I feel like in the startup space a lot of young people just aren't exposed to just how good highly experienced engineers can be. As a result, they end up just hiring the best youngsters they can find (and afford) and dismiss a lot of people as dated.

It's just breathtaking when you watch an experienced engineer slap together a well architected, highly optimized project that passes all tests on the first try. They even keep track of things like code size in the cache, opportunities for vectorization, etc.