Experience has a lot to do with productivity, understanding, and the ability to come up with simple, elegant, and maintainable designs. The "22 years old, fresh out of school" programmer is more pointed at the inexperienced individual rather than age itself. I would say the same comments could apply equally to 38-year old programmers that just started work after graduating from a hacker school. The fact is, when so many problems are merely iterations of previous ones, how can you ignore the wisdom of people that have been doing the same work for 20-30 years? It's ludicrous to believe that the contributions coming from a fresh grad with no practical experience will be on par with the quality of the solutions from programmers much more experienced.