Simplicity in the Valley

I'm a little late on this one, but it's not an issue that will resolve itself in a few weeks. Via an SFGate article by Andrew S. Ross, the words of Mark Zuckerberg:

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important."

There's some truth to this, I suppose, if you define "family" as spouse-and-children and "simpler lives" as work-is-all. And I'm not the first to point out the strange juxtaposition of work at a company that claims to be about relationships as the implied "what's important" in this statement, not the relationships themselves. (Not to mention a twenty-something weighing in on life from a very specific, limited vantage point, however nice it may be.)

But the rest of the article focuses on the need for experienced older workers to downplay that experience in order to get a foothold in what's often portrayed as an employee's job market. Part of what I liked so much about moving down to Silicon Valley from San Francisco was the presence of children and elderly people, of the sense of a life greater than that of your mid-twenties, but whether that is replicated on campuses valley-wide is another question. This is an industry town, and the industry is young, but it will age--and I'm very curious to see whether it will happen gracefully.