Hmm... that's almost exactly the opposite of what I think of when I hear that term. To me it conjures up someone who is overly serious, doesn't have any fun, and doesn't want to let anyone else have fun either.
This is a wonderful, terrifying neologism that I haven't heard before. Has it entered common use yet?
Perhaps, over here he simply encountered a few people with unresolved issues and got a raw deal because of it.
On the other hand, this happened when Google was relatively young an interesting question is, what happens in large organizations? When you hire people they tend to bring their baggage in them. So, now the question becomes how can a culture be created that allows people to transcend their prejudices?
I just don't know.
It's particularly common among my Microsoftie friends to refer to executive leadership. However, I've personally starting using the term "Crustacean" to refer to the dinosaurs who just refuse to go extinct.
Just because a person or idea is "old" does not make it somehow inherently negative.
If you have to comment on age to argue against something that isn't edible or lovable, then you really have no argument at all.
Yes, probably I loose some of my concentration and speed, multitasking capability etc as I get older but I feel to be able to see things better, have a better intuition, solve big problems quicker than before, by far (while taking longer to solve smaller problems, like algorithmic tests etc which require more concentration, but it could be also caused by the fact that I work too much and I'm simply too tired).
I don't think that performance and idea degradation seen in some older people is about physical age, but because perhaps of their particular personality, for example if they are prisoners of they experience at the point that they are unwilling to challenge them.
I'm not going to say here that there is a misunderstanding, that it's a social problem, that younger people also play their role into cutting off older people from their ideas and are part of this descending spiral. Because they are older professionals (I work with software engineers, but I guess it's similar in other tech fields) whose ideas are fossilized, which don't want to learn anything new, which don't have any stimula left, which work by inertia.
Those people are there, for real, and even if I have no idea which is the ratio of bright/inert older professionals, I wouldn't expect it be drastically different from the ratio of bright/dumb younger guys.
So the whole thing appears to me as a perfect place to abuse in both directions, discriminating good people and unfair accusing of discrimination. No idea how to solve it.
On the other hand I heard that google is happy to hire not-so-young people, so I'm not sure that their corporate culture is really orbiting around the "20 years old bright people" standard I read about around the blogosphere.
This goes back to my personal doctrine of trying to say exactly what I mean. I find that some people try to solve problems by saying things designed to get a person to do what they want, but without being direct about it. On more than one occasion I've observed this has led to hurt feelings where I think the direct approach -- just ask for what you want -- would not. For example, if your coworker bothers you while you are trying to work, "Hey, could we talk later? I am trying to work," would probably be received a lot better than, "Damn, dude, you talk a lot." This example is contrived but I have observed concrete cases not too different from this a number of times.
Anyway, hopefully no one reading this article is stressing out about not having a demographically appropriate workforce, because it seems very unlikely that alone will be enough to get you into trouble.