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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

It seems that as a college freshman he was already a competent programmer.

That was not uncommon back in those days. Personal computers in particular were a relatively small niche. Given the limitations of application and difficulty to use, a much higher proportion of those who could use a computer could also program one.

Most of my computer friends and I were decent programmers by the time we entered college in the early 90's.

It must be fairly common even now for people doing CS degrees, right? I didn't do CS, but I'd been programming for 5 years by the time I started college (I partly didn't study CS because I already knew how to program to a reasonable standard...)

Back in my day, almost exactly 10 years ago, relatively few college freshman had significant experience coding, beyond understanding basic syntax (probably <10%). Most of the most blatantly experienced coders were bored for the first couple months and dropped the course/school to make heaps of money, not realizing understanding syntax is like 2% of Computer Science. So the people most vocal about how easy the coursework was were at a significant disadvantage in the long run.

But it just goes to show that that 2% is all you needed to make heaps of money ;)

I mean heaps of money is relative to a college student fresh out of high school. Everyone I personally know who went that route seriously regrets it and hit a glass ceiling within 3 years of working. Their careers tanked before the rest of us even got started.

It’s not common in Australia at least. I wrote my first code in year 1 of CS. Most people in my class were in the same boat. Tutored the course after graduating and it was the same; in a class of 30 you’d usually see 1 or 2 who had any prior knowledge and breezed through it.

This was 10 years ago but I doubt it’s changed significantly. I think there’s also lots of people who don’t enroll because they think prior knowledge is required, which is a hard barrier to overcome.

I took my first programming class in 1983, after school while in the 2nd grade I guess (then reinforced by a BASIC/Pascal course in a Mississippi high school). Being just BASIC, I still had a leg up when I did C in college 10 or so years later.

Ironically, my second “better” Seattle-area high school had given up on programming as something to teach, I’m sure they’ve changed their tune now :).

Sure, in the 1980s the schools I went to in small-town Indiana had plenty of Apple IIs (and the Acer clones) that anyone could use. Kids magazines in the public library would usually have BASIC source code in the back that you could type in to get a simple game or logic puzzle.

Like most educational institutions they used June fiscal years, so they would buy technology near the end of the fiscal year with leftover money. Those computers would sit unopened in their boxes until September, unless you offered to take it home for the summer. I'd guess that I had a brand-new IBM PC (that cost 25-30% of our family income) at least half of the summers. You were kind of doing the school a favor - they didn't need to worry about storing it somewhere and you did the work to set it up and make sure it worked. And if a kid wanted to learn over summer vacation, they certainly wanted to help facilitate if they could.

Despite all that, I can remember going to the state programming contests in Indianapolis in 5th, 6th, 7th grades and being blown away by how much better than me all the other kids were.

Most of my peers had maybe a single class worth, if that, of programming experience by the time they started college to pursue CS. I would say the majority didn't. I wasn't at a university with heavy focus on computer science, so maybe it depends on the institution and the caliber of students.

Yeah, it's common to see people who already know how to code in college. Plenty of us are working on real cs projects, and with the internet, its easier than ever with the amount of resources we have to learn with.

Maybe it’s different at other companies but in my company the people with fresh CS degrees barely know how to code.

Maybe if you had the money to grow up with a computer and had people around to help you. I didn’t program until 1991 in Turbo Pascal. It was a terrible experience and somehow it was something you were supposed to already know. On the Vax or Unix machines in the lab, literally nobody was helpful. If you asked a question people would bark “read the man page.”

When I was a freshman in 1995 'could program a computer' usually meant being able to write simple routines in BASIC or Pascal, not developing parallel algorithms in C for supercomputers.

At the time Brin was a grad student, as you said, it was not-uncommon, but also not the norm, even in top departments.

The students who had programming experience from other than just their classes had a big advantage for systems work, compared to other students.

Though there were also a lot of students who had only undergrad programming experience, and had a lot more learning to do. Which is perfectly fine, so long as they know they have something to learn, and want to keep improving.

(The only annoying ones are those who treat professional and collaborative work like they're only trying to pass a class -- including the analog of only trying to get a homework assignment past the TA -- and think this is what everyone does. I suspect the ones I've seen would pass a leetcode CS101 interview just fine, because it's pretty similar metrics as getting into and passing CS classes.)

Is that an unreasonable expectation? Programming is the easy bit, no? (Not including design and style)

I don't know, solving parallel algorithms homework assignments was one of the most mentally challenging things I've ever done. My brain was literally overheating sometimes :)

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