When Youth Overtakes Experience
I can think of only two traditional industries where youth is seen as a challenge to experience – that of footballers and porn stars. Now depending on your inclination, you could even argue the merits of that point. What is more difficult to argue are the virtues of the young blood born into the digital age versus those who have moved themselves into the space in the last 15 years.
It’s a well known phenomenon that our children are far more computer literate than ourselves. But this is a different story. What we are talking about here is the speed of change and how it can make developer in their thirties redundant if he or she doesn’t constantly retrain and obsessively hang onto the cutting edge. How “doing the syllabus” at college immediately makes you “so last year”.
The digital industry evolves like Darwinism on fast forward. In the natural order of a skilled profession, as you grow older, an increase in salary will tend to follow. You would naturally expect to pay a 35 year old more than a 20 year old. Anyway, aren’t 20 year olds supposed to be poor? 35 year olds, meanwhile, need to pay for all the responsibilities that they inherit with the passing years. But as an employer in the digital game you can have your cake and eat it. You can pay your 20 year old developer half of what you pay his older counterpart and get a better job done, because the younger has learned the most up to date way of doing things. It doesn’t necessarily mean the older developer is doing it wrong, but certainly not as efficiently as the latest technology allows it to be done.
We met with a young agency last week that was a breath of fresh air. As one of its owners admitted to us, he was a lot younger than he looked. I put him at about 26 yet his vision, passion and strategic grasp of the digital industry, as an agency head, bore a beguiling maturity. He talked of the culture within his company, or “family” as he sometimes referred to it. He spoke genuinely of how he keeps his staff feeling inclusive in the process of growing the business. He was proud that his young employees weren’t “f***** up by the traditional agency model” and the old way of doing things. His approach to technical development was both flexible and commercially sound. To any sage old agency head reading this he would be dismissed as an upstart who will sink when issues of scale and market downturn afflict him, as they inevitably do. But this was a lot more than just bean bags, flexi-hours and table football for the staff. The attitude and clarity of purpose that he represents is both a challenge and catalyst to the old order playing in the digital space as well as a trail blazer for those looking to try and keep up.
In the same vein, I was asked today if I knew of any good CTO’s for a new digital based company. Thinking about it for a second, I said no, I don’t know any good CTO’s. Thinking about it for another second I started questioning out loud what a CTO looks like these days. Answering my own question I offered that a CTO in the digital age has two qualities, one tangible and one intangible. The first, the tangible one, is youth. Now when I say youth I mean he probably doesn’t look like the traditional image of a CTO. In my mind a typical CTO is in his (yes, his) fifties. He wears a fatigued suit and as the pastures of retirement loom, so he develops ever increasing qualities of intransigence. The second quality of the new CTO, the intangible one, is the ability to admit not knowing the answer to every technical question put to them. After all, in a world that changes quicker than costumes at a Girls Aloud concert, how can any one person possibly hope to know it all? In this new age, admitting the need to investigate, understand and sometimes even create the right answer, should be a badge of honour. It should be best practise. Seeking guidance and fostering collaboration is the new paradigm that the progressives in the industry should welcome not fear.
A number of stories have reached my ears recently of some of the leading purist digital agencies employing restrictive work practises reminiscent of their I.T. forebear’s decades ago. Namely ruthlessly enforced hours, monitored break times, credit taken by senior people for junior people’s work. Apparently the honour of working for some of these big names is reason enough to prostrate oneself at their altars. I was stunned to hear these stories reappear when I thought they had died and been buried with the advent of the new media company and all of their bean bags. If they were dead, Messrs Bezos, Page, Brin & Wozniak would be flipping in their cash lined graves were they to hear of such nonsense.
So if it is inevitable that a footballer will eventually have to give way to greater speed and agility; if it is welcome that a porn star will ultimately hand over the handcuffs to the pert and nubile; shouldn’t we be listening and promoting to the top table the youth in our industry? At the end of the day without them, we’d still be looking for the “on” button.
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