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.

Age and experience have everything to do to come up with efficient software architectures, except on trivial problems. Every coder I know (and I know 2 that are world class) look at his/her old code with regrets, and a kind an awe saying "What I was thinking ?".

You will improve with time. Coding is no different than any skill.

While age might not have anything to do with productivity, experience definitely has. Especially when it comes to recognizing which problems are worth solving and giving (appropriate) pushback to product owners and managers.

Think of it as an apprenticeship: university doesn't give you the experience to jump in as a senior dev, but you'll eventually get there with practice and mentorship from an experienced dev.

Every 22 year old thinks they can do everything just as well coming out of school...very rarely are they right, and looking back just 5 years later provides a lot of different perspective.

So you have no experience and you are just as involved in design? I could see that maybe for UX, but not for engineering. Either your entire team is inexperienced or they are just patronizing you.

Fresh out of school does not necessarily mean "no experience." Many students have written a lot of software before even entering college, and then work as developers during school, leaving with 2-3 years of development experience.

Or maybe I'm involved in design because I've proved I can handle complexity, know when an abstraction would be needed, and got good fitting ideas to work my way out of a problem.

If schools don't teach you that, what's their purpose? (genuine question, I'm from a "special" school in France, and I've definitively been trained with that goal in mind (ie: gathering real world experience))

Experience on the other hand has a lot to do with all those things.