> I agree with OP's point on the inherant age discrimination within technology, I say this because I was once a biased younger human who didn't have the life experience to understand the other side.
Thanks. Most people never stop to engage in a little introspection and think, you see a lot of that in comments.
Perhaps I was fortunate enough in life to have come up through a different path. At 19 I went to work as an engineer at a place where everyone was 10 to 15 years older than me. I was still in school, it was just a work title, but I was treated as a full engineer.
Unlike some of the tech companies I have worked for as an older person, the ratio of young-to-older where I worked at 19 was seriously skewed towards older experienced engineers. In fact, I was the only sub-30 year old in the team. My attitude was humble and simple: I want to learn from everyone who is willing to teach me. And teach they did. This was my start into becoming multidisciplinary. For example, one of the mechanical engineers ran the machine shop. He'd rope me in to help make parts on the manual Bridgeport and, eventually, design them and make them on the CNC machines. It was like that with just about everything that went on in the place. One day I could be designing analog circuits at me desk and the next on the roof helping fix a 20 ton air conditioning unit. I loved it.
One day the VP of Engineering called me into his office. He sketched out a full system on a piece of paper. Just basic I/O and some notes on important functionality. He said: This is your project now. I need you to design and build every single one of these boxes. I said: "But, I don't know enough to do this, it's fairly advanced stuff". He said: "I know you can do it. You can learn what you don't know. And the guys will help you with anything you need. Can you do it?" I said "yes". It took a year and a great deal of effort, but I got it done. That was incredibly valuable and I often look back at that moment as a seminal event in my life.
Anyhow, a long way to say that the obvious existence of age bias in technology is likely creating problems we don't yet understand. I can't predict what this means. All I know is that young engineers just out of university just don't know enough. It would be of great value to them to enter the workforce under the wing of older, more experienced engineers rather than having contempt for them.
I have personally experienced the ugliness of what this lack of humanity can produce. I was having a conversation with an engineer in the team I was supporting in the course of one of my consulting engagements. His design of a subassembly intended to go into a spacecraft was flawed. It didn't take me long to realize this because, well, I have a lot of experience. I brought this up during a cordial one-on-one conversation. The response was, almost verbatim: "I have a Masters degree from MIT. I know what I am doing". Six months and a quarter of a million dollars later, the entire assembly disintegrates on the vibration table, precisely as I predicted. What's sad is that, even after that, he remained defiant and refused to listen to me. At some point I just gave up. I saw too much of that from others. I did whatever I could to help but was not about to take on a cultural problem I had no way to address.
Mentorship is important, yet it requires the student to be receptive and humble.
“Mentorship is important, yet it requires the student to be receptive and humble.”
This is a key point (not only in engineering). In fact, I think it defines whether someone will excel at a faster rate than others with similar years of experience. Most of the time it is better to observe and listen in these circumstances and then decide if the advice makes sense with independent thought. Arguing or resisting while a mentor is discussing with you creates friction that can reduce the benefits of the mentoring relationship.
A friend of mine, my age, had problem landing interviews. When he did the an uncomfortable pattern emerged. He did very well until the video interview. After that, crickets, no calls at all. In one case he had no less than five phone (no video) interviews as he moved through the hiring funnel in this company. Code interviews, business interviews, etc. He was even told he was a great candidate. After the video interview, not even one smoke signal. Nothing.
After months of frustration he decided to dye his hair to make it far less gray. He didn't like to do that at all, but he felt he has no choice. Not long after that he told me the difference in treatment was so obvious it just floored him. His video interviews led to follow-up interviews and he finally landed a job.
> They generally give feedback on your application
That has not been my experience. I can't find the email right now. If I remember correctly it had some boilerplate about to the effect that they can't give feedback on every application and not to feel bad because sometimes they have to make hard choices and it doesn't mean your startup idea is necessarily a bad one. I understand all of that. No issues at all.
To jump in for a second as the OP. What is also interesting about me is that I do not need a single dime from YC. I value their input enough that I would easily give 7% for a $1 investment. Part of being where I am is that I have secured myself financially to the extent that my thinking about YC as an option wasn't at all related to startup money. I don't need it. I own a quarter million dollar industrial-grade shop perfectly capable of manufacturing just about anything I need. What I can't manufacture directly I can get made through myriad industry relationships for almost nothing.
The primary value I saw in trying to enter YC was about driving the inflection point through a larger investment after self-funding everything up to and including getting product in front of prospective customers, booking some sales and demonstrating traction. At that point, I wanted to have both the financial horsepower and network available to push hard on the accelerator.
My prior experience taught me that being starved of cash is the single most difficult hurdle to jump over. I put over $300K of my own money into my last serious startup. That money went a long way because I was able to wear so many hats (and I was working from my garage).
The problem surfaced when I had to grow. I was starved for cash. It was as twice as painful as anyone could possibly imagined. The slope of your growth curve, at some point, becomes a function of financial horsepower. I mortgaged my home and pulled out another $250K. That helped, but it wasn't enough. Hardware is hard for a reason. You need cash, lots of it.
The inflection point started to appear in 2008, it took an indescribably effort and unimaginable personal sacrifice to get there from starting in my garage in 2001. At the peak I closed a five million dollar sale that was going to provide enough money to truly put the business on the map and displace multi-billion dollar market-leader companies from the segment we were in.
And then the economic implosion happened. Our five million dollar client defaulted on the contract. The company went from having an acquisition offer to the tune of tens of millions dollars on the table to being as close to bankruptcy as you can get by mid 2009. I almost closed another multi-million dollar sale that would have saved the business in 2010. In the end, the tail end of the financial crisis ended-up imploding that potential sale, and that was the end of it.
Life can be an interesting ride for entrepreneurs.
I would say "Done thinking YC is the right fit for me" could be more accurate.
Of course, now they've flagged the thread, so not sure if any of this discussion matters. Instead of cancelling the discussion, it should be actively promoted.
I am not accusing of YC doing anything explicitly. I think they make the right decisions when it comes to what you need in a young team in order to succeed. An example of this is the multiple founder bias. Right on point. Young people are just not equipped for the brutality entrepreneurship can deliver.
I also think that some of their process results in unintentional age bias. Asking for age is one example. Older founders might not need or want co-founders. And relocation is something might be impossible as well. As an example, in my case, I have full industrial-class manufacturing capabilities where I live. Moving to YC for three months, quite literally, means I would be far less efficient and likely get very little done. Or, I would have to abandon work on hardware and focus solely on software.
They didn't cancel the discussion; users did. I didn't flag this thread, but thought about it. It's got nothing to do with the validity of your argument. I'm in my 40s, am alert to ageism, and tend to think it's a real thing. But threads like this, where there's barely even circumstantial evidence in the story as presented (the whole story might be much clearer!) tend to be total shitshows as threads.
I think the bias towards founder teams is especially problematic. If I was trying to marshal a case that YC pattern-matches on 25-year-old top-school grads, I'd leave the solo-founder thing out. They're right about solo founders, and they're right along multiple dimensions. We can have a healthy debate about that, but all it'll do is muddy the waters about the ageism thing.
It sounds to me, given all the circumstances you've rattled off, the YC just isn't a fit for what you want to do. It wasn't at all a fit for my last couple businesses, either, and they did (/are doing) great.
Older engineers are far less likely to be able to team-up with college buddies to go off into startup-land.
Most everyone I know can't drop everything they are doing, their families and responsibilities to launch a startup. Entrepreneurship is very hard. Some of us have lived the life all of our lives. Others have jobs and they would like to keep it that way. Not judging, it's just the way it is.
Pretty interesting that a YC person would come out and label this "indignation + sensationalism".
It is neither. It's someone (me) sharing an experience and a personal decision while --if you actually read my post-- praising YC for all the good they do.
My only intent is to perhaps shed some light on the plight of older engineers in the technology ecosystem.
Change the subject if you want. I could not care less. How about "Done with YC: A personal perspective".
I certainly didn't mean anything personal by it! The title alone was enough to count as that. If you hadn't put "Done with YC" and "Age discrimination" in your title, I doubt it would have gotten nearly as much attention. That's the way these things work.
I appreciated the nuances in the body of the text, but those have much less influence, the internet being what it is.
And no part of that implies any emotion or sentiment at all. What you are reading into is is your own bias.
It almost like a title:subtitle structure. You read the content to understand it. The title simply says something like "I am no longer interested in YC. I want to discuss age discrimination". It does not say "Those f--ker at YC are biggoted blah, blah who discriminate against older engineers and because of that I've had enough and I am done with them". That's what you and dang seem to want to read into it. Well, you are both wrong. It's just a title. No emotion or implications being made other than those made in the mind of the reader.
My resume scares and likely confuses most people. Most EE's with 30 years of experience have been EE's their entire career. I hired a guy once out of Intel who had, at the time, devoted ten years to designing nothing but power supplies. I couldn't even ask him to design an embedded MCU board, much less write the code. That's fine, nothing wrong with that.
My case is diametrically opposite. I can design anything and tackle just about any discipline. And my resume shows it.
Back when I was just trying to take a break from entrepreneurship and take a job for a few years I got no callbacks at all. Finally a recruiter took pity on me and opened up.
He said I had two problems. If I was dealing with a small company, one look at my resume and their would fear that I wanted a job to learn their business and become a competitor. And, at a mid to large company, when dealing with a VP or manager making the hiring decision, my resume would make them fear I would be after their job after gaining a foothold. So, he said "Nobody is going to hire you. You have no choice but to stay an entrepreneur or lie.".
Not long after that I landed a nice contract to help get astronauts to the International Space Station. That was fun and interesting...yet I eventually ran into the realty that they were paying 20-somethings about 1/3 (or less) of what I was getting. When my work was done my contract had nowhere to go.
I will only reply to messages if it seems a conversation is warranted. I've had the experience on HN and other groups of someone contacting you with something that looks interesting only to identify you and then go away. Not interested in that at all. I hope you understand.
Just a heads-up: for your contact information to appear in your profile, you need to include it in the "about" text area. The "email" field is only visible to moderators.
> You've got YC one-itis. There are a zillion other places to raise money. Any one funding source says no 98% of the time, it has nothing to do with you.
I don't think you read my post. Or, if you did, you didn't understand it. What you are saying has nothing to do with what I said, what I think of YC or anything in my post.
Congrats on raising capital. I never have. It seems you have in the past. Which explains why it might have been easier for you. I have, however closed five million dollar sales with single international customers for the startup I mentioned I self-funded and launched from my garage.
Different paths in life. If it hadn't been for 2008 I would be telling a very different story today. That's just the way things go sometimes.
Thanks. Most people never stop to engage in a little introspection and think, you see a lot of that in comments.
Perhaps I was fortunate enough in life to have come up through a different path. At 19 I went to work as an engineer at a place where everyone was 10 to 15 years older than me. I was still in school, it was just a work title, but I was treated as a full engineer.
Unlike some of the tech companies I have worked for as an older person, the ratio of young-to-older where I worked at 19 was seriously skewed towards older experienced engineers. In fact, I was the only sub-30 year old in the team. My attitude was humble and simple: I want to learn from everyone who is willing to teach me. And teach they did. This was my start into becoming multidisciplinary. For example, one of the mechanical engineers ran the machine shop. He'd rope me in to help make parts on the manual Bridgeport and, eventually, design them and make them on the CNC machines. It was like that with just about everything that went on in the place. One day I could be designing analog circuits at me desk and the next on the roof helping fix a 20 ton air conditioning unit. I loved it.
One day the VP of Engineering called me into his office. He sketched out a full system on a piece of paper. Just basic I/O and some notes on important functionality. He said: This is your project now. I need you to design and build every single one of these boxes. I said: "But, I don't know enough to do this, it's fairly advanced stuff". He said: "I know you can do it. You can learn what you don't know. And the guys will help you with anything you need. Can you do it?" I said "yes". It took a year and a great deal of effort, but I got it done. That was incredibly valuable and I often look back at that moment as a seminal event in my life.
Anyhow, a long way to say that the obvious existence of age bias in technology is likely creating problems we don't yet understand. I can't predict what this means. All I know is that young engineers just out of university just don't know enough. It would be of great value to them to enter the workforce under the wing of older, more experienced engineers rather than having contempt for them.
I have personally experienced the ugliness of what this lack of humanity can produce. I was having a conversation with an engineer in the team I was supporting in the course of one of my consulting engagements. His design of a subassembly intended to go into a spacecraft was flawed. It didn't take me long to realize this because, well, I have a lot of experience. I brought this up during a cordial one-on-one conversation. The response was, almost verbatim: "I have a Masters degree from MIT. I know what I am doing". Six months and a quarter of a million dollars later, the entire assembly disintegrates on the vibration table, precisely as I predicted. What's sad is that, even after that, he remained defiant and refused to listen to me. At some point I just gave up. I saw too much of that from others. I did whatever I could to help but was not about to take on a cultural problem I had no way to address.
Mentorship is important, yet it requires the student to be receptive and humble.