You mean the technical workers have below average programming skills? I haven't really been applying for jobs at startups because I thought I had to be really good at programming or statistical analysis
I would say the early stage employees more often than not are not as proficient at their jobs as say someone with a comprable job title at a larger, mature firm. And sometimes that does include the technical employees.
In each particular case, you have to gauge the average age of the founders and employees along with the maturity of the market in order to best define your chances of success at a given startup. A retail-oriented startup that caters to an immature market segment is invariable going to be the most inexperienced while a research-oriented startup that provides deep data analysis to financial or biomed corporations is probably going to debug your ballsack while laughing at your resume. Just find something interesting and challenging in between.