I've heard the same thing. Biopharma does a pretty bad job developing young talent. Too many smart young scientists and not enough jobs, and the scientists are used to less than stellar compensation and treatment in academia
From what I've heard this is a bit worse in Boston than the Bay Area. There seems to be more hierarchy and ageism in Boston and some of the VCs are very vocal in their preference for older employees. Bay Area is a bit better, some tech VCs are trying to get into biotech by supporting young scientists but there's still a long way to go
Funny you use ageism in that context. It usually refers to preferring younger workers. I don’t know about biotech specifically but anecdotally the Boston area is probably more generally often to older workers because of things like embedded, other kernel level stuff, and other tasks that require traditional engineering disciplines and people with experience from a Boston-area computer companies.
"Reverse ageism" is actually a fairly controversial topic in biotech. After a Twitter debate, a top VC (and one of the only biotech VCs who blogs) wrote this post about why he likes older entrepreneurs [0]
IMO he has valid points, but there are all kinds of issues with his analysis, but bottom line is there isn't enough data to prove either sides point, so there's a lot of opinions presented as facts
From what I've heard this is a bit worse in Boston than the Bay Area. There seems to be more hierarchy and ageism in Boston and some of the VCs are very vocal in their preference for older employees. Bay Area is a bit better, some tech VCs are trying to get into biotech by supporting young scientists but there's still a long way to go