[volgo]

I think there's a little bit of confirmation bias mixed with a bit of jealousy toward younger developers.

The fact is, technology doesn't really matter that much to the success of a business. Business sense, ability to spot what's next, and a fair bit of risk taking attitude are what matters. Older engineers don't fare better than younger engineers in starting a business not because they're worse at engineering, but that after a certain point engineering skills simply don't matter.

SAP, Adobe, IBM, all have terrible engineering culture, but rake in money. Facebook started with janky PHP. There are only rare instances where the technology itself was the differentiator in business. Maybe if you're working on advanced AI or weapon design or something

[sharemywin]

I think the point was there aren't a lot of young developers/entrepreneurs working on how to make the property casualty preferred vendor relationships work better. Because that type of business would take years of time in that industry to both understand the problems and make the contacts.

[tibbetts]

Weapon design is all about government contracts, which generally require experience. Even Iron Man was using his dad’s existing corporate vehicle.

Advanced AI usually depends on finding a business model, which requires experience. And places like Deep Mind were started by researchers who had been at it a few decades.

[TeMPOraL]

I have the feeling weapons design & manufacturing looks the way it looks because the advanced countries aren't really fighting and expecting to fight any serious war with each other. This makes it safe for the contractors to suck excessive amounts of money from the government while delivering very little, and for the whole endeavour to become one big political battlefield.

War was always the thing that connected humanity to physical reality - 2+2 may very well be 10000 on the procurement document, but it'd better equal 4 when you're trying to aim your cannons at the invading forces. With no war, effectiveness (and thus good engineering) is no longer a strong criterion for success of a weapon design.