There are three themes driving ageism in tech.

First, upper management and investorship doesn't understand engineering or technology. Accountants understand cost and risk, they do not understand oppertunity or business process. MBA's understand cost and risk, as well as any non-iterative business process with a defined start and end that is quantifiable; they are suited for running a company, not growing a company, and religous application of skills within that spectrum of capibility only creates tragedy and torture chambers (e.g. open floor plan offices). Any R&D process is by definition unquantifiable; you have 10 million workcenters infront of you and have to figure out the right routing, which may be iterative and require adjustments to the workcenter, to produce the widget. Figuring that out requires knowing where the bottlenecks are to constrain the problem, and that requires specialized knowledge and experience.

Accountants and MBA's are taught, religously, to view those things as "key man risk", and because of the ability of people to leave to go elsewhere to work for more money, that training staff is just a waste of money. It is vital to our industry that we take on interns as journeymen for a few years and guide them; the results are much better for all when they are taught how to think. This is antithetical to most organizations.

Any company that thinks this way is doomed to a slow death because nobody who is capible of managing the bottlenecks is going to work there; they will reverse engineer the company, find the bottlenecks, propose them, come across as pompous, then move on. Devoid of the experience of working with talent, the management, often coming from non-engineering management backgrounds, assumes programmers are factory, retail, logistics, or any kind of manual laborer and due to that, equates youth with maximum ROI.

They build torture chambers and hope to capture a few young geniuses then force out golden eggs. Think of MSP's that have no intellectual property or investment in technology, but hire IT folks and force them into bogus non-competes and other slaver working arrangements. Can't tell you how many times I've been look upon as the "whiz kid saviour" by some imbecile in their 50's or 60's coming from a non-engineering background who happens to have money. It's really patronizing, demoralizing, and absolutely disgusting. Nobody wants to work with that, and especially in a company that creates situations where the staff feel the only way out is bankrupting the place.

Second, you have highly levered\financialized companies. Facebook has almost no real world value aside from social entertainment, and nobody knows how to valuate the company. Because of this, goals cannot be clearly defined by the top brass of the organization; there's no long-term vision. Anyone who's seen a Zuckerberg press conference will call him a visionary; he comes across as a man-child trying to make sense of his dumb luck. Old engineers know, most importantly of all, how to have heated debates like an engineer and to discuss like an engineer. That threatens the management in these orgs because engineers, if left to their own whims, will form their own vision and experienced people know what works and how to be successful. They'll do things that can clearly be seen as progress and that reduces the importance of everyone else at the org in the eyes of the investorship. That too, becomes an engine for drama.

Finally, there's a severe shortage of good technical\engineering management around right now. Some of that is the above two reasons, but a lot of it has to do with things like IRS exemptions against allowing IT Staff to bill on a W11 obstensively because too many people were working as FTE at multiple companies working as specialists without benefits. Remember, one of the driving factors behind Austin Stack driving a Cessna into an IRS building was that very thing. Technology changes society drastically, and when you see management and leadership turning the nails on people, it's a response to this.

Feminism, for example, is a response to technology; first wave feminism was a response better materials science producing pressure vessels that created hard alcohol. Men ended up in the gutter escaping hard lives rather than dealing with them and it's no wonder when universal sufferage was passed, the first thing the ladies voted for and demanded was prohibition. Second wave feminism, e.g. equal pay for equal work, was driven by the obsolescance of muscle in manufacturing. That produces a discussion on what gender roles in a relationship are and ought to be (which by the way, the only people qualified to make that decision is the couple). Third wave feminism is a response to contraceptives and social media. GAO Does retirement security studies and did one in 2009 on the impact of fertility rates on retirement security and ended up publishing, then redacting, the fact that men with an 80th percentile income have a 50\50 shot, back in 2009, of procreating. You have lots of women inundated with too much selection via social media, and throwing everything they've got after it using contraceptives. It's logical, then, that intelligent hard-working men with money being given access to any women they want for anything they want would be demoralized about relationships and the quality of the breeding stock. The old addage of "building a family" or "building a man" has stopped being a concept and instead you have Maybelene, Gucci and Pornhub engaging in psychological warfare against young people to sell sex, hand bags, eye shadow and sex as a mental illness.

Government has been far outpaced by tech, and the key realization here is, it can take advantage of anyone irregardless of how smart you think you are. We really do not know what we're doing and it is total chaos out there.