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> this behavior will be exhibited at a very young age, or not at all

That's so obviously false that I doubt she's saying it. I suspect it's more like: these qualities tend to come up in childhood, so if we want to see more of them, that's where we should focus.

Everything about your comment ("I figured out HTML on my own") makes me bet you that had these qualities in spades as a kid long before you had a computer. All this existed before computers, after all. I remember Jerry Weinberg saying that he knew he wanted to devote his life to computers from the day Time Magazine ran a futuristic cover story about them in the late 1930s. Another farm kid, as it happens. He went to college to study computers and found they didn't exist yet, so he majored in physics and bided his time until programming became a thing.

I wonder sometimes whether any of this is about childhood per se or the fact that children are more likely to do things out of play, to figure stuff out, see what will happen, and so on. If that's it, then we can dispose of the controversy by agreeing that people who come to programming purely as a career or (god forbid) for status will do worse not if they're too old, but if they're too uncurious.

What I'm trying to describe is the "by 20, it's too late to make a hacker" sentiment, which I do hear people say. So if I did have these qualities, and we're going to identify them after we've already established that I am a hacker, then it must be true that lots of other people also have these qualities, but did not become hackers.

My point: the notion that good hackers must be hacking on, and tinkering with, computers at a young age is probably too simplistic.

Actually, I made it a point to explain that it doesn't have to be computers...

"Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains."

There are many early maker/hacker experiences that don't require access to or interest in computers. The point was that, at some point early on, every hacker (maybe there's an outlier or three, but I'd be shocked if there were twenty) had some experience digging in and building or fixing or changing something.

For me, it started a long time before my exposure to computers. I grew up in a rural area. As early as toddlerhood, I was learning to cook, sew, make candles, weave on a loom, etc. I was making as early as I could hold things and be relied on to keep them out of my mouth. It never occurred to me to throw something away without trying to fix it first, because if something broke, my parents would fix it, and I'd watch or help.

It's not about computers and youth, it's about making/fixing/tinkering and youth.

And my point was that I don't think anyone could point to those behaviors in me until I was 16. Before then, I think I was inquisitive, but had never had an opportunity to make in the manner you're talking about.

I don't think I ever fixed, made or was curious about such things when I was a child. So I guess I'll just have to accept my fate of becoming a corporate programming drone that hackers will secretly or not so snicker at for being so clueless and unproductive, and to become unemployable or change careers at 40 because of my relative lack of passion for the craft. At least I've been warned.

Well, you could take everything incredibly personally for no obvious reason, or you could consider that no one is actually saying you have to be a "hacker" so-called to participate in the industry.

I think you misunderstand me. I said that I would end up as a "corporate programming drone" - clearly a programming drone is part of the industry. What I'm saying is that, while I could probably get into the industry (if I could stay there for my whole professional life I'm a little uncertain about - see my OP), it seems that I would forever be an inferior programmer because I don't have the necessary passion to become a great programmer (or "great hacker" - and I realize that they are not necessarily the exact same thing), as implied by the OP of this post and some/many others. But I want to devote my professional life to something that I'm sufficiently passionate about and where I can make a positive impact, not just be another worker bee that is kind of doing an okay job but is vastly inferior to a lot of the truly passionate programmers, who occasionally look down the nose at me for not being devoted or skilled enough. Is this so ambitious? I don't think so - I think many people deep down want to make an impact. I don't have ambitions of being the best, or require it. I don't even require that I have to be more than average. But I want to make a tangible impact, I want to feel a purpose. I don't want to wake up in 10 years and realize that my passion was simply not sufficient, that most or many of my peers are far surpassing me in my craft, and I simply have to accept a lifetime of inferiority, or to maybe have to change my career entirely.

I'm not out of university yet, and I think that I've found something that I can devote my career to. But then I read about these people that make me question my passion, because really, it can be hard to gauge how passionate you are compared to most other people. And if it turns out that they're insinuations are correct - that I really don't have the sufficient drive and passion to make a satisfying career out of this - maybe I'll need to get out now...

It's a kind of existential question: who am I and where do I belong? But if you want to dismiss this as just being overly sensitive, that's fine.

If you have a drive to make an impact and to feel a purpose, then I think you'll be fine. I think those traits go a long way.

I think her point was that we can't magically transform random person x, at the age of 22, into a hacker. Not that it can't happen at all, but also that it can't be forced. At least, that's how I chose to take the paragraph. Rarely when someone says "this doesn't happen", they mean it is impossible. Just unlikely.

If I've spent the last 10 years being interested in computers, it is unlikely that at the age of 22 I'm going to walk into a mechanic and decide then and there that I'm going to work on cars for the rest of my life. Does it happen though? Definitely. Is it common? Doubt it.

I didn't start to program until college, but I would absolutely describe myself as a math hacker starting in elementary school. It's the almost addictive problem-solving mentality that I associate with hacking, not 1s and 0s on a computer. I think if someone doesn't have that sort of mentality, they won't become a hacker no matter how early they're exposed to code -- and if they do have that mentality, they'll become a hacker of some sort whether or not code is the thing that ultimately holds their interest.

There's more to it than that though. She is talking about hacking not just in the context of programming, but in a range of activities that may lead somebody to program on their own. It's more about the spirit of it. It's possible to be a hacker making web pages, learning what the markup can do, building whatever level of interactivity you could without 'proper programming.' And, possibly, the most important part of it was the 'thrill' you got out of it.

Of course there may be women in her example that take to their first LUG meeting and go on to become hackers, but assuming that that will be the result, and planning entire social movements accordingly, seems like a bad bet.

I don't think "hacker" and "programmer" are completely synonymous. The "hacker" attributes that you definitely see in some children - taking apart things (although often failing to put them back together), building things, solving problems - often turn into careers in mechanical engineering, electronics, even sculpture. Programming is just one way of expressing that desire to create and tinker. I don't think all programmers are hackers, and many hackers aren't programmers.