I suspect it is a deep seated human tendency to look up to and defer to the experience of those who are older than you (parents, community elders), so people are naturally uncomfortable with "senior underlings". Junior bosses will inevitably feel their decisions and position threatened by people older than them, especially in more general settings.
Throw in the conflation of skill with seniority, leading to an expectation of adjusting wage to age (not skill), our culture's infatuation with youth and the reliance on heuristics to save time and you have a situation highly unsuited to our present job-hopping lifestyles. Finding a job is more about "who you know, not what you know", which just makes things worse since age groups tend to cluster. This then gets explained as "cultural fit".
IME HR is all about risk avoidance. HR is not about finding the best candidate, it is concerned about finding the safest. The older folk may be the best, but they are not the safest, because they tend to have empty patches in their resume and the soft skills like wisdom, communication skills, tend not to be expressible in resume form.
It's never easy going against ingrained norms, especially when they are held by other people. Until the current millenial tech companies hit middle age, I don't see things changing much. Business opportunity?
Throw in the conflation of skill with seniority, leading to an expectation of adjusting wage to age (not skill), our culture's infatuation with youth and the reliance on heuristics to save time and you have a situation highly unsuited to our present job-hopping lifestyles. Finding a job is more about "who you know, not what you know", which just makes things worse since age groups tend to cluster. This then gets explained as "cultural fit".
IME HR is all about risk avoidance. HR is not about finding the best candidate, it is concerned about finding the safest. The older folk may be the best, but they are not the safest, because they tend to have empty patches in their resume and the soft skills like wisdom, communication skills, tend not to be expressible in resume form.
It's never easy going against ingrained norms, especially when they are held by other people. Until the current millenial tech companies hit middle age, I don't see things changing much. Business opportunity?