[PebblesHD]

Whilst I agree that hiring someone based entirely on age is not the best way to get a great team, and that not all older people are worse than all young people when dealing with technology, your generalisation that 'Kids these days understand the Facebook and the Twitter, but they're deeply insulated from how computers actually work.' is flawed and almost entirely incorrect. Kids these days (in general) are no less informed about technology than the kids of 30 years ago. In general I'd say kids these days know many times more than kids of that period simply because they've been exposed to it for longer, and then the young people who are actually interested in computers know many times more than that.

[yellowapple]

That's all fine and dandy in theory, but from personal experience, I've found that it hasn't made much of a difference, probably for the same reason that the proliferation of automobiles has yet to result in the world's youth being proficient in automotive repair, or that the proliferation of the written word has yet to result in the world's youth being composed of poets and novelists.

The reason (in my observation, at least) is that being familiar with using something doesn't immediately translate to being familiar with creating something. Now, for a job where the using is important, a "digital native" might actually stand a chance (assuming that the something being used is similar enough to what he/she has used previously that patterns can be matched and the candidate's brain can perceive the thing being used as "intuitive" or "user-friendly"), but the article seems to imply the creation side of things (by referencing "media giants" and startups), where the skills don't completely cross over.