Makes me wonder if news agency workers just pull stuff out of their behinds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18213942
The only thing particularly interesting about the super young founder myth, is just how drastically off the mark it is. The very few outliers are just that.
[0] a big list of founder ages for prominent tech companies
Unless, of course, you wouldn't want people to know that! (:
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180208022213/https://www.inc.c...
The only interesting part of the entire article is Peter Thiel railing against the fact that startup founders are getting older, mostly because Thiel seems to be an opportunist who wants fresh meat to exploit. Someone who has been around the block a couple of times might be thrilled by the idea of Thiel investing in them, but they're going to be more cautious because they've already got the bumps, bruises, and callouses of being in the industry.
The reason that so many founders were so young a couple decades ago is precisely because they were at an age where they could imagine online services at a time when even the act of purchasing a domain was seen to be a weird new thing. So they got rich off of building the infrastructure and services of the modern web. It was easier from a market standpoint, even if it was harder technically because they had to help invent or fund a lot of the things that ultimately became the web we know today.
It's like complaining that nobody since Newton or Einstein has come up with new universal laws and ignoring the fact that it's harder to just observe new things and report on them than it used to be. It's not enough to witness an apple falling from a tree anymore, now you have to build an LHC and smash exotic particles together.
Coincidentally, it's what the "young guns" who are web 3.0 proponents are missing: they didn't experience the web BEFORE there was a web 2.0, and they assume that it is the way it is today because of some nefarious plot. They sit there on their pile of shitcoins howling in the wind of a better tomorrow without recognizing that web centralization was a feature, not a bug. Nobody wants Usenet anymore. For the unwashed masses, it's a dystopia. Worse, they put the cart before the horse when they create tokens and then try to come up with ways for these things to actually be useful. They want to get rich from being the idea guy.
This is a nice pithy way of putting it.
With respect to engineers the opposite is true. I've heard at, many but not all, companies I've worked for obvious biases for age. There's a borderline obsession with youthfulness, at times, in engineering that is disturbing. Usually the form these conversations take is, "this candidate has too much experience for Senior". Let's be real, Senior is the first tenured level at many companies. Nobody has too much experience for Senior, especially thrown on top of the fact that levels mean nothing across companies. It's a better signal for what pay and benefits a prospective employee may desire or be comfortable with.
I don't think this type of remark shows age bias. I think it relates to what you remark on later on in your post: pay and benefits. Basically, "this candidate has too much experience for Senior" is a euphemism for "this candidate's past experience indicates that they will want more pay and benefits than we are willing to give them".
Remove it. Oh and be sure to flag anyone pointing out this fact again, because you're not getting enough attention on Reddit.
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paywalls%20by:dang&dateRange=a...
