As you are drawing from your personal experience, you may want to retitle this article “How I made a huge mistake hiring the developers I hired.”

I’m a front-end developer in a startup using React. Between me and 2 other developers, we have a combined experience of nearly 60 years.

We’re old.

And our investors have repeatedly been impressed with our ability to increment and pivot.

They’ve told us they’ve never seen another startup who delivers new features as rapidly and solidly as we do.

Try to get 3 devs out of college to get that kind of feedback.

Experience teaches how to pick the best of many tools for the job. It teaches humility. It teaches how to create flexible applications. It teaches how to listen to the business. It teaches how to appreciate the contributions of our fellow developers.

The issues you describe have nothing to do with seniority. They have to do with mindset. Startups are inherently fast-moving and flexible and it takes a certain mindset to do well there. I’ve seen juniors who should have nothing to do with startup culture as well as seniors.

So before you write off someone’s age, take a hard look at your ability to identify the people skills in your hiring process. Ask yourself why good seniors don’t want to work with you. Prejudice might be a turn-off.