That's shortsighted and your employer's process sounds shortsighted.
I don't give a crap if you've already used React, Redux, Express, whatever new flavor of the months are coming. If you're 23 and actively using them, odds are you're still going to be worth much less to my team than someone 40 who has to pick them up their first couple months but can immediately contribute valuable, hard-earned broadly-applicable timeless lessons about how to build and operate software.
My job as employer, and my team's job as onboarders, is to train you in the specific skills. Yours is to bring a proven ability to learn, and the general knowledge, wisdom, and thought processes to know how to build things right.
I don't care if you're passionate, I want to know that you'll be professional enough to take pride in what you do and hold yourself to a standard worth being paid for.
If you're a hiring manager and can't figure out better questions than "can you prove you know some things about X technology already," well, please don't get too much better, cause I enjoy being able to hire the skilled people you overlook without as much competition. ;)
Odds are fine, but they aren't a shortcut for using your brain. If a team's culture makes its members instantly side with either the 40 year old or the 23 year old when he/she makes a claim like "we don't need to write tests", "there are no problems in my code", or "we should convert our entire existing repo to <different style/library/language>", then that culture is stifling discussion and actively harming the quality of the code the team writes. Same applies to hiring decisions.
It's frustrating to see ageism swinging back and forth like a pendulum. There's value in having both the crystallised intelligence of older workers and the fluid intelligence of younger workers on one team, provided they firstly get hired and secondly manage to work together.
Just as the majority of 23 year olds are what you are imagining (inexperienced, know-it-alls, chasing the latest fad, etc.) I would say the majority of 40 year old programmers are just as useless in the other direction.
Maybe not on HN where everyone is above average, but in the flyover states it's absolutely the case. Exceedingly few 40+ year old programmers around these parts I'd describe as holding a relevant modern skillset or holding any interest whatsoever in updating their knowledge or trying to stay competitive. It's almost universal derision over the "flavor of the month" until 10-15 years down the road when they realized flavor of the month turned into Linux and all they have left is bitterness over being left behind.
Just as you have the hiring skills to weed through the huge cruft of useless candidates of your preferred type, some hiring managers hold the skills to wade through the cruft of young hipster bros and find the gems as well. The 80/20 rule typically applies to all things in life.
So put another way - in the end, I'd say it all roughly evens out in my experience. I think age is an extremely poor metric for productivity, and it really depends on the specific individual.
I say all this as someone much closer to 40 than 20.
This has nothing to do with age. In most people's case swim lanes are set early in life. If you weren't good enough at 23, unless some major incident in your life changed you, chances are you will be the same at 40.
This has largely been a problem- most people feel with this popular phenomenon called 'Nerd culture'. Some people have it all figured way early in life, others take long, many never. This fact alone counts for different starting points in life, overall seriousness, and the net time available to make progress. Also if you started out as a Nerd earlier, you are more curious, and more eager to learn, change and adapt to things. Than people who start out later, who just wanted a job to provide for their family, and are in purely for 9 - 5 kind of a job, those people will routinely find themselves stuck in the wrong job- As they have to spend bulk of their time learning things. While they might want to spend that time on recreation.
This whole thing about learning and exploring things just for the heck of it doesn't come naturally to most people.
From my own childhood I remember a bunch of bullies from my lane, routinely taunting and beating up kids. One of them grew up to his mid-20s and woke up to the financial realities of life. He then went to college and did his engineering. But that was 8 years after I had finished my degree, and had a neat 9 - 10 years experience compared to him. I once met him in a bus and he came across as a totally changed person, but he still struggles. Largely because the impulse to do things is different, he just wants a job, and beyond that bulk of his early life throughout childhood, teenage and early adulthood were spent doing unproductive stuff. So there is just no desire or curiosity, or even the mental tools required to sustain a continuous learning life long marathon campaign.
I was mostly trying to provide a counterbalance to the "older is always better" opinion I've seen as well. I was lucky enough early in my career to have a myriad of stellar mentors - both old and young, and learned to simply listen to what folks have to say.
As I get older I do understand how hard it is to keep up with the latest thing in tech, while also handling other responsibilities in life. I almost always tend towards the grumpy guy ranting about the latest fad, so this comment is largely out of character!
I thought I'd toss it in my earlier comment - but it's also selection bias at play here. The guys in their 40's looking for work are likely of a different type than those in their 20's. The stellar candidates who have decades of career behind them typically have a strong social network that places them before they even look at a job board. This is an area where I feel ageism is very real, and kind of terrifies me a little should I find myself in that position.
Older isn't always better, simply because older isn't a separate species or class of humans. Put simply young people eventually become old. If you had major human enterprise issues while you were young, chances are those will remain when you get old.
This extends to other things too.
Why do you think retirement is so hard for people who didn't save well enough in 20s and 30s? Nobody can wake up one day, and run a ultra marathon. Processes for making something like this happen start way early in life.
I think your view is 100% valid and could very well be correct. The key point is I don't think people who disagree should be presumed "-ist."
And if you are correct: Good news! As a hiring manager, you apparently have a wider selection of better candidates because your competitors aren't properly assessing value in the right places.
I would argue, though, that being able to readily assess someone's experience in a modern framework you're actually using might be a less risky hire than assessing someone's abilities in decades-old technologies you don't use, hoping their lack of horizon-broadening over the last ten years hasn't been due to complacency, and paying them more just to find out.
But I could be wrong! And that's OK. We should be able to disagree without the "-ist" so often.
First, what's the deal with passion? Can't land a job if you're not passionate about whatever the prospective employer wants you to work on? Replace that word by "enthusiasm" and it'll be more acceptable. Sorry for singly you out, it's the zeitgeist I'm after.
Second, the "relevant skills" bullshit. Sillysaurus3 had relevant skills for a wide range of jobs. The only problem was the lack of trendy buzzwords in the résumé. Employers just don't want to spend a few weeks (or even a few days) training someone to a new stack.
Regarding training someone for a new stack: You quite possibly are right. I just think it's possible for employers to disagree with your view and not be presumed "-ist."
So do I. There are more ways to be wrong than being an "-ist".
When I started, I was expected to pick anything up as I was working. I got my first job partially as a result of having seen Smalltalk in a programming language class. The important "relevant skills" were enough background to pick up new things (since everywhere was different) and a demonstrated ability to get work done.
I agree with your second paragraph--but isn't that a strong case for investing in a cheaper developer with less experience?
I just think the key difference in our industry is that it's far more punishing than others if you're not keeping up to date with relevant skills.
I'm 29 and my last search was two years ago. My last job had me primarily doing ColdFusion-based web development and occasionally iOS development. A big part of the reason I left was specifically to avoid finding myself trapped with few relevant skills a few years later.
I got into and built hobby projects around an upcoming "hot" new paradigm (serverless) and learned Python along the way to do it. Being able to talk passionately about that (and cloud architecture in general) was key to finding my next position even though most of my cloud experience on the job was with the plain stuff (like normal VMs).
But despite being 27, I wasn't immune from having to branch out, learn new things, and become passionate about something to find a new position. Respectfully: our industry doesn't allow for one to stick to the same skillset for long. Your post reinforces what I had feared, which is that people are blaming ageism while sitting on a skillset that is no longer competitive.
I think this is a problem that needs to be handled, and maybe that's through a more industry norm "20% time" for trying new things, a stronger case for experience applying well to new concepts, or something else. But I don't think the problem is ageism.