About our minimum staff age
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 2:41 pm
As you guys know we don't hire children or teens to be on staff any more. Our minimum age to become staff is 20. That isn't to say we haven't made exceptions to this rule because we have but strictly speaking we prefer the staff we hire to be 20 years old or older.
Now this is ageism plain and simple. But I have some very logical reasons for instituting this policy which I'm going to outline below.
Children and teens do not have many responsibilities in life compared to adults. They don't have bills, they don't have a mortgage, they don't have kids of their own, they don't have a job or a family to support. They usually only have two responsibilities, household chores and school. This means that for many of them becoming a Moderator on Minecraft is a very big deal because it's for some of them their first taste of control over other people.
This has two negative side effects, the first is that it can (not always but can) create a hostile environment where they throw their weight around and act very poorly to users. We have had to dismiss staff members for either directly threatening users or abusing their staff privileges to the detriment of our players in the past.
The other negative side effect is that when you dismiss these people from a staff position they get seriously pissed and will try to get revenge. This can manifest itself in a few ways, trying to convince other staff members to quit the server, trying to get players and other staff members to join another server, trying to hack the server or abuse privileges they still have access to, trolling the server either on the Forums, IRC or in-game using other peoples accounts. We've seen all of these things occur from past members of staff who were dismissed from their positions and all of them were done by individuals under 18 years old.
Now lets contrast this with our adult staff members. We have never had one of our adult staff members abuse their abilities, we have never had to forcibly remove an adult staff member for misconduct and we have never had a dismissed adult staff member cause trouble for us after their dismissal.
We have had many adult staff members who have quit or been removed but never due to them abusing any of the abilities we give to them, it is almost always due to inactivity. Just thinking in my head now we've probably had about 8 adult staff members who have later left or been demoted and not one of them has ever caused us issues once that decision was made.
Now why is this, why is it that the adults can take a clean break and not want to get back at us for them being removed from staff? It's because they have other things going on. Children, Jobs, College, University, Bills (my god, lots of bills). For them our little server is but a blip on their radar and nothing to get so invested in. It doesn't matter because it's insignificant in their lives.
So now you can see my reasoning for having this policy. And I know that some of you are probably reading this and thinking "But I'm so mature for my age!" and I'm sure you are but so were all the previous staff we had including the teenagers.
They are always very mature when things are going great, but as soon as things aren't going great and their conduct is being questioned or they get demoted that is when their attitude changes and we get stuck handling the fallout for months later. For us it isn't worth the hassle.
But I want to make it clear simply being 20+ doesn't mean you're going to get staff. That is just one in a long list of requirements. And as I said previously we have made some exceptions to this hiring policy when we feel someone is outstanding. But if there is two individuals with the same skills and one is 15 and the other is 20+ we will side with the higher age and I'm sorry if that makes you angry at us but we'd be stupid not to learn from our past mistakes.
Thanks for reading and understanding.
Now this is ageism plain and simple. But I have some very logical reasons for instituting this policy which I'm going to outline below.
Children and teens do not have many responsibilities in life compared to adults. They don't have bills, they don't have a mortgage, they don't have kids of their own, they don't have a job or a family to support. They usually only have two responsibilities, household chores and school. This means that for many of them becoming a Moderator on Minecraft is a very big deal because it's for some of them their first taste of control over other people.
This has two negative side effects, the first is that it can (not always but can) create a hostile environment where they throw their weight around and act very poorly to users. We have had to dismiss staff members for either directly threatening users or abusing their staff privileges to the detriment of our players in the past.
The other negative side effect is that when you dismiss these people from a staff position they get seriously pissed and will try to get revenge. This can manifest itself in a few ways, trying to convince other staff members to quit the server, trying to get players and other staff members to join another server, trying to hack the server or abuse privileges they still have access to, trolling the server either on the Forums, IRC or in-game using other peoples accounts. We've seen all of these things occur from past members of staff who were dismissed from their positions and all of them were done by individuals under 18 years old.
Now lets contrast this with our adult staff members. We have never had one of our adult staff members abuse their abilities, we have never had to forcibly remove an adult staff member for misconduct and we have never had a dismissed adult staff member cause trouble for us after their dismissal.
We have had many adult staff members who have quit or been removed but never due to them abusing any of the abilities we give to them, it is almost always due to inactivity. Just thinking in my head now we've probably had about 8 adult staff members who have later left or been demoted and not one of them has ever caused us issues once that decision was made.
Now why is this, why is it that the adults can take a clean break and not want to get back at us for them being removed from staff? It's because they have other things going on. Children, Jobs, College, University, Bills (my god, lots of bills). For them our little server is but a blip on their radar and nothing to get so invested in. It doesn't matter because it's insignificant in their lives.
So now you can see my reasoning for having this policy. And I know that some of you are probably reading this and thinking "But I'm so mature for my age!" and I'm sure you are but so were all the previous staff we had including the teenagers.
They are always very mature when things are going great, but as soon as things aren't going great and their conduct is being questioned or they get demoted that is when their attitude changes and we get stuck handling the fallout for months later. For us it isn't worth the hassle.
But I want to make it clear simply being 20+ doesn't mean you're going to get staff. That is just one in a long list of requirements. And as I said previously we have made some exceptions to this hiring policy when we feel someone is outstanding. But if there is two individuals with the same skills and one is 15 and the other is 20+ we will side with the higher age and I'm sorry if that makes you angry at us but we'd be stupid not to learn from our past mistakes.
Thanks for reading and understanding.
*high five*