Silicon Valley: no country for young men | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley: no country for young men

ft.com

24 pointsvdalal44 comments

Appears to firmly contradict this: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/youll-never-guess-avera...

Makes me wonder if news agency workers just pull stuff out of their behinds.

I usually drop this list [0] into threads about stories pushing the super young founder myth:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18213942

The only thing particularly interesting about the super young founder myth, is just how drastically off the mark it is. The very few outliers are just that.

[0] a big list of founder ages for prominent tech companies

Thanks for that - bookmarked! Shows there is still a chance ;)

Evergreen. How VICE choses stories https://youtu.be/Ia7fUQXskvA

I can only begin to imagine the harm incompetent media does to societies. I am not for censorship but there should be some standards.

Should probably tell people that's from 2018, and the FT article is from today. [0]

Unless, of course, you wouldn't want people to know that! (:

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180208022213/https://www.inc.c...

Yeah because so much changed since 2018 (:

just the biggest event in our human life time :)

How much do you think that has impacted the age of founders?

My general assumption is the age would be similar to what it was 4 years ago.

https://archive.ph/LfYaU

Imagine reading this vacuous nothing-burger and thinking to yourself "Yep, that's what I'm paying $40 a month for."

The only interesting part of the entire article is Peter Thiel railing against the fact that startup founders are getting older, mostly because Thiel seems to be an opportunist who wants fresh meat to exploit. Someone who has been around the block a couple of times might be thrilled by the idea of Thiel investing in them, but they're going to be more cautious because they've already got the bumps, bruises, and callouses of being in the industry.

The reason that so many founders were so young a couple decades ago is precisely because they were at an age where they could imagine online services at a time when even the act of purchasing a domain was seen to be a weird new thing. So they got rich off of building the infrastructure and services of the modern web. It was easier from a market standpoint, even if it was harder technically because they had to help invent or fund a lot of the things that ultimately became the web we know today.

It's like complaining that nobody since Newton or Einstein has come up with new universal laws and ignoring the fact that it's harder to just observe new things and report on them than it used to be. It's not enough to witness an apple falling from a tree anymore, now you have to build an LHC and smash exotic particles together.

Coincidentally, it's what the "young guns" who are web 3.0 proponents are missing: they didn't experience the web BEFORE there was a web 2.0, and they assume that it is the way it is today because of some nefarious plot. They sit there on their pile of shitcoins howling in the wind of a better tomorrow without recognizing that web centralization was a feature, not a bug. Nobody wants Usenet anymore. For the unwashed masses, it's a dystopia. Worse, they put the cart before the horse when they create tokens and then try to come up with ways for these things to actually be useful. They want to get rich from being the idea guy.

The fact that anyone wants to do business with Thiel these days baffles me. He spends his time and money finding and funding the craziest far-right conspiracy theorists in the country to run for elected office. He's a loon.

>he's a loon

He's pretty typical, honestly. There is a very large contingent of people who think exactly like he does. 10 years ago, he might be fairly cast as an outlier. Not anymore.

Also no mention that the Fed enabled these malinvestments by keeping interest rates artificially low for decades.

> without recognizing that web centralization was a feature, not a bug

This is a nice pithy way of putting it.

Wow, great comment.

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.

> 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".

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.

Useless post to an inaccessible article.

Remove it. Oh and be sure to flag anyone pointing out this fact again, because you're not getting enough attention on Reddit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32632286

Young founders are into crypto and it seems to me Silicon Valley is not the center of gravity in that area

Probably because more people in silicon valley are technical than other places, and they know it's mostly bullshit.

It's honestly surreal to me the amount of hype crypto is getting right now. No one can even articulate why they love it, other than the hype itself.

Easy money is probably the most exciting thing on planet earth. And probably always has been.

Please just post an link to a non-paywall mirror, a link to the paywall article is useless to most people.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html :

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paywalls%20by:dang&dateRange=a...

Massive paywall

Look out, Redditards gonna flag you for complaining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com