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Interestingly, if you multiply 15 years by 365 days and the two hours a day mentioned at some point in the article, you get 10,950 hours, which is remarkably close to Malcolm Gladwell's claim from the book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become a superstar at something.

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Yes, and unlike singing, programming can be comfortably done for more than 2 hours a day, without much risk of long-term body/voice damage. :)

Although incorrect posture over 10,000 hours sounds like a recipe for RSI.

Watch out for the carpal tunnel.

The claim originally came from the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...).

Umm, that's a bit backwards -- the 10k hours number comes from research by K. Anders Ericsson et al, and the first papers mentioning this are from the early nineties, if not earlier (as for book references, it's discussed in Ericsson's "The Road To Excellence" that predates the Cambridge Handbook by a decade).

Yes, here's one of Ericsson's landmark papers on the topic, 1993:

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

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