"As a result, we do find that we face a shortage of older, more seasoned developers. And it's not because we don't want older candidates. It's often because the older candidates haven't successfully modernized their developer skills.' "
I think us older developers bring a lot to the table young padawan.
First of all, development isn't just about coding and what languages/skills you know. How you USE those skills is important and comes with experience. Countless times I start a new job or contract and see younger developers making the same mistakes with the following:
Insufficient or non-existant logging.
Bogus error messages ( HTTP 500 anyone? ) or no error handling at all
Bad SQL and File system I/O leading to performance issue.
Over reliance on tools to generate code/in-ability to understand generated code.
No bug tracking.
Poor source control or no source control.
Lack of testing methodology/skills - nobody wants to QA, only unit testing.
Poor change management - things thrown into production.
Secondly, Wow, really? We don't learn new skills? I am in my 40's and I frequently encounter developers in their 60's and 70's still out there coding with modern languages. As for myself, I'm in my mid 40's and I've only managed to learn and use and put into production code written with the following languages: ( Note I still like to work in the yard and do things outside of work. )
Cobol,
C,
C#
C++
Java,
Java Script
Python
Visual Basic
Various Unix shell scripts ( SH, KSH, Bash )
I also know HTML/CSS well enough to build a web site, I just don't really like web side programming - I'm more of a server side developer.
I have also done some coding in the following languages and tools but decided not to use them either because I didn't like them, they are obsolete, or they were not very relevant to the work I am currently doing:
Assembly
Basic
Perl
Ruby/Rails
TCK/TK
Visual Basic
Third, why is being a Google or Facebook considered a sign of success these days? Yes, the salary and benefits might be good, but experience has taught me that usually the only people that really benefit are the founders and the first or second wave of developers. Then everyone "jumps" on and the stock equity gets diluted. Besides, not everyone wants to live on the West coast and spend 1 million for a house and pay some of the highest state taxes in the nation.