If your company doesn't have older geeks or is explicitly excluding them in the hiring process, it is missing out. Having worked in an environment with engineer

If your company doesn't have older geeks or is explicitly excluding them in the hiring process, it is missing out. Having worked in an environment with engineers of all ages, I learned a lot from older experience engineers. Over the years they've seen and accumulated a lot of experience related to how systems work, how code works, domain knowledge. You'll never get that if you hire only college kids. Someone I worked with just retired last year. He was perhaps not like the famous (infamous now) 10x programmer, but he was easily a 5x programmer. Because he learned how to learn better, he was also faster at picking up new technologies as well. Also startups and many companies simply don't want to pay market rate for what an experienced engineer would demand. Also mature people are not as easy to bully and push around. It is harder to force them to work till 8pm every day.