Presumably the ideas must also be old. ;)

Okay but that right there is where people discriminate. Unintentional or not, it's still discrimination.

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.

I don't understand what you're getting riled up about. It's obvious that the old ideas in question are meant to have been superseded or flat-out debunked (for example, the idea that black men can't marry white women is old in this sense, as is COBOL in this sense). I don't get mad that "green" (comes from young plants) is used to mean "inexperienced and unskillful." As long as they realize that doesn't mean any particular young person is that way, I don't see a problem worth getting mad over.

I completely agree with you, I also started to fear for my future as I'm entering in my 30ties, collecting experience and getting better and better every day.

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.