Assuming equal likelihood of success for product and library. It may feel that way to us but there is a survivability bias embedded in that assumption. I'd hazard a guess and say incremental value add per unit of effort is greater for product development due to the inherent bias developers have for building libraries under the false assumption that a domain can be conquered for good.
I think it’s more about not appreciating experience enough as opposed to discriminating against age. I’m 31 with 13 years professional experience. I’ve worked as an employee, contractor and as a single person start-up. Last year I interviewed for ~10 jobs in SV and I was rejected for all of them. None of the jobs valued my experience enough to consider my asking salary to be worth it. I make ~$300K USD contracting and was willing to take a pay cut to ~$240K to work at a big company and for access to big problems. I found out, via a friend, that one of the jobs I missed out on was due to my asking salary. They ended up hiring a guy with much less experience for ~$120K for the position. A year later and the project failed due to lack of experience costing many millions of dollars. I wanted them to succeed and I know that I could have done it but I’m not going back to $120K - at $300K customers only let you work on important stuff, no busy work. This story gets repeated over and over. There is a culture problem that doesn’t value experience. It’s not my problem because I'll go to where my experienced is most valued; it’s SVs problem because it results in failed projects and wasted money.
This is based on a history of recessions. Unfortunately this one is different (really)... We've never had interest rates so low for so long. It's possible, and I consider it likely, that those younger will be even more affected. Consider the possibility that parents run out of money and living in the basement isn't even an option. Also consider there is a decent chance for another recession before this one is even over.
I built an enterprise site that needed SSO to work for a number of different enterprises.
I tried 3rd party solutions, ping fedeate, Auth0, Azure etc. and these were nightmares to configure and get working.
Turns out it was way easier just to read the SAML RFC and handle the tokens myself.
SAML 2.0 is finally old enough that most enterprises support it.
So for me Enterprise SSO is a solved problem. For others having a hard time finding 3rd party plugins / services etc. I highly recommend whipping out the RFC and DIYing a solution. Only took me a couple of days. Far less than what I spent on other solutions.
I wouldn't hold my breath for anything approaching parity.