I doubt it. Google would be just fine if 99% of employees limited themselves to 40-hour weeks. People aren't productive-- not in the long term-- when pushed to work longer hours.

The age issue isn't about work hours; besides, I know plenty of older people who work quite a lot. It's about pliability, deference to authority, and not knowing what they're worth. There's also a bit of union-related fear in it. I think that the likelihood of Google unionizing is very low, but Silicon Valley's leaders are terrified of collective bargaining arrangements (even if they come in a form like the lightweight unions of Hollywood for actors and writers) and one of the best ways to prevent that is to avoid hiring older, seasoned people with the organizational skills and experience to pull it off.

Age discrimination also puts a harmful time pressure on workers. It encourages to take career risks (and, often, those risks are unwise for them) because, at least as things are presented to them, they have to do everything in the first third of a normal career or they will be cast aside. It's much easier to push someone into bad decisions (or, I should say, decisions where he'll defer to your expertise because he's out of his depth and scared) if you convince him that he'll probably never get another chance to be a founder, learn a new technology, program again, etc.

I look forward to the outcome of this suit. There's bound to be more gold dug up in discovery than there was for Ellen Pao. I hope it doesn't end in a settlement, because I want this issue to see enough air to set off a chain reaction and crush this age discrimination problem. After all, we're all going to get old.