There have been a lot of studies and surveys done regarding the peak age of entrepreneurship. Very few of those studies support the idea that youth is a benefit to starting a business.
I'll post a few quotes and links here:
"In 2008, I led a research team in exploring the backgrounds of 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 successful engineering and technology companies established from 1995 to 2005. These were companies with real revenue -- not just the start-ups founded by the college dropouts that some venture capitalists like to fund. We learned that the average and median age of successful founders was 39. Twice as many founders were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And there were twice as many over 60 as under 20."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-ca...
"It does not take but one minute to look around the world and prove any thesis of a peak tech founder age incorrect. There are countless entrepreneurs over the age of 30, including Reid Hoffman (age 35 in 2002), Evan Williams of Twitter (age 35 in 2007), Mark Pincus of Zynga (age 41 in 2007), Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (age 54 in 2005), among many others."
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/28/peak-age-entrepreneurship/
"“It turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55-64 age group. The 20-34 age bracket, meanwhile, which we usually identify with swashbuckling and risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google), has the lowest rate.”
Ecopreneurist (http://s.tt/12HYH)http://ecopreneurist.com/2009/09/21/the-average-age-of-an-en...
Aside from the quotes, I would also appeal to your own experience. If you are over the age of 25, then ask yourself, have you learned anything useful over the last 5 years? Have you learned important things about, say for instance, software, money, managing your time, communicating with people who are different from you, politics, self-discipline, the law, or perhaps a problem domain that you find exciting? If you haven't learned anything useful in the last 5 years, I would say you are doing something very wrong with your life. If you have learned something useful in the last 5 years, doesn't that suggest you have some new skills that will help you when you launch your business?
I think a huge factor is attitude to risk. The younger entrepreneurs are in the no-ties shoot-for-the-sky phase.
A larger proportion of people in the 30-40 range will be becoming more risk averse as they need to have financial stability to pay mortgages/support kids/spouses or whatever. But people tend to become more able to take financial risk as they get past young-kids stage, and develop enough of a savings cushion to go off on their own for a bit.
I don't see the connection between the title and the graph.
I know the adjective "cowboy" was used for some programmers in the early 1970's. BASIC, a dynamically typed language, was wildly popular for microcomputers in the 1980's. There were schema-free databases for IBM mainframes in the 70's too. For that matter, LISP was a dynamically typed language back in 1958.
Although "scrum", "extreme programming", "ruby" and things like that are new, all of the real fighting points in software engineering practice have been battlegrounds since the 1970's if not sooner.
As someone who did his first contract gig in 1987, I can say that all of those rules are conditional -- I can pound out certain kinds of projects quickly with languages like PHP and there are other ones where only C++ will do. Premature optimization is a mistake, but its also a mistake to build a system on an architecture that is doomed to forever be slow, unscalable and (worst of all) high latency.
"I don't see the connection between the title and the graph."
My thought was that startups target younger devs as they believe that they'll be more 'liberal' engineers. I think the graph shows that to be false.
edit: well I don't think the graph shows anything - but it suggests that age and liberalism are not correlated. Many people have suggested that the survey is flawed - and that Yegge's original post is biased against conservatives.
The survey behind this reminds me a lot of those internet "what's your political alignment" polls that go around from time, where you always end up discovering that you're a Libertarian.
Take a quick spin through the questions and look at how they're worded. It's no surprise that the results point to "Software Liberal". I don't doubt that you could spend a few minutes rewriting the quiz in such a way that the overwhelming majority of participants ends up on the other end of the scale.
Point is not the absolute "liberalism" value but that relative values are the same through all ages. And if you'll reword the quiz than picture will be the same - age is irrelevant (for this topic).
My thought is that startups tend to target 'liberal' developers so they can iterate fast and innovate rapidly. It's the 'fuck it ship it' kinda attitude.
[+] [-] lkrubner|13 years ago|reply
I'll post a few quotes and links here:
"In 2008, I led a research team in exploring the backgrounds of 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 successful engineering and technology companies established from 1995 to 2005. These were companies with real revenue -- not just the start-ups founded by the college dropouts that some venture capitalists like to fund. We learned that the average and median age of successful founders was 39. Twice as many founders were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And there were twice as many over 60 as under 20." http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-ca...
"It does not take but one minute to look around the world and prove any thesis of a peak tech founder age incorrect. There are countless entrepreneurs over the age of 30, including Reid Hoffman (age 35 in 2002), Evan Williams of Twitter (age 35 in 2007), Mark Pincus of Zynga (age 41 in 2007), Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (age 54 in 2005), among many others." http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/28/peak-age-entrepreneurship/
"“It turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55-64 age group. The 20-34 age bracket, meanwhile, which we usually identify with swashbuckling and risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google), has the lowest rate.” Ecopreneurist (http://s.tt/12HYH) http://ecopreneurist.com/2009/09/21/the-average-age-of-an-en...
Aside from the quotes, I would also appeal to your own experience. If you are over the age of 25, then ask yourself, have you learned anything useful over the last 5 years? Have you learned important things about, say for instance, software, money, managing your time, communicating with people who are different from you, politics, self-discipline, the law, or perhaps a problem domain that you find exciting? If you haven't learned anything useful in the last 5 years, I would say you are doing something very wrong with your life. If you have learned something useful in the last 5 years, doesn't that suggest you have some new skills that will help you when you launch your business?
[+] [-] dodo53|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|13 years ago|reply
I know the adjective "cowboy" was used for some programmers in the early 1970's. BASIC, a dynamically typed language, was wildly popular for microcomputers in the 1980's. There were schema-free databases for IBM mainframes in the 70's too. For that matter, LISP was a dynamically typed language back in 1958.
Although "scrum", "extreme programming", "ruby" and things like that are new, all of the real fighting points in software engineering practice have been battlegrounds since the 1970's if not sooner.
As someone who did his first contract gig in 1987, I can say that all of those rules are conditional -- I can pound out certain kinds of projects quickly with languages like PHP and there are other ones where only C++ will do. Premature optimization is a mistake, but its also a mistake to build a system on an architecture that is doomed to forever be slow, unscalable and (worst of all) high latency.
[+] [-] cyborg|13 years ago|reply
My thought was that startups target younger devs as they believe that they'll be more 'liberal' engineers. I think the graph shows that to be false.
edit: well I don't think the graph shows anything - but it suggests that age and liberalism are not correlated. Many people have suggested that the survey is flawed - and that Yegge's original post is biased against conservatives.
[+] [-] jasonkester|13 years ago|reply
Take a quick spin through the questions and look at how they're worded. It's no surprise that the results point to "Software Liberal". I don't doubt that you could spend a few minutes rewriting the quiz in such a way that the overwhelming majority of participants ends up on the other end of the scale.
[+] [-] Tooluka|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyborg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agscala|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyborg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaggyfrog|13 years ago|reply
...or should I borrow another bad meme, and say it should be "considered harmful"?