> Places want to hire younger people because they're more apt to work longer hours for less pay.
This is the best light you can shine on the discrimination. Most often it really is managers taking their “seniority” literally. As in, they don’t want to take the risk their reports are smarter, more experienced or capable of replacing them, so they discriminate on the basis of age. It’s counterintuitive, but this feels truest from my historical observation.
I wonder if this is really true or just an off-the-cuff comment (no disrespect). I have worked for a number of major tech companies and have never seen this in practice. Some managers were older, some were younger, some the same age. In most/all cases, people were hired based on their technical skills not because they fell into some magical age gap.