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Gen Z can\u2019t catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer grads because AI can do the job cheaper, and young workers are routinely slammed for showing up late and refusing to put in overtime for free. Cisco\u2019s president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel isn\u2019t buying it\u2014he\u2019s just handed one of the company\u2019s biggest jobs to a 27-year-old he found hidden in the org chart \u201cfive levels\u201d below him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve given him unlimited tokens because he\u2019s going to refactor code,\u201d Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. \u201cSo I\u2019m like, you can go, you can go nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201chim\u201d is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, or \u201cPaddy,\u201d as Patel affectionately calls him. He joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup Krishnamurthy cofounded in 2023. And despite coming in as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel\u2019s words, \u201cburied away in the organization doing something unstrategic.\u201d<\/p>\n
That changed when Patel dropped into Cisco\u2019s San Francisco office, and the pair got talking. Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco\u2019s legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren\u2019t thinking that way.<\/p>\n
So he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco\u2019s legacy code within 24 months.<\/p>\n
Now, he\u2019s on the hunt for more Paddys: young hires who will \u201cchallenge the system and the status quo,\u201d or, as he puts it, be \u201can energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cisco\u2019s president says Gen Z should be teaching his veterans, not doing data entry\u2014and he\u2019s fine with the tension that causes<\/p>\n
At most companies, only someone with decades of experience under their belt would be trusted with a project this size. Patel thinks that\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Seasoned staff can still come up with new ideas, Patel added. What they can\u2019t do is ask the questions that only someone with no experience would think to ask.<\/p>\n
And getting the two to get along isn\u2019t always smooth. Patel admits that putting a Gen Zer in a room with people who\u2019ve been at Cisco for decades can create friction\u2014but he says that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n
\u201cTension is good,\u201d he said. \u201cI actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas. You don\u2019t want to have friction with people and personalities.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you have to do is establish enough trust with people to say you are going to be expected to create unreasonable goals for yourself,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd so, in order to go out and achieve those unreasonable goals, think outside of the box.\u201d<\/p>\n
And he\u2019s not just pushing senior staff to take notes from twentysomethings. He said that he treats every intern as \u201ckind of a reverse mentor,\u201d and even does talks at colleges to find students who are \u201chungry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
His latest Gen Z bet came out of one of those talks, to 17- and 18-year-old Stanford scholarship students. While a line of students fired questions at him, one, Baya, stood off to the side, just listening. She waited until everyone else had finished before she opened up.<\/p>\n
He told her to email him every month with what she\u2019d learned about AI. It was a test of follow-through: \u201cEveryone can go out and have one good conversation. But are they going to stick with their commitments?\u201d<\/p>\n
She never missed one, landed an internship at Cisco, and redesigned \u201csomething\u201d that experienced staff hadn\u2019t been able to crack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t bring her in so that she can do grunt work and do data entry,\u201d he said. \u201cWe brought her in so that she could actually teach our people how to think completely differently.\u201d Now he wants to recruit her.<\/p>\n
Patel isn\u2019t the only one betting on Gen Z\u2014OpenAI investor Josh Kushner and Will.i.am are hunting for young, hungry talent<\/p>\n
Patel isn\u2019t the only boss who sees Gen Z\u2019s lack of experience as an asset.<\/p>\n
Thrive Capital\u2019s founder Josh Kushner told Fortune he specifically likes to hire people with less than four years of industry experience.<\/p>\n
When he launched the venture capital firm at just 26, he faced pressure to bring in older, more seasoned hires. But, as he put it, \u201canyone who has experience that is talented will never want to work with a 26-year-old.\u201d So, instead, he recruited the \u201csmartest people that we knew who were our ages.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that bet paid off: His firm made early investments in startups worth billions, including OpenAI, which\u00a0is currently raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation.<\/p>\n
These days, Kushner could easily hire industry veterans with glowing r\u00e9sum\u00e9s\u2014but he\u2019d still rather \u201cfind that young, hungry person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alon Chen, founder and CEO of Tastewise\u2014a generative AI platform trusted by PepsiCo, Nestl\u00e9, and Mars\u2014is also actively looking for Gen Zers with zero experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hiring entry-level because they have no boundaries or limitations in how they think about the world,\u201d Chen told Fortune. \u201cThey\u2019re almost like AI natives themselves, having been born and raised in this new realm of opportunities. And I see some of the best ideas coming from the younger generation that have not yet been in the job market.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Will.i.am has reached a similar conclusion. The Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas frontman might be best known for his chart-topping hits, but behind the scenes, he\u2019s a serious investor too. He backed Tesla, OpenAI, and Pinterest before they became household names\u2014and now, he\u2019s betting on Gen Z for his next investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Why? He believes the next big tech breakthroughs will come from young innovators at MIT and Stanford.\u00a0 \u201cThey\u2019re young kids, and they\u2019re native to this,\u201d Will.i.am told Fortune. \u201cSo you want to hunt for that. That\u2019s the only thing I\u2019m focused on.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Patel told Fortune that the trend toward hiring Gen Z will only continue, thanks to AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only way for us to keep accelerating is to make sure we\u2019re surrounded by people with a broad range of experience,\u201d he said. \u201cRoughly one-third of my team is experienced, scaled operators who understand how the Cisco engine works. The second third are systems thinkers from the market who bring the outside-in perspective. And the final third is made of entrepreneurial founders, CEOs, and engineers who are AI-native who operate in founder mode.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEither of these groups by themselves aren\u2019t nearly as potent as when all three work together. It\u2019s what creates magic.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Cisco #letting #27yearold #refactor #legacy #code #unlimited #tokens #nuts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gen Z can\u2019t catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[22450,2418,636,11997,4681,3907,926,580,641,310,5022,8159,16183,23894,317,7978,10325,967],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19448"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}