Ask HN: Why won't start-ups hire older, experienced programmers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why won't start-ups hire older, experienced programmers?

8 pointsextofer34 comments

Why won't start-ups hire older experience programmers. They seem to focus on recently graduated engineers who will take this as their first career job rather than experienced developer with 10 + years under their belt?

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If you have 10+ years of experience, then you're probably 30. If you're 30, you're probably married. If you're married, you probably have kids. If you have kids, you probably want to leave work at 5pm to go spend time with them. If you need to leave at 5pm, you probably aren't the right cultural fit for a startup.

It's just math, really.

Also they might be afraid that older, more experienced programmers won't respect a younger, less experienced boss.

True. Or that generally they're not as up to snuff on the latest and greatest, which tends to be the bread and butter of startups.

But all generalizations are still false.

How about asking them? All these assumptions have a name: discrimination

Ok, is there another name for ignoring qualified candidates based on physical attributes they have no control over?

Of course, as I say above, all generalizations are false. However, when you're asking about a general trend, broad strokes are appropriate. The number of people of that age that fit into startup culture are much smaller than the number of people that are younger.

Even though this thread sounds like "Why don't I get hired?" that's not what he actually asked.

Well, change the pronouns and it is: "Why don't young startup founders hire more experienced programmers?"

Or at least one? See my comment to jhg.

To make a more general point, you need balance, at least as soon as you can afford it. You don't necessarily need to make an experienced programmer a lead, but you ought to listen to him when he says "If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will..." (i.e. help you see how much technical debt it will incur).

And then there are the things that just won't work at all: you don't need an experienced per se programmer, but you're likely to be very unhappy if you don't have one who knows big O notation and regularly does the math, so you aren't e.g. trying to get 100x or more the max peak transaction rate out of your database, exceed the bandwidth of your systems, etc.

Well, this may be considered nitpicking, but that's a category mistake. Such assumptions are prejudices. Discrimination is acting based on those assumptions.

Cultural thing - sure, but keep in mind that professional programmer with 10+ years of experience typically can do more in 9-to-5 than your average college graduate on a 24/7 schedule. He needs to be paid appropriately though, which is something that a "startup" full of college kids may not be able to afford.

I tend to ask, can you afford not to have at least one seriously experienced programmer? It's not just a question of units of code per time, but the right code in the right (enough) architecture. As PG has noted, a whole bunch of the dot.bomb crowd were technical failures.

Another I noticed after programming C/C++ for more than decade was an ability to hone in on many bugs in seconds/minutes where the less experienced could take hours/days. How do you value that type of "productivity"?

> As PG has noted, a whole bunch of the dot.bomb crowd were technical failures.

And those are now the guys with 10+ years of experience.

> How do you value that type of "productivity"?

There's also the productivity of not using C/C++.

Indeed, I myself learned Lisp before I learned C. Unfortunately it was hard not to use or be forced to use C/C++ in the '80s and early-mid '90s, although what I could do with Perl 4 and early Perl 5 in the latter part of that period changed a few minds.

Absolutely. But now's different... and someone who's programmed in C since the 90s is going to be really upset when they sign up for a startup and they're coding in Ruby.

I just generally find this discussion interesting, since I'm a 'recent graduate' with 10+ years of experience...

  Absolutely. But now's different... and someone who's 
  programmed in C since the 90s is going to be really upset 
  when they sign up for a startup and they're coding in Ruby.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that "Ruby" in that sentence is a proxy for any of the "newish" langauges that are out there. If we can go with that assumption...

Well, let' see; as somebody who started programming in the 90's with C and C++, I would say that your assertion is simply not true. Maybe some people are dinosaurs and don't change with the times, but I made the switch from (primarily) C/C++ to (primarily) Java about 2002, and started dabbling in Erlang and Ruby about 2008, and am doing a lot of work in Groovy now, while spending some time learning Scala and Clojure.

(Speaking of which, there's a TriJVM Hack Night tonight, for anybody in the RTP area! http://www.meetup.com/TriJVM/calendar/13771811/ )

And I've written some Python and Ruby as well. So no - based on my experience (and observations of colleagues about my age) I don't think it holds that somebody who was doing C/C++ in the 90's is necessarily a fossil who won't be interested in doing Ruby (or whatever).

To be fair though, I was just starting in programming in the 90's, so I may be younger than whatever stereotypical character you had in mind by saying that. <shrug /> I still think it's dangerous to generalize in this fashion though.

I know programmers who programmed Fortran in the 70's, Lisp in the 80's, C++ in the 90's, then switched to Java, now programs python, and is learning Scala. Just because you're over 30 doesn't mean you cannot learn new things.

However I'm guessing the assumption that they can't might be another reason why 23 year old startup founders are loath to hire them.

I myself went from C to C++ to Perl to Java to PHP and Lisp and Python and Ruby and Haskell and tons of other stuff.

But see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439535

I would also argue that founders are generally not 'average college graduates.'

You're probably closer to 35 if you have 10 years of experience.

Also, hardly anyone in startupland is married with kids by age 30.

And, nobody with a professional job in any capacity (programmer, doctor, lawyer) leaves work at 5pm.

Think of the growing pains twitter could have avoided if they had hardcore experienced java/scala people from the beginning.

Older, more experienced programmers are likely used to getting paid a real salary instead of equity, and eating more than just ramen.

I think this is a huge part of it. As you get older you naturally acquire and subsequently have to maintain things -- they can be material (a mortgage, car payments, insurance, etc), emotional (dog that needs walking, kids that need feeding, wife that needs attention) or other obligations. And that's just obligations. There are other reasons why startups fail to convince older, more mature and more experienced developers/engineers.

Kids fresh out of college are easy to convince for little or no money and the slim chance of glory. As you get older you are more realistic: Even if this company is successful it won't make me rich. Even if the technology is awesome to work on it may not make the company successful.

We tried really hard to grab a couple of really brilliant engineers right after we closed our angel round. The reality? While what we were working on was cool, they could make twice as much as we could afford to pay until we closed our Series A and even though our options package was decent, it wasn't generous enough to make them rich even if we had a generous buyout or IPO (which, you know, who knows if that will ever happen). Plus it takes 4 years to vest.

At the end of day I think it is for essentially the same reason the 50 year old Harvard MBAs in grey suits prefer to hire other 50 year old Harvard MBAs in grey suits. Like attracts like. People are instinctively drawn to people with the same cultural values and background as themselves.

Startups do hire older, more experienced, developers. That they won't is a myth.

That's more likely to happen as the startup matures. In the early days of ramen-fueled late night code-a-thons in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment, you have a much better chance of finding 20-somethings, not older developers with mortgages and kids.

How about older developers without mortgages and kids? They exist, but are underrepresented anyway.

There's a fairly compelling argument to be made for hiring (somewhat) older folks that goes something like this (attribution: cribbed from Donnie Deutsch):

"Hire 30-somethings who haven't done anything yet. They're hungry to take that step to the 'next level' and prove themselves."

He's talking about hiring people with talent of course; but people who haven't - yet - taken that big leap to really go to the next level success wise. I think there's something to that. Speaking as a 36 year old who feels like he hasn't reached "the next level" himself, it rings true to me.

Easy: We're expensive, and we don't work 80-hour weeks. (Both generalizations, but both certainly far more true of older engineers than younger ones.)

That said, I've worked for two startups, one when I was 31 and one when I was 38. If you bring something to the table that they need badly enough to be worth the higher pay and lower time commitment, it can happen. As @steveklabnik said, it's just math, though the math doesn't always fall in favor of the young guy. Just usually.

I think they probably would hire an older, experienced programmer...

...but it might be interesting to turn this question around and ask if these older experienced programmers would want to be hired by a startup. Keep in mind, this is a very different question from asking if they'd want to work for, or at, a startup.

The old mantra I heard was "the founders get rich, the early employees get screwed, and the late employees get paid." Of course, not at all true in all occasions (even fairly "late" employees at google got rich, and at most startups, nobody gets rich). But I figure an older, experienced programmer would truly understand how illusory the stability of W-2 work at a startup really is. It'd better be a pretty great startup (and they are rarely as great as they think they are).

If you're going to tolerate that degree of instability in your life, there are usually much better options than taking an "interview you, hire you, assign you work" role as a programmer at a startup (consulting work, starting your own company if you seek high risk/rewards, bigco, gov't work if you want to interview for a job with a paycheck).

Well, I for one loathe working at bureaucratic, political companies. And the older you get, the less you believe in the illusory stability a W-2 at such (for an extreme, Lucent had 106,000 employees when I started at it and was aiming for 35,000 when I left).

I prefer the environment of startups, I prefer being given an opportunity to focus all my talents and energy in making tangible differences, I'm not in it primarily for the money. Granted, I'm a would be scientist who was forced to live a sordid life as a programmer due to finances....

As for the options I didn't cover, I'm not enough of a extrovert, salesman type (you need at least some of that) to be a multi-client consultant or co-founder.

Price tends to be the biggest issue for our startup. I'd love to hire some senior programmers that I know can produce high quality solutions for any problem I throw at them. But from a cash flow perspective, we simply can not afford them. And with older programmers having wives/kids/house payments, they (I'm including myself in this boat) tend to be more risk adverse and not as willing to take the pay cut for potential payout later.

I think there is a network effect as well. When I was fresh out of college, everyone in my close network was all the same age. I always prefer to hire someone I've already worked with or someone that was recommended by a friend. So if the start up is founded by fresh college graduates, their network is going to mostly consist of other young developers.

There are several reasons. Depending on the startup, it may be one or more of these:

* Older and more experienced programmers may need a bigger salary, which startups cannot always afford.

* Older and more experienced programmers may be more suited to work in larger organisations with set procedures and practices, which is not suited for startups.

* Older programmers have other commitments which may prevent them from putting more energy in the startup. It may also be more of a risk (money wise) for them to join a startup which may or may not succeed.

I'm 35 and I've never not worked at a startup. I don't think that many older guys apply to startups because the pay is usually shit.

I have found that older programmers are out date in terms knowledge and skills. It sounds ageist but that us my experience.

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