"Cultural fit" is a legitimate reason to fire someone. While the jabs at age sound bad out of context, working at a place like Google while being stuck in the 60's mindset could cause problems
Also keep in mind, this happened almost a decade ago.
Given that they went into space and landed on the moon in the 60's, that decade might not be a bad place for your mind to rest. It was, in many ways, much more visionary than the times in which we now live.
Not to mention that quite a few groundbreaking technologies were invented in the 60's.
With that said, I do agree that if someone doesn't fit into the culture, that can cause big problems. But, as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the way to avoid that problem is by not hiring those people in the first place.
I didn't mean that from a visionary perspective as much as a practical one. For instance, stick someone who's programmed in FORTRAN and COBOL all their life and then set them loose on a newer OO language. The mindset is completely different there. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly a great deal harder than having a blank slate - and the age makes this a greater problem. The person this article references would be 60+ by now. Entire pillars of programming have shifted since the 60's and now.. that's a lot of damn time in the tech world.
>the way to avoid that problem is by not hiring those people in the first place.
Some things you can't find out until you've actually got someone working with you day by day. You can minimize this somewhat with a decent interview process, but i'd say "culture fit" is one of those concepts that you can't really twig in an interview or two.
Same with me.. I started out with BASIC, and it's taken a lot of time to unlearn some of the bad habits introduced there. (Didn't Dijkstra say something about that?)