> And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc.
That might mean that the great old people are either not great at these things despite their efforts (which I believe is your opinion), OR it could mean the old people optimize for the things you did not list, and don't place too a lot of value on "coding quickly", for example.
> And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology
There older I get, the more I realize there is more to life than work. I mean, I love technology, web development particularly (because the web is awesome for humanity), I really do enjoy it. However, I can make better, more fulfilling use of (some of) my weekends and evenings than staring at my laptop, rewriting an app in LatestHypeJS. Is there any other industry that requires much running just to stay in one place?
Bear in mind the "younger faster models" won't stay young forever.
Experience is not magic, it is not directly a function of age but of duration in the industry. I'm not even tyat old yet, but my experience (aka larger training set) so far allows me to pattern-match/foresee potential disasters way before they appear on radars of more junior devs: and this goes for technology, people and processes.
> No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available
That's because mining coal is physically exerting. I would hire a 60 year old boilermaker before any 20 year old since I don't want things to go boom.
Edit:
> just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done.
With experience, you know which shit not to do