Part of it is the older workers in question have outdated skills and probably act like "fuddy-duddies." I've worked with great tech types in their 40s plus, who

Part of it is the older workers in question have outdated skills and probably act like "fuddy-duddies." I've worked with great tech types in their 40s plus, who are smart and present and current as well as wise and experienced… and I've worked with terrible ones who bellow like angry walruses (AGRGRAGRAH) and declare things to be done which are impossible. Including one who fell asleep in a meeting with our mutual client, snoring with his subnotebook on his belly, then woke up long enough to demand I make it so the web site "copied the data to the email in a table" when somebody dragged a "picture" from "The browser to email". After back and forths of me explaining that it couldn't be done, he eventually demanded, "WHY NOT?" and I, exasperated and having exhausted all my other explanations, said, "Because the internet doesn't work that way." And yet, one of us got hired as CTO and the other got fired from the project. (Hint: the young person got fired.) I think that in this, as with all questions of skill and desirability, the answer probably lies more in the worker themselves than the outside environment. That said, many of these companies want green young people because they will work for peanuts, can be manipulated, and don't know any better. Older workers tend to have a better sense of self, perspective, the need for work-life balance (because they have families, etc) and are less likely to sleep under their desk. This is the money line: "Brendan Browne, who heads hiring at the professional networking site LinkedIn, said his firm wanted every new hire to be entrepreneurial. Mr. Browne said that approximately 25 percent of LinkedIn’s new hires came from the company’s recruitment efforts at colleges and universities." So is this: 'Lori Goler, the head of human resources and recruiting efforts at Facebook, said her company was looking for the “college student who built a company on the side, or an iPhone app over the weekend.”' This is code for: you have some skillz but no actual prospects (or you wouldn't want to work for us), so we'll label you "entrepreneurial" so you feel good about coming and working for the man right out of college, and we'll squeeze & overwork you as long as you don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way.