Following on from ‘Microsoft is Dead‘, I’ve just read another long essay in which Paul Graham, a computer programmer, author and venture capitalist, muses on the potential of the young, how large (technology - in his concept) companies should really be buying small startups instead of trying to hire all the good people direcly as well as the quandry of whether to stay in school or start your own business. Graham’s basic thought is that ‘the youth of today’ have immense power because we can take all the risks in the world and largely, come out unscathed from them. We can create our own companies and see how they almost value themselves within the marketplace rather than having to rely on a corporate master for a dollarEuro value on a paycheck. He acknowledges the risk that people take when considering leaving college, grad school or business school but also counsels that it may be the best decision one can make. It’s all a question of timing and of your own and your colleagues’ personal skill.
Here are some quotes, which I’ve shuffled around in order and context to make work here. The essay is worth reading in full. The link is below.
Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high….The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean…. I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds.
Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that’s not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks… Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won’t even try.
What’s an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company.
The market is a lot more discerning than any employer. And it is completely non-discriminatory. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you’re 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. If you’re really productive, why not make employers pay market rate for you? Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, when you could start a startup and make them buy it to get you?
-from Hiring is Obsolete by Paul Graham
Hmm. Am I being silly, is Firefox being silly, or is the link broken? A shame; it sounds like an interesting essay. I wonder, do you think it’s applicable to industries that aren’t software or internet oriented?
You weren’t wrong. I’d put in one quote mark too many. TINY punctuation errors makes huge differences in HTML. What a hassle!
And yes, I do think the ideas are applicable to areas outside of TECH. As I was reading the article I kept on thinking of what I’d be doing in the next couple of years, including next year. I don’t think entrepreneurship has to be solely for the geeks and the engineers of the world: even though they’re keeping the spotlight at the moment because they’re building the technologies, somebody has to have the ideas and the overarching vision. I don’t think that can only be techies, I think his idea can move to media, to science, to retailing and farming: most areas really! I don’t think ‘we’ should be limited to thinking we can’t do almost anything at all, because really, we can!