But again, the article was about discrimination in the valley, and the parent was also referring to sv, although they again identified sv as a start up scene wh

But again, the article was about discrimination in the valley, and the parent was also referring to sv, although they again identified sv as a start up scene when it's really not. Sure, start ups discriminate against older workers, against women, against blacks, etc. Hell, I've seen them discriminate against people with different musical tastes. Start ups, by definition, are small businesses and we tolerate/have lower standards for small businesses than large corporations. That's why you have restaurants that only hire family members, for example. Fortunately start ups are kind of irrelevant in terms of total developer employment in the valley. There just aren't that many start ups and they don't survive that long, so they don't account for most employment. They do capture the imagination of the valley, so whenever someone brings up age discrimination in the valley, the come back is always "well, in a start up.." >That formula isn't going to change until older founders and older devs start creating googles, facebooks, apples, microsofts, etc. Intel was started by Robert Noyce when he was 41. Gordon Moore was 40. Geschke and Warnock were 45 and 42 when they founded Adobe. Cisco and AMD were founded by 30 somethings. Huang was 39 when he founded NVIDIA. Interestingly in China, Jack Ma was 35 when he founded Ali Baba -- would he have been able to raise capital in SV today? None of the original companies in SV were founded by someone in their 20s. It just didn't happen. The idea that only 20 somethings can start companies is very new, and whether or not it's a good idea, it's not the case that workers in their 30s and 40s need to "prove" that they are able to found big companies, as we are all living in the shadows of great tech companies founded by people in this age bracket.