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> I want to hire hungry creative kids that want to step up. So Kan's companies are ageist, gotcha.
by MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> I want to hire hungry creative kids that want to step up.
So Kan's companies are ageist, gotcha.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoMaybe you only need to be a child at heart (fingers crossed). : P
- snogglethorpe 14y agoIf he's looking for people without degrees I suspect it's more important that you have a child's salary requirements...
- sixothree 14y agoIncidentally, that was my only take-away from that article.
- danielweber 14y ago"Stay(ed) up until 5am coding" was what really jumped out at me. I think the modern college market is just a credentialing racket, so I don't mind steps taken to disrupt it. That doesn't mean I'll support any step to disrupt it.
- abstractbill 14y agoJustin.TV certainly wasn't, and I'd be very surprised if Exec is. I was the first engineering hire at Justin.TV, aged 33 at the time (a full decade older than one of the founders!). Nobody cared about that, they cared that I'm a good hacker who gets things done.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThat's good to hear, the article's tone made it sound like he's only interested in hiring young inexperienced engineers (code for cheap).
- timr 14y agoI'm late to the party, but can +1 Bill. I started at JTV when I was 32. Bill made me look young, though. ;-)
- emmett 14y agoLiterally one sentence later: "Network engineers who started off as college dropouts but figured it out from years of on the job experience learning to be the best." So, he wants young creative kids, and also super experienced people. The obvious point is that he wants ambitious people who work hard, not that he wants young people. Some of those people are younger and some people are older.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoYeah, I kind of regret posting that as it was snarkier than I intended and was undeservedly upvoted a lot. The article mentions young people several times and it rubbed me the wrong way, I got the impression that he likes to hire lower-waged engineers, but after a re-read I don't think that was intentional.
- rdouble 14y agoYounger engineer doesn't necessarily mean lower wages. There's so much funding in Silicon Valley, and such a talent crunch, that startup salaries are often on par with "real jobs" at established companies. In the first dot com boom, startup engineers were often paid sub par wages because much of the funding was allocated to expensive infrastructure and for-show C-level execs. These days, infrastructure is cheap and startups don't hire MBAs, so virtually all of the funding is earmarked for engineering salaries.