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Comment by makeitsuckless | Hacker News Reader

Are we doing this again? The whole thing is a straw man argument which deliberately conflates having talent with acknowledging talent.

It does so with such patently absurd examples (people who's totally obvious programming talent is not recognized for some insane, usually just sexist, reason), that one assumes the author already knows he's making this shit up.

Added to the mix is the red herring about being a "mediocre programmer". Being a mediocre musician still requires talent, mediocrity doesn't mean shit when asking the question if something requires talent. I personally have a talent for drawing an painting, but I'm a shit artist because I have no artistic creativity and I haven't made the effort to hone my skills.

Although I seriously doubt it, there may be a good argument to be made that programming does not require talent. But this isn't is, this is just political garbage with no merit whatsoever.

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I wish people would stop insisting that there is such a thing as talent.

People who try hard at something and put a lot of time in to doing and learning about that thing, will improve.

Some people are a lot more interested / motivated and so will try harder, spend more time and will be better than others. This should not be mistaken for some innate "talent".

I agree, and even if there _is_ talent to some degree, insisting that people simply aren't talented enough for something just does us a disservice when they simply need to work at it.

"Oh no, I'm not that talented, I couldn't possibly do that!"

It's just a way of shooting people down prematurely, either by the people themselves because they believe they simply can't, since they believe it's some stupid innate thing, or because others tell them "you're not talented enough, stop trying.".

It's dangerous and it deprives us of a lot of actual talent, who simply believe they could never be.

Not to mention the fact that people move this to a ridiculous degree where they say "10x programmer", but this doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a 10x programmer in all of the field, merely where they've been so far. This needs to stop.

It's because there is an enormous body of evidence that talent exists. It exists in the form of different levels of cognitive processing, in different levels of hand eye coordination, in, you get the idea. We know this exists. We can voluntarily affect cognitive processing with cocaine or oxygen deprivation, and involuntarily affect it with things like strokes or head damage (some head damage leads to mastery of skills like music, though most usually it is damaging). Any number of tests show that people learn at different rates, rates predicted by cognitive abilities. I've excelled at things I didn't much care about or practice, and lagged on stuff that I put my heart and soul into.

I've noticed the same thing: amongst the people I know, proficiency in programming appears to be almost directly proportional to the time spent doing it. Same with proficiency in visual arts. Perhaps it'd make more sense to refer to some programmers as 10x interest programmers; they often find it more interesting than hanging out with friends, more interesting than watching tv, more interesting than family stuff, so of course they're gonna put a lot more time into it than most and hence wind up a lot more skilled at it.

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