[kodah]

With respect to founders, there were a lot of well-known founders (read: founders that found success) that were quite young - as the article points out. In my experience, most founders are in their 40's. I've always written this off because it takes a lot of connections and knowledge to build a successful company. Even navigating the disruptor field takes some life experience, patience, and awareness. I think young founders tend to succeed in the disruption space and the list of things to be disrupted easily shrinks with every giving year. At the end of the day, I don't think it's too worrisome.

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.

[pdonis]

> 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".

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".

[kodah]

The people who I've heard say that definitely had space to say exactly that if they had wanted, so I don't think that's true.