This is so interesting to hear. From what I've seen, probably half of recent yc startups have founders below 30. I wonder how senior talent views being interviewed by people who are essentially junior/mid developers.
I'm in my 20s with good credentials and have quite a few friends in the startup world. I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
> I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
I would say that's probably overcompensating. I've got about 20 years of startup experience at this point, and one of the things that frustrates me the most is a kind of zero-sum mindset, where you "pass" an interview or not.
In the best cases, interviewing is a conversation, a path to better understanding for both parties. The idea that you're "not qualified" is just as silly, in my opinion, as the idea that an hour-long interview lets someone pass judgement. We can both gain, and maybe I'm exactly what you're looking for, in terms of someone who brings skills or perspective you don't have. Maybe it's obvious that I'd be an awful fit. But either way, I believe everyone has something valuable to bring to the conversation.
Some of the best times I've been involved in interviewing, we've had even an intern talk to someone. If they're helpful, clear, and kind, that can be a huge signal. It's kind of a cliche, back in the day, that you ask the office manager how the candidate treated them, but it's absolutely true that if you treat people "below you" in the hierarchy poorly, that's a red flag, to me.
As a senior (in age and experience), it is sometimes not pleasant.
The junior interviewer might be really smart and extremely motivated, but ready to argue about something very specific while missing the forest for the tree.
Years ago, I was interviewed by two young guys at meta. They asked me to solve on a white board a problem to which the obvious and expected solution was a binary search. Which I did.
I wrote a generic binary search function, and then used it in another function. I stepped through the code of each functions line by line as attempt to prove correctness.
They wouldn't have it. They argued I could only prove it was working by stepping through both functions together. While I argued the literal point of using (pure) functions was to simplify by composing and abstraction.
Things got quite heated up. Especially with one of dude. I just left right there and then.
I'm in my 20s with good credentials and have quite a few friends in the startup world. I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.