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Comment by kevinwang | Hacker News Reader

No, this article is baseless. Teenagers can be great coders, just like adults can be.

Swartz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Tourist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich

George Hotz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

And really, the "teenage coding god" meme is just a specific instantiation of the concept of young prodigies. Terrence Tao, Mozart, Ramanujan, Bobby Fischer. So the claim that teenagers can't be competent at their art because of their youth seems silly.

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For any meaningful discussion on this subject to take place, we have to first specify what we mean by "great coders". The skillset required to win programming competitions is very different than what it takes to build maintainable & scalable production systems.

Mathematics has a similar phenomenon. Not every great performer at the IMO (and similar) becomes a great researcher, although overall they certainly do better than the average. And even the most prodigious IMO performers rarely do any meaningful research until after completing a PhD later in life.

Terence Tao is an example of someone extremely prodigious at math competitions who also ended up being one of the world's best researchers. And he also didn't really do meaningful research until after his PhD.

I think "better than the average" is an understatement. I think they do much, much, much better than the average. While not very great IMO performer becomes great researcher (example: a friend of mine with 2 gold medals who didn't finish his Ph.D. because of mental illness), I think that most of them do become good researchers, if they choose a career in research. Of course, many go and join Wall Street or Sillicon Valley, so it's hard to say what their potential could have been.

I think the difference is that the article is saying that truly "great" programmers come with experience. Experience you can't have at 15.

Which is something I can get behind.

The 15 year old programmer can most DEFINITELY be a "prodigy" and will without hesitation have a leg up on most people - including the fact that (s)he will get the experience "sooner" than most. At 25, (s)he will have a decade of experience. At 37, I'm coming up on 6ish years of experience as a programmer (Late bloomer and what not).

That doesn't change the fact that being a "prodigy" doesn't give the breathe and depths of experience that comes with... well... time and age.

The meme skips over the reality that such genius is often accompanied by serious side effects and mental illness. The thing that makes them a prodigy is the thing that breaks them in other ways. So to the OP's credit, you wouldn't want a company staffed with prodigies, but to the memes credit, you would want at least one if you're able to support their unconventional needs.

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