But at some point that will stop being true, so now more than ever I think it's important to be trying to build real, sustainable businesses.
At some point, all of the available in state talent is going to be employed. Now you have to look outside. Much of your senior talent are not going to be able to up and move. There's a big difference between working insane startup worloads with a company in your home town vice doing the same AND doing it a new city after having moved your family across the country.
And suddenly a lot of people can't. The financial crisis has toughened up immigration everywhere.
In addition to people starting their own thing, I've also noticed that a number of people are trying to focus a bit more on the work / life balance. Trying to get out more and enjoy nature/work out/etc. instead of working 20 hours a day. And, in some ways, this is impacting their decisions between startups and large companies.
Reading that sentence alone, and then thinking about how much big corporate CEO's are paid, and banksters and Wall Street types, hedge fund managers, etc. and as a software engineer I tell ya my heart just bleeds for them. What a horrible tragedy, having salaries for talent go up. So irrational! :) Heck, at least the engineers and designers are actually building something, and adding to society, which is more than many of those other types can say.
It's more "can this person commit in the same way that at unattached 25 year old could commit?".
Typically that answer is "no" but it's not fair to make that assumption for them and it is quite honestly a stupid assumption to make.
Instead of assuming, you should find out first if that's the case, and secondly why.
In my case, it's not a lack of ability but a refactoring of my priorities around my family and young children.
Maybe there are some allowances that can be made. If the person is really the best fit, then you should do whatever is reasonable to get them. You won't even get that far in the discussion if you stereotype based on age.
There are tactful and entirely legal ways to ask those questions without actually asking them:
i.e. "We have a pretty intense timeline right now. Are you able to put in X hours a day for the next X months?"
Honestly, I tend to make some bad assumptions as well. In my past experience, that type of "intensity" isn't because of trying to rush to market or because of pressure from external forces so much as poor planning internally. I have some pretty vivid memories of one company where the reason for the long hours were solely based on bad management decisions around over-catering to customers. Things like "Sure we can have that done in a week" combined with "We don't have time to do proper testing" which resulted in late nights massaging broken data back into the database or performing releases only to realize 2 hours into the process (don't ask why it took 2 hours), that the build was bad.
I've learned to watch for those signs and ask questions up front to suss that information from potential employers.
I think it's generally accepted that, regardless of age, after 16 hours of non-stop work people make stupid mistakes. I like to say "If it has to be done in 10 minutes, can we spend 20 minutes making sure we do it right?" If you can't spare an additional 10 minutes for even a tiny amount of discovery, that's an antipattern.
The current U.S. government's "tax the rich" attitude can't be helping small business, either. It just adds to the uncertainty.
Some have been running for cover, but some of us are running against the crowd.
