From my personal experience, this is utter bullcrap. At my first real programming job in a somewhat large company, we were an Android team of 6 developers aged 20-25 (the 25 y.o. guy was the team leader) and one dude aged 40. It was very easy to get along with him, even though we couldn't really relate to the problems of having a teenage daughter. I wouldn't call these cultural differences problematic at all - actually having an older person's perspective on your team can be quite beneficial, young people are often too impulsive for their own good.
Most of us were juniors facing our first professional coding gig. The older guy's experience was invaluable because he already knew a bunch of languages, had used lots of different SDKs and had made a ton of mistakes, so we could and did learn a lot from him. The only thing that struck me as silly was that he was a 'Junior Developer' by job title since he also wasn't experienced in the concrete platform, even though he could code circles around us newbies.
I haven't ever worked in a 20-something only culture. I was the young guy when I joined my company, most of the team was in their 30s, some in their 40s. Over time it helped me grow as an individual, and it also helped me to grow professionally. Anyone who's had a few more years of experience probably has something wise to share with you, whether they know it or not. Hell even those with less experience often have a different perspective that is worth listening to. I guess what I'm trying to say is none of us should live in an echo chamber and we should all try to be open-minded (but maybe that's a little heavy-handed).
I've worked at three different small (<10 people) startups, every time with most employees 18-26 and one older at 35-48, all three times in three different roles. Never did it come up. Never did it ever cross my mind, nor seem to be a problem, to me or anyone, that this person was older than the rest of us. We got along great.
Age is only a cultural issue if you make it one. As it turns out, when you evaluate people on less superficial things than age, skin color or gender, this simply doesn't come up.
I've talked about this before and I've heard crazy shit like "what if the person in question has to go back to wife&kids rather than go out for drinks - it's a cultural misfit" and honestly... what the fuck. Not going out, not participating in out-of-office activities, who cares? I avoid most parties (or only go to show up) because I intensely dislike them. That doesn't make me older than the rest of my team, and if someone thinks it's an issue they're probably someone I don't want to work with.
There's extremes (such as extremely antisocial people) you can't always accomodate, but that usually has nothing to do with age.
I bet that usual 35+yr developer is a better developer than <25yr one. Company's task is to make money. Employee's task is to do the job and get paid for it. Where's "culture" here? Drinking beers, organizing parties, etc. is a waste of company's resources.
It can but there's some downsides. Not everyone likes drinking beers and parties with coworkers. For those people it does the opposite of improve morale.
The best way to improve morale is ample vacation time and good work-life balance.
That's something I learned while interviewing at tech companies. They all have tons of perks but when I talked with the employees 2/3 of the people I talked to (I actually counted) complained about work/life balance at some time. I would rather work a sane amount of hours a week and have more vacation than have a rock-climbing coffee bar at work or whatever the perks are now.
I think what the poster meant is that the twenty-somethings will just want to hack things up on the quick in Python or Rust while the old guy says whoa, let's sit down and write a specification first, and think about how we could architect this thing, and let's make OS packages out of all the components.
Sorry, I'm not clear on what you mean: they think that the old guy will write the specification and architect everything, or they think he will hack stuff together with them?
I guess that's probably correct. The old guy will appear to be slow because he'll want to think things through before digging his fingers into the keyboard, where the young guys are just fury of a tornado, but absolutely no plan.
And planning is 50% of the work.
However, I'm not being completely fair: my experience working in Silicon Valley with 20-somethings was extremely positive. At first, they were suspicious that it was taking me an entire day what they normally do in two hours, but they did it by manually hacking. What I was doing is writing a program which, based on data, generated another program to actually perform the work. I could just tell that they thought I was full of crap, because programs which program sounds completely esoteric.
What they didn't know was that the subject of programs which program, and data driven programming, is ancient history for old guys like me: open any European computer enthusiast magazine (64'er, Dator, anyone?) from the '80's and you're almost guaranteed to find at least one treatise on the subject in almost every issue, in one form or another.
But I digress; after that one day, their jaw dropped when I would perform the same amount of work that would take them two hours to an entire day... in three minutes. Every time.
Next they wanted to know how I did it. AWK and shell. Say what?!? What is AWK?
And this is where our story really begins: I always purposely kept enough free space at my desk, and an extra chair, so that anyone from all over the company could just pick up their laptop, walk over to me and plop themselves down next to me with whatever problem they were trying to solve. I also gave them homework. Pretty soon everyone was walking around with Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's little Grey AWK book and used it as a reference. Then it was ANSI C 2nd edition's turn. Throughout it all, I kept teaching. There were whiteboard 1:1 classes on data structures. Then on algorithms. I loved it. And because this is regular work, I thought the exact theory that they needed to implement in order to solve the problem they were working on.
When it came time for some of the guys to switch jobs, go back to school, or go home, there were tears on both sides. I had had really devoted, bright young students, eager to learn, and I loved to teach; enthusiasm can be contagious given one is surrounded by right people. It was such a wonderful experience, and I think it was so for both sides.
I've had some pretty positive experiences working with older colleagues, so I'm totally in favor. I think the relationship can be better than either side alone because one tends to fill in the other's gaps.
Having been on both sides of the table, I can attest to it. When I was a young developer interviewing more experienced developers, I would foresee the hassle of arguing with him on everything day to day and that would instantly give negative weight to his candidacy. The irony is that I realized I had this subconscious bias only after I got older. On the other hand, when an older guy is getting interviewed by a potential peer, he should do everything in his power to appear coachable (gasp!) and flexible. The situation may be slightly different if you are being interviewed by a mid-level exec or a senior manager for a senior role in the team.
I don't know that there's anything quick about Rust. I'd probably be more inclined to use it for the second kind of project you're talking about than the first.
What sort of "culture" do you need in your workplace other than "get along with your co-workers, be respectful, and get your work done?" You are interviewing colleagues not drinking buddies.
If you're hiring someone 15+ years older than the rest of your team, there are going to be some cultural differences.