It seems to me that, as others have suggested, this might be just a silicon valley bias, real or perceived.
At 32, my skills in both hard and soft outstrip anything a developer in their early twenties could match, no matter how passionate or innately skilled they are. There is a certain 'momentum' you pick up as you get older, especially if you have been constantly feeding it with new experiences, learnings and failures. Having confidence and the skill to back it up can only be obtained with a decade or two in the industry.
And if my contracting rates and employment prospects are anything to go by, employers recognise that.
I would say that in my late 30's I was hitting my peak in terms of raw ability and experience. At least as far as ability is concerned, I really didn't hit a downturn until much later. Now, getting on to 50, I'm noticing that my ability to deal with complexity is quite a bit diminished. But my tolerance for complexity is likewise diminished. When I would have accepted a poorly factored solution, now I scratch my head until I find a way that allows me to understand it.
When you get down to it, do you really want to tailor your code base to the top 1% of coders? How will you sustain that practice? By paying people 4 times as much? Even then you aren't going to nab all the amazing people. Hire some people who know how to dumb down your code base. It pays dividends.
>When you get down to it, do you really want to tailor your code base to the top 1% of coders?
I think I agree with your sentiment, but to me a "top 1% coder" is someone who knows how to make things simple and readable, and knows the best abstraction to use for the goal. It's not the person who can write and/or follow the most complicated code. To me complicated code is generally a sign of a poor coder. There are exceptions, but they're rare.
At 32, my skills in both hard and soft outstrip anything a developer in their early twenties could match, no matter how passionate or innately skilled they are. There is a certain 'momentum' you pick up as you get older, especially if you have been constantly feeding it with new experiences, learnings and failures. Having confidence and the skill to back it up can only be obtained with a decade or two in the industry.
And if my contracting rates and employment prospects are anything to go by, employers recognise that.