As a greybeard in the making (36), my instinct is to dismiss comments like Mark's as inexperience and naivety. Those sorts of attitudes make me uncomfortable and edgy.
After some reflection, I'm forced to conclude that although such ageism is annoying, is naive, is arrogant, it's also beautiful. It is exactly that arrogance, the sure knowledge that the "establishment" is full of it and needs to be rescued by youth, that has rescued us, many times. Its from that arrogance that the energy to drive change comes.
There are many examples. A mantra of the 60s was to never trust anyone over 30. Kurt Cobain didn't exactly work with a lot of elder statesmen of the music world. Bertold Brecht spent his 20s in active rejection of all drama that had come before. And the art world is chock full of young artists declaring that a new age had arrived -- Basquiat probably never even talked to anyone under 30, except Andy Warhol, who was at least pretending to be a teenager.
None of which makes Mark's words easier for me to hear, but I can't bring myself to dismiss the attitude. It's fuel for radical new ideas. It's the nuclear reactor of society.
A much more noble attitude than plugging your ears and humming -- which is how many people seem to react to this harsh reality.
The fact is that Kapor himself was very young when he made his mark. There are far more similarities between him and Zuckerberg than differences, regardless of their opinions.
You're confusing selection for objectivity. Startups founded by "hot wiz kids" get more media attention to the fact that they are young. Companies founded by older people do not have that hook, so there is less emphasis in their age when the media writes them up.
Facebook doesn't need to keep innovating and re-imagining itself. It's designed to do one thing and it already does that quite well. All Zuckerberg needs to do to continue milking his cash cow is to keep the product fresh and trendy. This means hiring the kind of young and trendy people who his product targets.
Lotus, on the other hand, is a business. And as such they need to constantly innovate to survive. That means finding new problems in new markets and delivering new products to new people. As such they need all the diversity they can get.
If Facebook wants to become a business, they'll need diversity too. If they're content to keep milking the cash cow they already have, I'd say Zuckerberg's strategy is sound.
While it's interesting to think about what would be ideal in the abstract, I think any company that puts hiring someone who fits a demographic (ie, "young") over hiring the right person for the job is doing themselves a disservice. We all know woefully boring 25-year-olds and exciting, bleeding-edge 50-somethings, I'm sure.
That said, teens and 20-somethings tend to have much more time and energy on their hands -- and a tendency not to be stuck in old ruts. But I imagine they're also much more chaotic and restless. And simply inexperienced. Which could be problematic.
I agree with this guy. Mitch's talk was well put together and thoughtful. I think building a diverse team (assuming everybody is highly capable of course) wins most of the time.
Good point. But companies should be built to last, not built to flip. If the corporate culture becomes "don't hire anyone over 30," will it be possible to change in a few years when you're no longer a startup?
What a stupid argument to be honest. Arguments such as this always get a laughter out of me.
Why does it have to be one way or the other? It is quite understandable that FB has a leaning for the young as much of FB feeds off of young folks. I canât imagine too many 50+ guys brainstorming next generation of FB features. At the same time I canât imagine too many grades in early 20s coming up with next set of Lotus features.
May be the whole thing was missing a big disclaimer: USE WHAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU:)
"... in early 20s coming up with next set of Lotus features."
Why not? The only reason I can image is because they wouldn't likely be allowed to try. Instead they have to create something entirely new and better that makes it obsolete.
Mitch's talk was one of the ones I got the most out of. He seems like an all-round great guy - I have no doubt it'd be a hugely enjoyable experience to work with him.
I think what Mark is trying to avoid is the "Curse of Knowledge" (To borrow the Heath brothers phrase - check out Made to Stick, great book) Facebook is all about innovation, I think they purposefully avoid old ideas. (preferring young people = fresh ideas) Thats not to say they aren't young experienced smart people.
"Facebook is all about innovation, I think they purposefully avoid old ideas."
Are they, really?
The only new idea I've seen come out of FaceBook is tagging photos by drawing boxes around the people. Other than that, they're your basic database-backed social networking app. There's very little new there: LiveJournal/Flickr/Friendster/MySpace did it all before.
Google innovates. Thinkature innovates. Justin.tv (much as I think their community is heading for disaster) innovates. FaceBook seems to have positioning going for them, but they do fairly little technical stuff that can't be done by a hobbyist programmer in college. Which seems to be what most of their hires are...
I think thats overgeneralizing a little, many of the problems they are solving on the back end are not simple, give them a little credit for scaling from nothing to the 6th biggest website in the US very smoothly.
All the people I know that work there are far from "hobbyist programmers" and they are all damn smart, a fair amount have owned and sold companies before working there.
The innovation that comes out of Facebook is not purely technological, but more idealistic. They took stuff that had been done before and uniquely applied in a way that hadn't done before, doesn't that pass as a definition of innovation?
In my hiring, there is one thing that is paramount over all- attitude. And generally the attitude that gets people filtered out is arrogance. Not confidence, but arrogance.
Discriminating on age is silly. As is technological proficiency for non-technical positions (to a point.) I'll take a killer sales guy who's just getting by technologically over one who has accepted patches in the linux kernel but doesn't have the drive.
Too many people of one age fail to value people of a different age group... give me two equally proficient engineers, one with 20 years experience and one with 2 years experience, and I'll try to hire them both. But if either of them is arrogant, I'm not interested.
I knew Mark's would be drawing some fast criticism. There were some things he said that raised my eyebrows, sure. Super arrogant, absolutely. I sure as hell got something out of it though. He just gets what he's doing. He sees how critical it is to keep technical people behind the company. And while his blanket statement about youthfulness made some eyes roll, it holds true for most of us and especially facebook. No matter what you might think of the guy, it'd be a really good idea to buy facebook stock when they eventually go public.
After some reflection, I'm forced to conclude that although such ageism is annoying, is naive, is arrogant, it's also beautiful. It is exactly that arrogance, the sure knowledge that the "establishment" is full of it and needs to be rescued by youth, that has rescued us, many times. Its from that arrogance that the energy to drive change comes.
There are many examples. A mantra of the 60s was to never trust anyone over 30. Kurt Cobain didn't exactly work with a lot of elder statesmen of the music world. Bertold Brecht spent his 20s in active rejection of all drama that had come before. And the art world is chock full of young artists declaring that a new age had arrived -- Basquiat probably never even talked to anyone under 30, except Andy Warhol, who was at least pretending to be a teenager.
None of which makes Mark's words easier for me to hear, but I can't bring myself to dismiss the attitude. It's fuel for radical new ideas. It's the nuclear reactor of society.