[TheCondor]

Is she a badass engineer or is she a sage? I don't mean it to be offensive but I've worked with oldtymers that wanted to coach more than actually do. They have tremendous knowledge and experience but if they're advisors or extra managers, they aren't building; some companies need and can afford that and value it, a lot of startup type places see that as an extra cost.

Our industry has these polar ethos that are pretty deep: one group sees old product that has stood the test of time as an indicator of quality. Like "UNIX has been around over 40 years, it clearly did some things right." The other, and it's insanely popular right now, thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd, "vim doesn't even use the newest C standards features.." Some times you have to believe that you're doing something different and everybody did it wrong before and that's while you'll succeed this time, that's how you take the risk and ignore the downsides. being old can be a detriment to that belief.

[JoeAltmaier]

To evaluate whether age can be used as a descriminator for those attitudes and behaviors, I suggest you substitute "woman" or "black" and see how that reads.

There are young people who will only use the tools they are comfortable with. Ageism is the mistaken belief that this is somehow associated with your most recent birthday, akin to astrology.

[TheCondor]

I'm not endorsing or accepting discrimination, I simply offered up a meek rationalization as I see it.

Honestly, if you find and older person that wants to work at a startup, there is a good chance that they could be doing a few things right to have that energy and drive. You want to know how they live and what they do.

[pjc50]

Ahistoricity is one of the things I find infuriating about this profession. Because everyone's an autodidact. I don't mind the argument that "everyone did it wrong before" because that's sometimes true, or something underlying is really different, but it needs to come with some actual awareness of what constraints "before" was operating under, and what was and was not achieved.