Embedded hardware companies are skewed to an older demographic because you can't hire significant numbers of younger engineers with the necessary knowledge.
As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed slowly from the 1940s to the 1980s when micro-electronics began to democratize and challenge the established players making the financial benefits of (non-wartime) warp-speed innovation clear for the first time in history (previously, it was taught that the risks of fast innovation far exceeded any benefit), but highly skilled workers (101% of workforce) were slow to want to deviate from their established work paradigms or risk their mortgage on a dicey startup job even with VC backing. First Steve (Jobs), then Bill (Gates) began to have luck pairing these workers with, then managing them with and ultimately replacing them with kids that had way more talent than experience (a mistake that Steve did not repeat after the “classic” MacOS disaster and being fired —and that Bill “outgrew”).
I could go on for hours about this, but what you are seeing today (an industry filled with mostly young people) is not a result of “under 50” workers (as you put it) being better, indeed it is a market aberration (that you may not be able to realize from your perspective in The Matrix) that arose by the rank-in-file being forced out during the dot-com crash in 2000 and new college grads not commencing for more than half a decade later. Watching the industry (slowly) “come back” with future pear-shaped gurus has been one of the great satisfactions in my long career. (Who needs Star Trek timewarp plots?)
PS: BTW, I have over 40 years of experience and am not eligible for the senior menu at IHOP anytime soon —though being GenX, I am also holding a reference to a Promise that, by the time I get to that age, they will have changed the qualifying age! -and yeah, the older presenters at WWDC mostly creeped me out too —though it may just be that they are required to stay healthy and not pear-shaped by the AppleWatch team.
I don't know a lot of this sounds like reverse ageism. Facebook was built entirely on young, talented engineers who could perhaps scale out software better than "experienced" developers. Same goes for a lot of Google products. The barrier of entry for software development is much lower and you can pretty much hit the ground running with a few good math and algorithms courses and good internships. You can become a good software architect with a few years of experience -- even the best are barely 50 years of age (Jeff Dean, for example).
I am not sure why this trend didn't translate towards hardware but if I were to guess - the jobs are fewer, the barriers of entry are higher (no one really teaches hardware design in school) and the cost of mistakes is bigger.
No rational person that has lived through age discrimination would engage in any kind of ageism and again, my career spans over 40 years. (How many people my age in the Fortune 500 company 40 years ago? ZERO! Maybe down in mailroom or something, but they weren't even allowed in the tech areas so I would have to assume.) I also strongly disagree with your assertion that Google has "young" engineers developing "a lot of Google products", at least in the sense that they are doing so without guidance from experienced engineers. As far as Facebook, I don't find their stuff very interesting (though I thank them for helping to all but destroy HP with their open hardware) --it's a website with a big power bill and a non-ACID database, right?
I don't know if I agree with that statement, engineers can be invested in, university programs etc. If a company is growing and expanding, they're going to need to draw on a lot of engineering and R&D talent.
And in my case it doesn't apply, the equipment we're evaluating was all software, running on a common x86 telecom platform. While I'm sure the office did have some embedded R&D, alot of what telecom vendors do just requires software developers.
