This may be an unpopular idea, but I think a company should be able to hire or fire whomever they like for whatever reason. This is best for both the company and the employee - clearly in the case noted in the article, the employee who was fired was having a hard time in the Google culture, so why would he want to continue in the environment? Life seems too short for that.
Recently, a friend of a friend introduced me to a young man who is developing some interesting software. REALLY interesting stuff. During the demo I was floored at how much more advanced it was than anything currently on the web. The young man's presentation panache was second to none as well. You see, he went to his website on MY MacBook demonstrating at once his confidence in his virtual world platform's ability to run in arbitrary browsers, AND the fact that it supports MacOSX without stating it! Who IS this kid!?!? I thought.
I am ashamed to say that I was shocked. Oh the software he described was straight forward enough. Though admittedly my eyes did glaze over during his explanation of some of the algorithms behind his system. This type of minutia was NOT something I needed to know. A simple "This demos our booty physics" engine is fine, I get it.
What REALLY got me, yes even SHOCKED me, was the fact that all of this was coming from a person who, if I saw he and his friends on the street, would probably have prompted me to double check my car locks. Maybe that is a little bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea. How does a black kid, t-shirt, necklace, sweatpants and all, understand these technologies so well? Now before you call me racist, realize that this kid had been shopping around a LOT. Even so, I am the ONLY person, so far, to have invited him to give a presentation. At least I gave him a chance, and I am ecstatic that I did!
As I have too much respect for a lot of people on these boards to sport with your intellect any longer than necessary I will come to the point. Though, being so intelligent, I am certain that for many of you I have already made it. How does this young man, with intelligence, ambition, and persistence, become successful in our society if "a company should be able to hire or fire whomever they like for whatever reason"? Attitudes like that are what leave him, and others like him, on the outside looking in most of the time now. I believe that we live in a society with a color-blind ideal. I also believe that MANY young men, like the young man in my story, suffer due to our failure to live up to it.
A product (or person) that has a particular value, but is undervalued for some incorrect reason, represents an inefficiency in the market. But free markets are self-correcting, because...
The real money in this world is in recognizing inefficiency and exploiting (viz, "correcting") it.
Okay? So give the kid some money for a share in his endeavor, and you'll clean up. Unless you're just BSing.
I agree wholeheartedly agree with the first part of your post. Finding, and exploiting inefficiency is what my role is all about.
No question.
The last part of your post has a few things in it that I have to take issue with. Firstly, giving this guy money is NOT what I do. I invest in companies. I think investing in companies is the best way to exploit inefficiencies. Secondly, simply investing in a company with good people, and good technology at a good price is part of "cleaning up" as you put it, but it is at times insufficient to the cause. Now I could list GUBA, Revver etcetera here, but I believe you get the point. Lastly, take a quick scan through the comments in this thread. You will notice, in very short order, that yours is the only one containing profanity. You will get a lot further in life if you do yourself the goodness of presenting yourself in a favorable light to others. Even when you disagree.
One more thing, my job is analysis. I look at, and analyze, data in a dispassionate fashion. Then I give a yea or nay. Normally it is with an eye towards advising other investors. In this case, I put a little of my own scratch on the table. My business depends on reputation, I do not lie. I do not omit. I do not aggrandize. Let me say now that given the attitudes of people like you, I hope, for the sake of more than my investment, that this guy is successful in a fashion that forces others to recognize that the existence of people like him is possible.
Oh, sorry for the profanity, grandma. It's just that when "straight forward" software causes someone to get "ecstatic", my BS detector flips a bit. Sorry.
You will get a lot further in life if you do yourself the goodness of presenting yourself in a favorable light to others.
No doubt. (...wondering if you gave this advice to the subject in his "t-shirt, necklace, sweatpants and all")
I'm flattered that someone took the time to go through my comment history. My web presence is currently limited to my forum user's accounts at news.YC, TechCrunch, and the like. The idea of a blog occurred to me briefly when we decided to start looking at consumer startups. However, we determined there to be many blogs already in existence doing an excellent job of providing coverage of the space. It was doubtful that we would create a large enough audience from which to select clients.
All that said, the idea of a personal blog has been pitched to me. Recently the requests have been coming more and more often. So perhaps at some point in the future. Right now I am so busy that I am staying in touch with the office on the weekends. I would like to actually put thought into blog posts for a personal blog, and not have it be these more off-the-cuff brainstorms that I post to the forums.
College football programs in the American South can "hire and fire", so to speak, whomever they please. They were, for many years, the most racist institutions you're likely to find, with many teams composed entirely of white players. And yet, those who refused to allow black students to play got their asses kicked, and now virtually all college football teams have many black players.
How could a society where companies can hire and fire at will possibly be just? One word: competition. Racist companies that reject talented black youths such as the one you describe will, like the racist football teams of yore, get their asses kicked by companies that hire them.
Why women, aged people or anyone should be "protected" if they have talent?
The young man in your story was so confident of his talent that wore t-shirt, necklace and sweatpants to present his software. And any smart company will hire him.
Protect some group of people for being fired implies they are inferior than "the others" who maintains they works by creating wealth to their companies and society.
All other things being equal, I would agree with you. I am intimating that, perhaps, all other things are not equal. The guy in the article seems, to me, as though he has a case. I think that the behaviors and statements outlined indicate a hostile work environment. As to the question of the guy in my story, if we follow your logic, that "any smart company will hire him", then we would have to conclude that the majority of the people and organizations that he attempted to approach prior to me are "not smart". I am not so important or well known that I would be very high on the list of your average entrepreneur shopping around his idea. That is why I have to keep an eye on the forum users at places like news.YC, it allows me to potentially contact some bright kids at VERY early stages to see what they are about. I say that so that you realize that this kid tried to go to a large number of places before he was reduced to making desperation pitches to people like me. So I think it is a little idealistic to assume that he would have been "hired", or "invested in", in any case.
You seem to be one of the antidotes to that problem. :) And, if you become successful doing it as well as the demonstrating young man, it becomes foolish for wise investors to ignore such profitable possibilities. But aside from your experience here, didn't Google have a hard time convincing people at first too?
Of course he doesn't want to continue in the environment, but he does want monetary compensation for missing out on the hypothetical job that was just like google only without the "old fuddy-duddy" comments.
The point of the laws as they stand is that companies must foster work environments accepting of people without regard to age race etc. for fear of civil liability if they don't, just like making safe baby toys and proper meat processing.
The disadvantage is that it discourages companies from hiring people in the selected groups in the first place as they have a tendency to sue you on the way out; we just saw an article about firing someone in France, think that only for certain groups (of course you can get sued for that too, but discriminatory hiring practices are much harder to prove to a jury than wrongful termination)
It's interesting which transactions get this treatment; do you get to sue for being denied service at a business because of age, sex, race? do you get to sue the town for not patronizing your business because you are age, sex, race? What about suing investors for the cost of equity capital being too high for companies with CEOs of color? This seems to be an issue more of what's practical to regulate than some overriding moral principle.
This sounds to me rather similar to the (abhorrent) old argument that schools should stay segregated: Why would black students even want to go to a white school where they would have a hard time? Why would they want to continue in that environment? Wouldn't it have been best for the school and the student if schools had been able to continue admitting whomever they wanted for whatever reason?
It is an entirely different story under government run operations, such as your school example. The answer to this, in my opinion, would be not to have the schools run by the government in the first place. This would lead to schools, in those days, that were "white" only and "black" only. But it would have opened the door to the school entrepreneurs who only cared about providing the best education value and to profit from that. And to be really successful in that context would argue against being racist and excluding half of the potential students. Of course, in those days, racism was culturally embedded, but this would not have stopped the "black" entrepreneurs from creating high value schools that would have given students a big advantage down the road, and potentially in other less racist locations.
An interesting note is that racism in a modern culture seems to be inversely proportional to prosperity in that culture. Look at Mississippi and Alabama in the US, the Middle East, etc. It is hard to be innovative and successful when your mind is warped into a racist mode.
I really try not to get into these discussions, but what you are saying is akin to 'let them eat cake'.
If you had black only schools run by black people 'in those days', how well equiped do you think they would have been? Where would the black enterpreneur have gotten capital from to provide standard services in his school?
Now onto the white entreprenuer who does have the capital and cares only about providing the best service to paying customers..how would black students have been able to afford to pay for that school?
There is no such thing as a completely free (or perfect) market , governments exist to ensure that the weak don't get crushed by the strong in the society.
Your relationship between racism and prosperity does not hold ANY water either, many of the more successful businessmen in America in the early 19th century were known for their racist views and indeed some of them belonged to the KKK.
Among the most innovative people in America today, I guarantee you will find many with deep seated prejuidices.
Seriouly, your entire post reeks of intellectual dishonesty or maybe you have not had the time to really think about the issues at hand.
</end rant>
>There is no such thing as a completely free (or perfect) market , governments exist to ensure that the weak don't get crushed by the strong in the society.
Exactly, this is the fundamental flaw of capitalism. Once you have power it is too easy to get more power and no one ever seems to want to share power and the ensuing resources. For now, society needs some redistribution of resources to work and elected, non-corrupt governments are a much better way of evening things out than charity.
My examples were present day examples - so no, the racist ages have not ended, and I would not be surprised if there are some very intelligent very racist people out there.
I agree. A company should be able to hire and fire for whatever reason. Mandating anything else just doesn't work. But it's helpful to know that if you are old, female, jewish, black, gay, or whatever you might not be welcome at particular companies. Thanks for letting us know. We'll go elsewhere. Maybe somewhere with a more relaxed idea of "cultural fit"
This same stupid issue comes up on this board about once a week now (and is beginning to get a little tired).
Will someone please cite the implied maxim "IF (AGE > X) THEN <something> MUST BE LESS"
Anyone who believes that is automatically putting themselves at a disadvantage for many reasons.
OK, ready? Once and for all, people...
WE ARE NOT BASKETBALL PLAYERS!
Hackers do not "lose a step". We often get better with age. I am clearly doing my best work ever right now and it things keep going this way, hell, by the time I'm 60 I'll be f*cking James Gosling or <insert your favorite digi-idol here>, for crying out loud.
The idea that "puzzle-oriented questions that require quick thinking in interviews" favor younger candidates would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.
Where does this kind of thinking come from? One of the many beauties of the hacking community is that this is one of the last true bastions of non-discrimination. I don't care if you're a young, old, black, white, female, gay, republican, left-handed, agnostic, vegan, French cosmonaut. Can you code? Does it run? Does it deliver value? That's all that matters.
And as far as physical attributes are concerned, I challenge anyone here, regardless of age, to a 50 yard dash to the donuts when they arrive.
Got it? Good. Now back to your data.
(Sorry for the abrupt tone, but sometimes I gotta call 'em as I see 'em. Anyway, I've been a little cranky since that last AARP meeting ran into valuable hacking time.)
"Scientists do not know why the brain starts to slow down past a certain age."
SOME scientists don't. Many do. It's called lifestyle.
Lay off the drugs, eat cleanly, stay active, and live right, and your body can easily serve you just as well as you age. Unfortunately, most Americans are counterexamples to this. Aging doesn't cause us to slow down and lose our health, poor living does, at any age. I have friends and relatives in their teens and twenties who can't do a single pull-up, a single push-up, or carry their own luggage throught the airport. Many in their twenties are balding or have gray hair and can barely make it up a flight of stairs. OTOH, I play bridge with some seniors in their nineties who are as sharp as tacks. Still.
Discrimination based on age is stupid and illegal.
And at a time when anyone can publish anything anywhere, it's a good idea to take all health advice on the internet with a grain of salt. For every study you cite, I can probably google another one with the opposite point of view.
Still wanna race me to those donuts?
Or we can webboggle.shackworks.com. I like the 5x5 board. I'll spot you 5 years, er I mean, points.
Hell... I have some of the symptoms in that article, and I'm only 23. I don't think the ability to recall random strangers' names or remember why I walked into a room really affects my coding, though. I would argue that the older I get, the better I get at remembering the things that really matter (big picture stuff, the project I'm working on, etc.) and forgetting the rest.
Also, here's a counterexample, a checkers player who was basically undefeated well into his 60s:
I wonder what the age of the scientist is who published finding. I'm sure he's 20 and makes very very fast decisions ;-)
Edit: Prof Wesnes graduated in 1973, so presumably he's around 60. He's a researcher and CEO of a high-tech company. Should such an old person really be doing research? Should Paul Graham not be thinking about passing his duties on to Paris Hilton?
I believe Google does exactly that, this is one very smart guy however it looks like he is very sensitive and took a little ribbing too personally. Google should have given him a better payout on the way out.
As they should. It's one thing to give puzzles to an inexperienced kid who has yet to prove herself. It's quite another to throw them at a senior candidate whom you're probably recruiting based upon their known experience and skill.
