seems to have these sorts of values: S = 8 M = 2 C = 1 so assuming no B (extremely unlikely), this puts 13 as an upper bound on N for long term. However a normal 13 hour day is a LOT. I know for me B is around 2 or 3 and a lot of people think I'm nuts on how much time I spend doing work. I should note, in my case, B is actually higher, however aspects of my work also count towards B - I love my job, and so can spend more time at it in a sustained way because of the "fun" or "paid hobby" aspects of it.

pauljburke 14y ago

" for engineering managers the comprehensive knowledge of the code base and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than knowledge of how to run scalable engineering organizations" I know many people who can get productive with a code base very quickly; the number of people I've encountered capable of managing those people is substantially less.

microcentury 14y ago

Slightly off topic: Are there no male executives left in the world? All that politically admirable use of 'she' was linguistically very jarring, and an unnecessary distraction from a fine article. Have we not pretty much agreed on 'they' as being the gender-neutral acceptable alternative to 'he'?

sophacles 14y ago
If the idea of female executives it that shocking to people, it's probably a good idea to sometimes use a female gendered "generic" executive. Had the author said "he" rather than "they" I highly doubt that anyone would have made this comment. Further if they had, any complaints about it would be ridiculed as overly feminist or sensitive. A lot of people fine the use of a collective pronoun (they) for a singular generic to be extremely jarring. The argument against using "they" is actually pretty good - as when it is unexpectedly countered it can cause confusion in the reader, causing her to re-read the sentence wondering what this group that suddenly appeared is. Even when readers know the modern usage of they/them, they will be caught off guard. Until we all can read "she" in a "male role" and notice it as odd, or until there is a singular, gender-neutral, non-dehumanizing pronoun (calling people "it" is bad too), the use of "she" for generics is a darn good idea. Well - except in traditionally female roles, then perhaps we should use "he" as the generic pronoun. (e.g. talking about daycare providers, nannies, nurses, etc as "he" in the generic gets equally weird responses).
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Using "she" is confusing in a similar way as using "they" - just to a lesser degree. If typical executive is a male, then using "she" needlessly attracts reader's attention due to the unexpected word usage. Granted, using "she" helps making overall idea of female executive more acceptable, but main focus of this article is "hiring experienced/old employees", not "shifting cultural norm to making females more acceptable for executive roles".
  - sophacles 14y ago
    This is disingenuous to an appalling degree. How does shifting the cultural norm happen if not by doing things that aren't (currently) the cultural norm? Why does one have to toe a line when she doesn't find that OK? Equally disingenuous is the notion that the author must strip out everything not related to the point as you dennisgorelik sees it (as opposed to the author keeping exactly what the author wants to keep in the article). Perhaps in an article about finding the right experienced employee, where a major theme is "you have to look at it a bit differently than you'd expect", the use of the unexpected gender is a subtle reinforcement point. But sure, people who write never try to use multiple methods to get the idea across - that would be silly and go along with everything most writing courses/books/guides suggest. It must be a political agenda.