[Spoom]

Devil's advocate: Asking highly academic questions allows employers to be ageist without explicitly stating it, since college grads are likely to be the most familiar with them. This lets them select for younger candidates with less experience and thus drive down developer salary.

(Standard disclaimer: Some development positions actually require the academic knowledge mentioned. Most of the time, though, a good developer will use a well-tested library instead of rolling their own.

[lmm]

Why would they want or need to be ageist about it? If it's just about paying low salaries, surely all they need to do to accomplish that is offer low salaries?

(If anything my experience is that older developers have a stronger tendency towards implementing academically known datastructures themselves, whereas younger developers are more likely to make more use of libraries)

[manufacturious]

Longer hours, less willing to stand up to borderline abusive labor practices?