FWIW my company does embedded development and we take in many older engineers because of our skill base working with low level hardware and unmanaged code that much of the younger crowd is lacking.
I suspect that the trouble is that, while work like yours does favor the pre-Ruby/JavaScript generation, there just isn't a whole lot of it. It is probably growing in absolute numbers though, while the supply of low-level near-metal experience is not.
Yeah, I can imagine. About half the kids (adults, really -- it was a grad course) in a systems programming course I took had that deer in the headlights look in the computer lab sitting at a Unix prompt. Not that they couldn't figure it out, but there was a definite learning curve.