"[W]hatever that may mean," indeed. It doesn't mean anything, and that's the problem. "The right sort of people," is what it really says, and it's not the first time in history that it's been used. All stereotypes are ineffective and self-defeating. If in your own mind you've associated "good engineers == tech native == young" then you'll probably miss out interviewing a lot of good engineers. And from their perspective that definitely constitutes discrimination. They never have a chance to demonstrate what they can do.
I think this is fortunately pretty rare in actual practice. I'm 58 and speak from some experience.
I suppose it's because we were self selecting as being interested in tech and as the tech was more primitive had to know more about it to get it working.
Even so, if you want to employ somebody who knows how to make the technology sit up and dance, employ somebody over 40 who was using computers when they were 10. If you want to employ somebody who knows how to read twitter and facebook then just pick the next kid in the street with their head buried. Good luck in getting their attention long enough for them to do your work though.
If my first immersion in tech was BASIC on a PDP-8 in the 70's when I was 12, does that make me tech-native or not?
If you are looking for somebody to do your social media campaign, then go with the "tech native". If you are looking for somebody to develop the next blockbuster social media platform, maybe you will need somebody who has done time in the trenches learning how to develop robust software.
And if they don’t actually believe in the tech native concept, why would they use it? You think they dislike people over 40 out of principle and just come up with excuses to avoid them, even when they fit their profile?
Wow! I rarely openly disagree with strangers on the internet but wow! I am currently focused on improving diversity and inclusion within my teams and the diversity of thought, approaches and outcomes that are a direct result of this effort are a delight. Progress may not always be in the right direction or slower than one expects but zigging and zagging towards the right thing is a reward in its own.
In the moving company example, it would be a mistake to optimize exclusively for physical strength in the hiring process - you're going to want someone who can work out the dimensions of things in their head to tell whether that table is going to fit through that door frame, someone who can put the homeowner at ease while you put their priceless heirlooms on a truck, etc.
In knowledge work, which is the domain I daresay most of us around here will actually be applying this to, there are far more of these variables, many of which are invisible to us. They impact a team's ability to, for example, devise innovative and robust solutions to problems by drawing on a wide range of inspirations, or design products that appeal to target markets beyond what any one team member might be familiar with. Valuing a diverse staff makes a reasonable proxy for these hidden variables.
Your argument, as I understand it, is that a company has the right to choose some characteristic and require that characteristic to be present at or above some standard level in all of the employees it hires. Which is fine, so long as it isn't one of these [0] (in which age is included).
However, I would argue that a term like "tech-native" is not a characteristic - it's a label, and it's loaded from the start. Imagine the moving company puts out a job ad saying that they're looking for "powerlifters" or "muscleheads" or something. What they _mean_ by that (or what they think they mean) is that they want people who are physically strong, regardless of any other characteristic. What they're _saying_ is that they want men, and no woman is going to read that posting and think that the poster is expecting women to apply. And when the candidate gets to the interview, the interviewer is going to try out that label on that candidate, and the label will inevitably be overloaded with connotations far beyond "physical strength" - with the best will in the world, the interviewer will end up selecting men at even a higher rate than they apply, because "masculinity" is part of the implicit set of characteristics attached to that label. The use of language in the want ad, rightly or wrongly, appeals to a certain type of candidate, and not only indicates but reinforces a preference for that type of candidate.
What would have been wrong with just saying "Must be able to lift 100 lbs", or "Must be comfortable with social media"? The term "tech-native" is an opaque neologism that doesn't mean anything other than the big ball of mixed-up stereotypes the HR person had in their head when they typed it, and a company that asks for "tech-natives" either doesn't know what they really want, or isn't willing to tell us straight out. Either way, we should be celebrating companies who don't use bs terms like that, which is exactly what OP is doing.
It sounds like OP was arguing along those lines in her last paragraph.
But that’s untenable, if we consider that discrimination then we can’t advertise for people with skills in anything related to IT since 9 out 10 people with the skill will be men, yet it’s quite reasonable to want your web developer to know Javascript.
There are plenty of female powerlifters...
This is just as silly as complaining that a moving company only hires people that are strong enough to lift a piano and women complain about sex discrimination because women tend to be much weaker.
It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else.