About this:

"ideally they'll have been programming since before college"

Lot's of people get into computer programming as a second career. Rich Hickey, who created the Clojure language, studied music when he was in college. Later, when he was working at a music studio, he got serious about writing code in C++, and from that experience he developed his opinions about the flaws of object oriented programming, and the possible benefits of immutable data.

Your remark says a lot about the hunger for stereotypes in the tech industry. As if everyone is suppose to follow the same path to a career in computer programming.