Technical entitlement is only a problem if you let it be. Understand that the guy boasting about x at age y (or whatever) is doing so only because he seeks (needs) your approval. It's the old social status game. Your approval is his validation.

I guess I've been lucky in that I started to program (for myself) because I was just... interested. I never studied CS or maths or, well, anything. But here I am, 22 years of programming later still not giving a damn that you can do language a or pattern b that I've never heard about.

I've come across this elitism thing so many, many times and the cool thing with age is that it (age) is inversely proportional to the give-a-shit-o-meter.