Asahi and Alyssa are the titans of reverse engineering. Their work is pretty unbelievable. I would bet Apple is planning to hire them, or has tried already and they refused.
Most of these types cut their teeth in their younger days - doesn't really mater if it is sports, musical instruments, art, coding, or whatever. If you spend 6-12 hours a day doing something, seven days a week, from you're 10 years old - you'll be pretty damn fantastic by the time you're college aged.
A lot of people diversify, which is good for the mind, but bad if you have to compete for success.
Other people choose very unforgiving fields: want to live a life playing the guitar? Tough luck.
Some other people realize they don't like a hobby or job past some point, but turning over decades of skill to start a new path places them in a huge disadvantage.
It's not a person's fault to not choose the right career path when they're naturally too young to foresee their future in the field.
I personally feel pretty lucky to have chosen computers and technology for my vocation. If, for any chance in life, were to choose anything different when I was 12, then my life would have been entierly different.
Don't measure yourself against others, it's a recipe for stress. Instead, understand your core values and measure yourself by how you live up to them.
If we could put a number on kindness, we could make a better economy.
Also, isn't she a high schooler/freshman? There's always internships but it's best to do other things before grinding those out.
And this is kind of a valuable skill, considering how many coders don't understand their codebase even with docs.
It's not a negative of course.
Ask Mark Russinovich, now Azure CTO
I agree, her kind of people will find the money and better work without corprate bureocracy.
Not saying that's the case here; just that "amazing programming" doesn't necessarily mean "Apple wants to employ them".
Anyone with a talent, should rather seek to incorporate and sell their services at fair price.
Unfortunately in some countries, big corporations managed to lobby governments to put a stop to that.
Certainly you can hire people to do those functions, but you need to have a decently well-established reputation and enough work and income before you're able to hire those people.
Employment does give you a trade off there: less money in exchange for someone else handling the "overhead".
I think it’s the opposite - developers are overvalued.
We all know that their engineers are paid well, but that's still potentially more than an order of magnitude off of the value they generate. Of course, there are many other expenses to running their business, but to claim that broadly developers are overvalued when one of the most prolific employers of developers is generating 10x+ the revenue of what they spend on them, is likely no more than only occasionally correct.