

Why Ageism in Startups is BS - cyborg
http://sweaxis.org/stats/age?src=hn1

======
lkrubner
There have been a lot of studies and surveys done regarding the peak age of
entrepreneurship. Very few of those studies support the idea that youth is a
benefit to starting a business.

I'll post a few quotes and links here:

"In 2008, I led a research team in exploring the backgrounds of 652 U.S.-born
chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 successful
engineering and technology companies established from 1995 to 2005. These were
companies with real revenue -- not just the start-ups founded by the college
dropouts that some venture capitalists like to fund. We learned that the
average and median age of successful founders was 39. Twice as many founders
were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And there were twice as many over
60 as under 20." [http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-
ca...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-case-for-old-
entrepreneurs/2011/12/02/gIQAulJ3KO_story.html)

"It does not take but one minute to look around the world and prove any thesis
of a peak tech founder age incorrect. There are countless entrepreneurs over
the age of 30, including Reid Hoffman (age 35 in 2002), Evan Williams of
Twitter (age 35 in 2007), Mark Pincus of Zynga (age 41 in 2007), Arianna
Huffington of the Huffington Post (age 54 in 2005), among many others."
<http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/28/peak-age-entrepreneurship/>

"“It turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of
entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55-64 age group. The 20-34 age
bracket, meanwhile, which we usually identify with swashbuckling and risk-
taking youth (think Facebook and Google), has the lowest rate.” Ecopreneurist
(<http://s.tt/12HYH)> [http://ecopreneurist.com/2009/09/21/the-average-age-of-
an-en...](http://ecopreneurist.com/2009/09/21/the-average-age-of-an-
entrepreneur-is-older-than-you-might-think/)

Aside from the quotes, I would also appeal to your own experience. If you are
over the age of 25, then ask yourself, have you learned anything useful over
the last 5 years? Have you learned important things about, say for instance,
software, money, managing your time, communicating with people who are
different from you, politics, self-discipline, the law, or perhaps a problem
domain that you find exciting? If you haven't learned anything useful in the
last 5 years, I would say you are doing something very wrong with your life.
If you have learned something useful in the last 5 years, doesn't that suggest
you have some new skills that will help you when you launch your business?

~~~
dodo53
I think a huge factor is attitude to risk. The younger entrepreneurs are in
the no-ties shoot-for-the-sky phase. A larger proportion of people in the
30-40 range will be becoming more risk averse as they need to have financial
stability to pay mortgages/support kids/spouses or whatever. But people tend
to become more able to take financial risk as they get past young-kids stage,
and develop enough of a savings cushion to go off on their own for a bit.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
I think risk might be the opposite. Very young people might have no risk...
unless they don't want to move back in with their parents.

But older people might have the least risk if their kids are grown and don't
need help, their own parents gone, and they have enough money saved not to
worry about failing.

Thus over 50 could have _less_ risk than 25 and under.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Anecdotally, many of the older people I know starting businesses have their
kids moved out, and either a spouse whose income is more than enough for both
of them or enough savings to retire. That might be why so many people in the
55-64 age group are starting businesses.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
Indeed, the first startup I worked for was founded by a Ph.D who's wife was a
working M.D.

------
PaulHoule
I don't see the connection between the title and the graph.

I know the adjective "cowboy" was used for some programmers in the early
1970's. BASIC, a dynamically typed language, was wildly popular for
microcomputers in the 1980's. There were schema-free databases for IBM
mainframes in the 70's too. For that matter, LISP was a dynamically typed
language back in 1958.

Although "scrum", "extreme programming", "ruby" and things like that are new,
all of the real fighting points in software engineering practice have been
battlegrounds since the 1970's if not sooner.

As someone who did his first contract gig in 1987, I can say that all of those
rules are conditional -- I can pound out certain kinds of projects quickly
with languages like PHP and there are other ones where only C++ will do.
Premature optimization is a mistake, but its also a mistake to build a system
on an architecture that is doomed to forever be slow, unscalable and (worst of
all) high latency.

~~~
cyborg
"I don't see the connection between the title and the graph."

My thought was that startups target younger devs as they believe that they'll
be more 'liberal' engineers. I think the graph shows that to be false.

edit: well I don't think the graph _shows_ anything - but it suggests that age
and liberalism are not correlated. Many people have suggested that the survey
is flawed - and that Yegge's original post is biased against conservatives.

~~~
blindhippo
The whole thing is wonky - there is no software "liberalism" vs
"conservatism".

I always assumed startups target younger devs because they generally fit
startup culture more: cheap, work horses, full of energy, willing to take on
risk.

------
jasonkester
The survey behind this reminds me a lot of those internet "what's your
political alignment" polls that go around from time, where you always end up
discovering that you're a Libertarian.

Take a quick spin through the questions and look at how they're worded. It's
no surprise that the results point to "Software Liberal". I don't doubt that
you could spend a few minutes rewriting the quiz in such a way that the
overwhelming majority of participants ends up on the other end of the scale.

~~~
Tooluka
Point is not the absolute "liberalism" value but that relative values are the
same through all ages. And if you'll reword the quiz than picture will be the
same - age is irrelevant (for this topic).

~~~
jasonkester
But that's not what it shows. It just shows that people of all ages give
similar answers to a set of questions designed specifically to have only one
answer.

Similarly, if I gave a quiz with the question "I don't think it's right to run
over kittens with my car. Strongly Agree ... Strongly Disagree", then gave
that quiz to a broad spectrum of people across all age groups, you'd suddenly
find that the overwhelming majority of them were all "cat people".

But if you simply asked whether they liked cats better or dogs better, you'd
get a more accurate and less skewed view on the situation.

------
agscala
Why does "Software Liberalism" = "Startups"?

~~~
cyborg
My thought is that startups tend to target 'liberal' developers so they can
iterate fast and innovate rapidly. It's the 'fuck it ship it' kinda attitude.

~~~
slantyyz
And what does that have to do with ageism?

The thing that keeps a 40-something like me from wanting to be in an SV type
of startups relate more to priorities. I've been through the grind from the
first bubble, and would rather not go through it again.

I'm talking about:

* Giving up salary for equity/options/signing bonuses. No thanks.

* Working stupid long hours that bring my effective hourly rate down to a fast-food restaurant manager's hourly rate. Because of this, I'd probably be flagged as someone who has "no passion" for what I do. No, I just like a balanced life.

* Working in a "frat house" environment. I've been there and had fun in those environments, but I'm past it, and prefer a more diverse workplace.

* Working in a VC-funded company - at least in my past experience - usually means the focus shifts from ramping up quickly vs. building value and/or a solid business model

~~~
dllthomas
If you _don't_ want to be in a startup, fine, that's not ageism. The problem
is if you're turned away because of your age if you _do_. There's a perception
that older folks are going to be "stodgy", overly concerned with outdated
engineering principles and less with cool new features, and that startups need
the latter. This attribute seems to map reasonably well onto Yegge's
conservative/liberal framework, and to the degree that it does (and the degree
to which the survey is representative) this seems to not be the case
empirically.

It doesn't preclude the possibility, of course, that there may be other
reasons someone might not be a good fit that age may predict.

~~~
slantyyz
Having been part of that hiring process during the first bubble, we'd drop a
lot of older, skilled candidates for "cultural fit", which was related to the
exact same things as to why I wouldn't really want to be in a SV startup at my
current age.

* Candidate asks about overtime? Probably won't work late with us during crunches.

* Candidate won't take equity in lieu of a pay cut? Doesn't get at all what our mission is.

etc. etc.

------
shaggyfrog
This meme of grafting political meanings to software development practices
needs to get put down.

...or should I borrow another bad meme, and say it should be "considered
harmful"?

