alt Hacker News> Seniority here also unfortunately often correlates with age. The best startup employee will usually be someone early in their career who doesn’t have as many responsibilities or as much need for consistency due to having more dependents. They may have fewer immediate cash flow constraints, fewer “adult responsibilities.” Kids need braces and karate classes, and if Mom is doing 996 at a ten-person company paying her peanuts, offering a crappy health care plan, promising an epic payout ten years from now, that’s a real mismatch. Startups are an extreme sport, and generally inadvisable for anybody who’s not in a safe position to speculate on their career for several years.
Oooof. Following this paragraph is a recipe for age and family status discrimination lawsuits. (A number of states prohibit both, and federal law prohibits the former above 40). Quite possibly sex discrimination lawsuits as well if a court quite plausibly concludes that someone who makes decisions this way will also be averse from hiring women of childbearing age or life stage.
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The paragraph was supposed to be descriptive of what one sees in the field, not prescriptive of what managers should do. I can see that it doesn't obviously read that way. Will edit, thank you for the feedback.
It's also completely incorrect. The average age of startup founders is 45, many of the best engineers in the market right now are older Millennials and GenX because they grew up in a time when you could still gain legible access to every aspect of computing in a home setting with PCs, which gave them an exceptional fundamentals basis which allows them to have a broader scope than specialists.
As someone who spent almost my entire career, until fairly recently, in startups, I would not consider age in any way a determining factor /especially/ for early hires. You need "adults in the room", because they will help to establish the bar for the remainder of the team as you grow, act as technical leads, and have a very broad scope of responsibility. The more experienced and capable they are, the better the quality of your future hires and the less technical debt you incur in the process of getting to product-market fit and growing to profitability/critical mass.
You should not (legally) have an age bias at all, but if you were going to apply one, the reverse bias is more rational.
Also, anecdotally false. The highest performers were often late 30s-55 yo at both startups I've worked (acquired and 'unicorn'). The young had tons of energy, but their output didn't meet any engineering rigor for working in a hardware startup. Maybe the mobile/web guys have a different story. But here in hardware, firmware, electrical engineering "The Best" had families, children, dogs, homes, heli-ski'd, bicycled from Mill Valley to SF, and were absolutely surgical with their work.
These people were exceptional and I would easily call them The Best any day.