I work in enterprises with 50,000+ employees and billions in annual revenue. I work with older programmers all the time! They're better at programming in Angular than I am. And they are wonderful mentors!
I think what's actually happening is some programmers, who happen to be older, don't keep up with their skills. Then when they interview, they bomb it, or talk about how they could do the same thing in an older stack.
That's great, but the company is really invested in the current / new stack, so it doesn't make sense to hire someone who does not have those skills. So they pass them up and find a candidate who knows the software the company is looking for.
But the older interview candidate, instead of reflecting on themselves and realizing they need to spend time enhancing their skills, they simply say the company was "ageist" and blame it on age discrimination.
Blaming others is generally easier than blaming yourself, I guess.
I think what's actually happening is some programmers, who happen to be older, don't keep up with their skills. Then when they interview, they bomb it, or talk about how they could do the same thing in an older stack.
That's great, but the company is really invested in the current / new stack, so it doesn't make sense to hire someone who does not have those skills. So they pass them up and find a candidate who knows the software the company is looking for.
But the older interview candidate, instead of reflecting on themselves and realizing they need to spend time enhancing their skills, they simply say the company was "ageist" and blame it on age discrimination.
Blaming others is generally easier than blaming yourself, I guess.