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Ask HN: Why do big companies rarely hire people with 0 yrs experience as a VP?

5 points by diminium ↗ HN
I've been looking at some job ad's for positions which say "Director" or "Vice President" or some high level management. They always mention they are looking for someone with 10+ years experience,a resume the size of dictionary, and so forth. They never seem to be looking to hire anyone with 0 years experience but with a ton of motivation to try something new. Any idea why?

Companies like this spend billions of dollars to acquire companies with a culture which do the complete opposite of what they do. If they only spent those dollars starting a few divisions and putting a few "start-up" leaders there, they might create something cool. However, that rarely happens. Why?

Starting an "entrepreneurial" division in most big companies is insanely difficult. Why won't they allow that? Dollar for dollar, it would probably be cheaper if they create their own then buying successful startups.

16 comments

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bdfh42
Point made. No business wants to hire someone into that sort of role who does not understand why they would not want to hire someone with 0 years experience.

There is more to it than having ideas.

Hiring someone who has no idea how to do the job would mean waiting months to detect that, firing them and then starting to look all over again. Complete waste of time.

diminium
What does this exactly have to do with what I mentioned above? VC's are willing to put their money and time and energy on people with almost no experience.
b0o
you can't equate hiring a vp with a VC, they're apples and oranges and I'll tell you why.

With a VC, its simpler, if the start-up has a good idea with a good plan to execute, then the risk is only money. If the start-up does well, both of them make money. But if the startup screws up, then you lose your investment, and move and invest in other companies. It's different with hiring a VP. If you're a VP and you do well, you help the company grow. But, if you screw up, you've just ruined your company and its employees' which could potentially affect tens or hundreds of your subordinates' futures AND especially their families, and with some screw ups, you can't even use money to fix it.

If you can't distinguish between those two things, then you're going to be a crappy vp if you ever make it.

mark-r
Reason 1: past success is the best predictor of future success. With no track record you can't be evaluated.

Reason 2: there are certain things that can be only learned by experience. If you have no experience, you haven't learned those things yet.

diminium
Are VC's and Angel Funds stupid for well - funding companies with leaders who have basically fulfill those two reasons?
stonemetal
VCs give money to people in a different position. I can't think of a single start up that went in to an angel round with 20,000 employees.
mark-r
A VC or Angel knows they're taking a risk that you won't be able to handle the job, so they spread their investments over a lot of companies hoping to find that diamond in the rough. Even so they're not going to hand over money to everyone who asks for it, you need to prove yourself to them through some means other than experience. Look at how tough it is to get into YC for example.
imcqueen
i think if you get a job at a large organization you'll quickly understand why VPs and directors are more experienced. ability and motivation aside, no one wants to report to someone less qualified (on paper) than they are. imagine sitting in a meeting with the other VPs. could you be effective? would they take you serious? its probably not a question of ability as much as it is maturity and cultural fit for those companies.
Rottweiler
Ideas are (almost) worthless. Ability to execute is the thing of value. The latter is gained mostly by experience.
tryitnow
I actually think your point is a good one. As for ge experience argument - it's hard to evaluate, so I don't think that's the main reason.

A major reason is simply risk aversion. Years of experience is an indicator (a misleading IMHO) of safety, if the guy you hired who has 10 years of experience screws up, you can explain it away by attributing it to bad luck. If the guy ou hired with little experience screws up then it's his fault and your fault for hiring him.

A lot of it has to do with how we explain success and failure.

[dead] tryitnow
I actually think your point is a good one. As for ge experience argument - it's hard to evaluate, so I don't think that's the main reason.

A major reason is simply risk aversion. Years of experience is an indicator (a misleading IMHO) of safety, if the guy you hired who has 10 years of experience screws up, you can explain it away by attributing it to bad luck. If the guy ou hired with little experience screws up then it's his fault and your fault for hiring him.

A lot of it has to do with how we explain success and failure.

gyardley
I've worked as a director of product management and as a vice president of product management, but I do have close to a decade of experience.

These positions are only partially about creativity or being entrepreneurial, even at startups. In a high-functioning organization, creativity and entrepreneurship comes from the organization as a whole - it's the job of every employee.

Mostly, these positions are about people management - building a team of great people and getting the best out of the team as a whole. This is really hard, and it takes a lot of practice. I've certainly cocked it up more than once.

Since people management is something that you learn by doing, it makes sense to hire someone who's both done the job of the type of employee they'll be managing and has a track record of managing the type of employee they'll be managing. Bringing in someone inexperienced is too much of a risk - if you fail, it's not just you that performs poorly, it's your entire team.

You simply can't relate this situation to a VC's (or more likely, an angel's) willingness to put a small amount of money on an inexperienced founder - the two situations are very different. A VC is in the business of risk - he has a large portfolio and expects most of his investments to fail. A CEO is in charge of one and only one company, and the VPs he hires are all in charge of critical functions. Often, he can't afford to have any of them fail.

diminium
How do you explain Virgin or even, well, Pixar?

Why does it matter if a division fails? It's only one part of many as if you have many divisions doing the same thing trying competing for the same prize, with the winning division getting it, what's wrong with that? Isn't that how Apple made it to the top?

I don't get this argument. Why not just split the division or create two and have them fight it out to create the better product? Kind of like the Mac, Lisa, and Apple II team worked?

gyardley
I don't know anything about Virgin or Pixar, so I don't and won't explain them at all. For that matter, I don't know anything about the Mac, Lisa, and Apple II team. I have heard that Apple will create ten prototypes from scratch before picking one, but this seems a little different from having ten different divisions doing the exact same thing. I would be surprised if the ten different prototypes were made by ten different VPs, but there's a lot I don't know about Apple.

It matters a great deal if a division fails precisely because most companies only have one of them. If the company had two, certainly one could fail - but often companies don't have the resources for two. Splitting the division into two equal parts often isn't practical - sometimes it takes five people to complete a job and the company only has money for five salaries. And for most functional divisions - human resources, marketing, product management, finance, etc. - I really don't understand how the company could have two parallel organizations operating simultaneously, even if they had the resources, without causing damage to and confusion in the company.

I get that you'd like things to work differently - but I can only tell you how they work currently, at every company I've ever been a part of. If you can persuade a company to hire you as the vice president of something without lengthy experience, that's terrific, and I wish you much success. But you asked why companies don't generally do this, and I've told you.

diminium
So basically, what your saying is most companies don't want to split even if they can? What's wrong with having two people work one division while the other three work the other? What do you think is preventing that from happening?

Yes, some companies really do split the functional divisions of HR, marketing, product management, finance, etc. They are rare but they are quite successful otherwise I wouldn't be asking this question to figure out why more companies don't do the same?

brd
Basically you're asking why someone can bare the responsibility of starting a startup but not manage an existing organization.

A startup is basically a entity catapulting itself into the unknown with the goal of eventually creating a viable business. With that in mind, it becomes more reasonable to hire someone with little experience but lots of motivation.

Coming into a corporation is an entirely different beast. There are LOTS of constraints that are built into the environment already and you must learn to identify and operate within those constraints. This ability to known boundaries, respect them, and push them occasionally is a key skill of a good executive. This same ability is hard for an inexperienced person to even fathom. For instance, a good executive knows when to make the politically correct move even though its more painful operationally but an inexperienced person may not even realize they are making a political move.

Consider a startup developer vs. a enterprise developer. A startup developer essentially starts from scratch and builds what they want. An enterprise developer must know the existing environment, know the entrenched technologies, know the involved parties, get the process owners to agree on decisions, and then make informed decisions on how to build out their requirements based on all these factors.

In startup circumstances naivety can be an asset, in the enterprise world naivety isn't even an acceptable excuse.

note: I am not trying to trivialize starting from scratch. Building a startup from scratch is a highly commendable skill set in and of itself, its just not relevant to the argument framed by the OP.