"Cultural fit"

SV start-ups need bright shiny twenty-somethings for their "About us" pages and their IG lifestyle feed, with a few wise old thirty-somethings to ride herd on them.

It leaves room for the forty-something and fifty-something VCs to do what they enjoy, which is pretending to be the team coach.

Put in some wrinkly old guys - or worse, some old women - and there goes your brand identity.

Luckily there is an entire country outside of SV....

Start-ups in general. I had the same experience in the few start-ups I know in Germany.

Only result of this is to repeat mistakes over and over again...

Me to mate. I think its silicon valley thing.

I am 48 and having a blast in my career now, I am getting my hands on all sorts of interesting things to learn.

The only people who I have seen struggle with this are those who just go stale. I have friend who is a C++ programmer, and for 30 years all he has worked on is some logic controller software used in trains and energy systems. He is getting close to retirement, but if things go tits up due to COVIDs impact, he will very likely be unemployable. Me on the other hand. I get daily connect requests and job interests put my way on linked in.

I think its more of a SV thing than a U.S. thing. There are a ton of older coders in my industry and having experience, especially if you have domain knowledge in addition to technical skills, is huge. Most companies in my field would gleefully hire a 50 year old coder with domain knowledge over a coding rock star straight out of school who doesn't know the business.

I'd say in the Netherlands it looks almost the same I am 33 and usually work with people in their 40's. Seems like all kids are moving to US and take jobs of older people :)

I think a big factor is health insurance in the USA. If you are in your 40's you probably have a partner and kids. Your company will have to cover all of this, and if the kids get a condition things can be expensive. So, I think that they consciously focus on younger people to drive the costs down.