[jimbokun]

"They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things, whereas younger developers will happily be able to switch in between tasks while waiting for the previous task to finish compiling/running without problems."

The younger developers get confused/much slower when they work on multiple things, too, they just don't realize it. I'm pretty sure there is experimental data showing that everyone performs worse when they switch tasks often.

I actually just watched The Social Network for the first time a couple of nights ago, and one of the things I appreciated most about the movie is how they would yell at people who tried to interrupt someone who was coding with a question ("Don't interrupt Chris, he's in the zone!"). I suspect that attitude had a lot to do with the productivity needed to get Facebook off the ground, and they were certainly all young people.

(Or maybe the writers of The Social Network just made it all up.)