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Comment by frenchy | Hacker News Reader

> We overvalue people who have been "hacking since middle school"

Nothing specifically Dark Ages about this. I think that's true with many fields. It's the theme of the child prodigy. A painter, a violinist, an athelete would all be given special notice if the excelled at these skills at a young age. One would expect an excellent engineer to grow up playing with legos or building toy bridges.

Perhaps this is a practice that doesn't do us any good, and should be done away with, but it is not at all limited to programming.

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As to engineers, while people might expect that correlation to exist, no company actually cares whether a candidate played with legos as a kid. It would be absurd to even bring it up in an interview. Engineering companies expect that any skills you need to do the job will either have been taught in school, or will be taught to you by the company.

What's "dark ages" is grouping programmers together with painters or violinists or athletes rather than other engineers. It's the result of not having a systematic theory of the skills necessary for the profession, and not having a way of taking people with the requisite mathematical aptitude and instilling those skills in a formal way.

Do middle-schoolers who will be doctors take apart animals in their spare time? Do the future-lawyers sue people?

Violinists, painters (presumably the artist type, not the outside-of-my-house type), and athletes are in career paths vastly different from engineers, doctors, or lawyers. There are very few people who actually support themselves with careers in the former.

Even though I have been coding since 2nd grade, I'd hate for that to become some kind of career filter to keep people out.

As someone who grew up thinking he wanted to be an attorney (until I realized how much paper work there was), I grew up participating in debate club and mock court. My sister grew up wanting to be a doctor and would research various illnesses and learn all about them; she is now in school for medicine. This sort of thing might not happen in every field, but the two you pointed to are probably not the best examples, since both of these behaviors are pretty common for kids interested in law and medicine.

The career path is different, but mindset is very similar. As far as mindset goes, I find I have a lot more in common with the artist or musician than with the doctor or lawyer.

And much like the artist or actor, but probably unlike the lawyer or doctor, I'd probably pursue my technical passions (at least as a hobby) even if there was very little money in it.

A "practice"? It's called reality.

There's a reason why most top professional athletes started their sports at a very young age. It isn't coincidence or societal convention.

That analogy doesn't fly. Top professional athletes are truly exceptional in a way programmers are not. They're the 0.01%. They're a good analogy to maybe Fields Medalists, not people working at Facebook.

I mentioned "top athletes", since they're a very visible part of the curve where we can demonstrate that longevity in a field from an early age increases likelihood of success.

I would expect that all levels of athletic performers would benefit likewise - although they won't end up in the top 0.01%.

We like to flatter ourselves and think that programming isn't a skill like athletic performance, but that's just because it makes us feel better since it's harder to measure.

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