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Do startups really hire older engineers?

  • There are always exceptions to the rule... and I don't want to hear about those.  I have received a somewhat cold response while poking around the startup scene for the last couple years.  It may be that I am reading the tea leaves wrong so I am curious what others more in tune to startups in general think of this question? In my current world, I have met few engineers who understand what it really means to design enterprise data models and the protections needed.  Likewise, very few engineers understand code smell.  It seems startups would take more interest in such things if they really want to withstand the rigors of rapid growth.  (Not to mention experience with UI/UX design theory regardless of app type.)  I believe I have such skills but cannot seem to attract the interest of any startups I apply to. Most startups advertise for raw talent regardless of experience with specific tools but, it seems to me, that most also fall into the same old habit of matching bullet points between job description and resume and hiring the youngest person with the hight bullet-point score.  I would love to trade in my Oracle expertise for Postgres, and my PL/SQL expertise for Python (or any other language) but nobody seems to believe such tricks are possible from older dogs (even though I branch out to other languages all the time).  The only older person I know to have successfully made the leap to a startup was a bit younger than I and happen to have a resume full of Ruby on Rails (in other words, a good bullet-point score). Speaking of resumes, I began to suspect that my old, bulleted resume possibly smelled funny to startups so I rewrote it into a much more interesting blog-style read.  Still no response.  Heck, I even tried sending out a Mondrian-styled HTML resume... nothing there either.  Perhaps my 2-page resume is too short compared to all the 8-page resumes I see these days from younger people.  (Personally, I think it takes talent to keep a resume chopped down to 2-pages.  Reading long resumes is a drag.  I prefer to put more focus on the cover letter.) I am historically a consultant because I get tired quickly of the grind of low-challenge maintenance jobs.  My personality seems more geared for high-quality engineering culture and startup life.  Do it quickly but also do it right.  Yet, nobody seems interested in my skills in the parts of the country I've poked around in (the Boston/Providence area and, more lately, the Salt Lake/Provo area).  Anyone have any idea on the rest of the world?.. or is the stereotype of only young engineers allowed at startups generally true? It would be one thing to get some interviews and then be told my talent does not meet their standards, it is quite another to not even make it to the interview stage.  This is very odd for me compared to my applications for enterprise work.

  • Answer:

    Absolutely.  Older engineers are the ones with the experience to get it right the first time.

Tony Li at Quora Visit the source

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Yes startups hire older engineers.  I'm over 40, have to beat startups off with a stick,  worked with a bunch of engineers over 50, and know a few over 60 still working in startups. 1.  Lots of venture funded startups are ecstatic to talk to (and hire if they can) engineers over 40 because they appreciate what experience can mean to the bottom line.  That said there are usually more openings for less senior engineers than more senior engineers and some startups don't appreciate what experience gets them. 2.  As a more senior engineer you need to bring more to the table than just language skills which are quickly picked up by any competent engineer.  That can be a history of solving hard problems where experience helps (I do distributed systems and fault tolerance), software process, business perspective, etc. 3.  New England as a whole is a distant (11% of Q3 2013 venture capital spending, 109 deals) second place to Silicon Valley (45%, 312).  The Southwest as a whole got 2.64% of the total over 28 deals with 11 in Utah. When you want to work for software startups as a day job you're _really_ handicapping yourself by not living in Silicon Valley or San Francisco (which the outside world considers part of it). from https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTPublic/ns/nav.jsp?page=region on Q3 2013 venture capital investments.

Drew Eckhardt

Start-ups do hire older and more experienced engineers to make use of the knowledge that they have; however, older and more experience engineers are are quite pricey.

Herbert Brown

We hire people we think can do the work and complement the culture regardless of age. You don't have to know the items in our stack but you do have to convince us you can learn. And that's the core competency for a startup engineer: adaptability. So we look for multiple languages and the enthusiasm to talk about them, an appreciation for architecture and the ability to communicate it. As a result, our dev team ranges in age from 20s through 50s. Between us we have experience in everything from C to Java to Ruby to Clojure to JavaScript to COBOL to Haskel, from OSX to Windows to OS2 to Solaris to Gentoo. When an unusual problem presents itself - as they tend to! - there's a good chance at least one of us will have the tools to solve it. I believe that makes us more agile as a company...

Mike Stenhouse

Yes because they need them. Basically, the older ones are the most experienced when it comes to that field (whatever it is). So they need to hire someone like those people in order to have or develop a successful project.

Christian Teece

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