Let's see - you can get these experienced engineers, who will build a proper platform, a robust architecture, a decent code base, and given the fact they have delivered before, a solution that will provide what the customers want.
Or
You can have these wet behind the ears fuckers straight from college who will just download a metric shit ton of code via gem install and npm, and then rebuild several wheels in JS, whilst spending all their time on the company engineering blog wanking about how great they are?
And the vcs choose youth over experience every time.
In my mind, fair ownership is proportional to investment risk. Each owner invests some combination of time and capital.
I assume you are an employee, so how much risk are you taking on?
If you aren't already wealthy, and its a startup - which means you pretty much selling you life to the thing - than everything you have.
A VC might invest a million in ten different companies, but they often still have another 10 in traditional stocks to fall back on if all their ventures fail and they can continue to sit pretty. Their investment in the company is mathematically significantly larger than an employee, but that isn't how it feels when the business goes belly up. The VC writes off another failure, made another million somewhere else, and meanwhile the dev is distraught with blaming himself for basically his lifes work failing.
Yes, there can be role reversal there, it is not absolute, but it is the average. Just because some have and some have not does not mean someone can not put in a lot more of themself into a project. There are enough VCs that got rich off of being the developer that they probably recognize the difference.
And yes, that should hold weight when you only want to give the guy that makes the dream the reality .05% while a guy surfing waves after doing a VC round on a yacht providing the money to make it happen can expect incredible returns if the dream succeeds.
Those with the resources will always have more to lose than those without. This doesn't justify greater protections for them, especially when the reasons that have more are directly tied to the kinds of protections they have.
That's circular reasoning.
What you have to show is that those who are investing more money are making better decisions. Because we want to protect those who make the best decisions, not simply those who have the most invested.
I think thats the point though. You have a couple of "leads" and "platform engineers" who make the structure of what needs to be, and then you hire a bunch of "coders" to actually turn that structure into a reality, and its great for the company, since they won't question the stack. Whereas, a more experience engineer, will have intelligent discussions about languages, frameworks and tradeoffs.
In other words, companies want stooges so that they can still keep running without addressing the ridiculous technical debt that they have accrued.
>And the vcs choose youth over experience every time.
With predictable results:
"A compelling report out from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation describes how most institutional investors, including larger state pension funds, endowments and foundations, may be shortchanged by their investments in venture capital funds. "
"Over the past decade, public stock markets have outperformed the average venture capital fund and for 15 years, VC funds have failed to return to investors the significant amounts of cash invested, despite high-profile successes, including Google, Groupon and LinkedIn."
Yeah, because all experienced engineers are perfect and all "wet behind the ears fuckers straight from college" are idiots... Well, Watts Humphrey, creator of CMM, PSP and TSP, had a nice saying along the lines of "Most developers who think they have 20 years of experience actually have 1 year of experience 20 times."
VCs choose youth because, as a previous poster said, single people in their 20s have a much greater tolerance for risk, can work very long hours without family commitments, and are much more likely to not have preconceived ways of thinking how things "are supposed" to be done. For example, Paul Graham has said a bunch of times how much he hated the idea for AirBnB originally, and how lots of smart people (mostly smart, older, rich people) thought it was a horrible idea. However, at the time, Couch Surfing was already well known and popular, so I don't think it's much of a stretch to see how this could be made safer/more convenient and turned into a marketplace. Younger people were more comfortable with the idea of a shared space, while most older folks just thought "Who's going to want to sleep in some stranger's house?"
