I work in an enterprise environment though my skill set is mostly on the admin side. Ageism may play a part in the bias against enterprise workers, but other factors exist as well - whether justified or not.<p>1) Over-specialization - the vogue for startups is to hire full-stack engineers, which to me reads as a desire to have one person perform the work of three. The constraints of a startup environment may justify such desires.<p>2) Risk-aversion - many of us in enterprise environments groan about all of the meetings, deferments of decisions to superiors &#x2F; domain experts, and other risk-avoidance strategies, but in the end we like our butts covered just like everyone else.<p>3) Tolerance &#x2F; preference for a certain amount of friction - some might call this a lack of urgency or an excess of complacency. Consider the problem of selecting a platform for your new project. In most enterprise environments, the decision has already been made for you - what is on the approved product &#x2F; vendor list? Another is how to get a person who reports to a different chain of command to do their job.<p>All of these factors and others seem to exist at odds with the startup culture, which is a general term for the composite self-image of a startup&#x27;s founders. Generally, they see themselves as pirates who plunder market share from the lumbering galleons of large enterprises, at least until they sell.