Old People
bhorowitz.com
bhorowitz.com
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.
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).
Just playing devil's advocate, anyway... I am all for senior people, getting old myself...
1) There have been largish successful organisations built since the web was invented ;-)
2) Lots of pre-web skills skills are transferable to more modern technologies. Most of the work in creating and building sales channels - especially internationally - is understanding people relationships, legal issues, managing recruiting and scaling of organisations not code, etc.
3) There are domains where large multinational organisations are still built using telephones, personal relationships and boots on the ground. If you're looking to build the next Oracle or SAP a bunch of retweets and facebook likes are not going to help.
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.
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. ;)
Can you explain this claim? For what value of N are N hour days not "bad and wrong"?
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.
Short periods of time (measured in days, not weeks) can be spent working for N > 8 hours per day, but it becomes counterproductive (from the employer's business standpoint, not even considering employee health or satisfaction) beyond a few days in a row.
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).
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.
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'.
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'.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.