I've been mulling a thought recently, the company I work is internally looking for people with fresh ideas and that can execute them. I have to be honest, though, there aren't a lot of people where I work that can do that. I don't feel the creative vibe or the fire to get something done. Upper management is preaching that we need more "creative people" that we need to make more "innovative products" and etc etc. Their ideals and the reality of the working environment speak is a world of difference.
I've been reading a lot about start up culture and the most important thing is to hire people that creates the right culture that sets the course of a company, the attitude of people and the things they can do and think about. At one point, when you start hiring and working with mediocre people, the cultural assets of a company is diluted causing trouble for the future. Things that can't be quantified with numbers are often hard to measure, but one does feel it.
The one thing I've realized, recently is how adverse older people are to new ideas, not that they are against them but being able to come up with new ideas or being able to accept them. Once they get used to doing things a certain way, it's all they know. The worst thing for young people is to be infected with that way of thinking. In hierarchical cultures (both social and working) I think this is sort of an infectious poison and the people that end up coming up with and executing revolutionizing ideas are people that aren't cast from the usual social mold.
I've had the some interesting opportunities to talk with HR people within the company to find that the average age of the company is starting to rise quickly, it's probably the result of the Japanese "baby boomers" getting older. In some departments, the average age is hitting close to the 40 year old mark. When you have so many old people at the top, I think it is hard for young people to find other young people with similar ideas to work with. The other thing is social politics and when you are around people with more authority than you, it becomes harder to do your own thing. Which brings me back to the fast paced change I've been seeing in the software industry recently, fueled by youthful people going their own way and creating startups. I am an avid reader of what the people at Y Combinator have been doing and the programming languages they've been using. Most of these guys that build web applications are young, using new languages and software platforms that large corporations have not even come to touching on a large scale. In the programming world, you can pretty much learn a lot about the culture of the company by the programming languages they use, thus looking at job postings is an interesting way of learning about your competitors.
Many of the biggest corporations now have been started up by young people at one point and the question is if the company culture ages well with passing time. The companies that are hot, are generally the relatively young ones, the ones like Facebook, Google, and Twitter as "hot," and we hardly think of companies like Microsoft, Oracle or IBM in the same way.
I've been working for older people for too long with their own ideas for too long and I think it's time for me to cut and move on. What they think isn't the end all and be all, but there are things that you can learn from them. It's just that you have to be good at seeing through some of their out dated thoughts. It's a tricky position to be in politically as a young person, but I've come to appreciate the need to become politically adept in dealing with people.
I've also been watching a lot of youtube recently and have been really amazed with some of the quality work that is being put out there by young people interested in music and video editing. It is a place where hardly older people create good content for. I miss that vibe and I realize more and more that it's time for me to get out of where I work.
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