tomtomAmazon

Lots of good advice here. I'd like to add a key phrase thrown around a lot, 'A-players'. As in, "we only hire A-Players for our team." Or "Our team is made of only A-Players. If we hire anything less then the world ends." Beware when managers/cofounders/leads/directors say this. Your bullshit detector should be going off at this point in the process because what they're really saying is that they only hire people like them, egotistical, shallow, puts others down, don't ask for help since you're suppose to know everything, expect them to talk about themselves ALL the time, expect a lot of bullshit (i noticed that a lot of 'A-players' resemble the 'bro' attitude). It is difficult on the first 'pass' to avoid such a situation especially without experience. A company I worked for explicitly targeted young developers because of the long hours, cheap labor (coder monkey?), the koolaid is easier to drink without experience. good luck out there.

You don't need a PhD to understand that young people (what we call millennials this generation) are easy to manipulate. Their lack of experience makes then ripe to work for startups. Hiring 'older' workers will only bring more challenges since they are more likely to question and challenge false idols. There are exceptions of course, having older folks who also believe the hype and feed it to the younger kids works great to produce the startup echo chamber. Once the leadership is in place you want to recruit people who are more likely to drink the Kool aid. This is not rocket science. A prime example is the military.