> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.
I am by most standards a successful founder. I was not hacking on computers at age 13. Why not? My family could not afford a computer at age 13. I got my first computer at 15-16 by essentially fishing it out of a garbage can.
How long did it take me to write my first C program? About a year. Why? Because I was the only person in my (very, very small) hometown who had any affinity or interest in computers in general, let alone programming in particular.
>I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the net before I was 18 at home.
I'm a hacker and "the net" didn't exist before I was 18.
My learning came from the books I bought, and the magazines I subscribed to. Somehow, without IRC or Google to help, I taught myself to program a computer, and wrote an entire game in assembly language (reinventing the concept of linking object files in the process) which I then sold. While I was in high school. I also designed and built an expansion board for my computer with only the IC technical manuals.
By college I was doing real video game consulting work.
I had one awesome friend who was also a good programmer, and we lived and breathed programming together. But beyond that, I was on my own.
It can happen without unfettered Internet access at 9 years old.
I come from a home that lived below poverty level for most of my life, though we maybe disguised it well--most of my friends were middle-class.
I fell in love with computers at age 10, but I didn't have access to one outside of public school until age 16, when I bought one with money I earned at a job I took after school.
After off-and-on dedication to programming over the past decade, I've been working as a developer for approximately 1 year, and I have a very solid chance to get "there" if I choose to continue down this path.
I don't see what's preventing more-or-less anybody in America from taking these steps. I didn't do anything that is out-of-reach for any given person, nor did I, in any obvious manner, have a stroke of luck.
>Programming is something that anybody can do with a very modest investment.
Yeah, but most people don't know that. Sure, us nerds figured it out, but most people are shocked that I learned to code at 13. I thought it wasn't that difficult. I don't think I'm smarter than most, I just wasn't scared off by the technical details.
> Basically, nothing too much out of the reach of your average teenager -- with the exception of interest/dedication to the art.
My father grew up, went to school, and finished university in the 70s and 80s, in the Soviet Union, where none of those things were within the reach of an average person. He's only started programming towards the end of his physics PHD. Since moving to Canada, he's done ~20 years of programming.
Biasing hiring towards people who programmed in high school is incredibly ageist.
Sure, a computer is within the reach of most teenagers now. No, a computer was not within the reach of most teenagers 30 years ago - or even 20 years ago.
> Sometimes I feel like they were just more impressive programmers back then.
I feel that way often. I definitely stand on the shoulders of giants to do my silly web app job.
But then again no one has ever hired me to do anything wild like fitting a game into 8mb on a hardware cartridge. I've never been in a group of other smart people trying to accomplish it, or mentored towards accomplishing something like that. Maybe I could if I had to.
I have the education for it, in theory.
I often wonder what line of work I would be in if I hadn't grown up with computers though. Would I have still tried to go into it as a profession because I'm good at math? Or would I be off working as an electrician or something else.
> I remember when I was young, writing programs and making computers do simple things seemed really impressive to me at the time!
It was same feeling for me too, in the early/mid 80s. And it was impressive also because few other people were even doing it. Whether other people could or not, based on their capabilities, most didn't actually have any home computer to even practice on. Merely having a home computer in, say, 1983, was a rare thing. Actually being able to make it do things you wanted was even rarer. It probably seemed more impressive to many outsiders than it actually was (in the sense that a for-loop is pretty boring/basic) but hard to separate out that impressiveness between having access to the situation at all vs having the skills.
> It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer.
Indeed the seeds were sown a very long time ago. My father bought a PC with some inheritance money he had, then he immediately regretted it because I spent all my time and summer on it rather than playing sports or hanging out with friends!
Back then nobody realized how in demand our field would be. By the time I started college I had already been programming.
> My father tried to interest me in programming somewhat before high school; it didn't work, and I didn't continue then.
I suspect, that it almost never works that way. Learning programming or hacking as a child is all about figuring it out on your own, doing something, what your parents or your teachers can not understand, defining your own identity.
That is why I doubt that all the programs in the US, which try to teach children programming, will work. They might teach some concepts, but in the end i fear, that they will hinder the children to aspire a career in the field. I see a bad parallel to beauty contests, were parents try to live their dreams through their children.
Of course it is never black and white, but I think you have to be ultra careful with stuff like this. I think naturally interesting, open platforms are a better way to get children to dig deeper. Minecraft is a perfect example.
> Do you think that all people are born with the innate ability to master computers, programming, and other technical tasks?
No. That is besides the point.
There is a big difference in knowing how to repair a computer, how to program a computer and how to do technical tasks with a computer.
Repairing a computer normally involves identifying the part that is faulty and replacing it. On a desktop PC that is relatively because the components go together like Lego pieces tbh. My father managed to replace the memory in his ageing desktop computer by just looking for what the parts were in the machine and just replacing them. He barely understands how to use a keyboard (he highlights each letter with the mouse and presses delete)
I am good at programming computers but I don't understand how Excel works past very basics. My friend who can't "program" with something like a text editor or IDE, she will quite happily do all sorts of complicated tasks with sheets and cells in it all day.
> Just as not all people are born with innate ability to write a good novel, paint a masterpiece, write a symphony, or lead a nation, I'd say no.
I never claimed the opposite.
However there are plenty of people while they can't write a symphony can start up their own metal tribute band and make quite a lot of money.
You are painting it as a binary of people that can't do something and people that have mastered something. There are plenty room inbetween.
This place is called hackernews and I have explain this point sooo verbosely. This must be satire.
> But all people are born with the ability to live their own life and learn how best to do it in the direction that seems natural for themselves.
Some aren't actually. I have a friend that looks after seriously mentally ill people. They must be cared for almost 24/7. There is one lad he told me about that will masturbate in public because he has no concept of it being socially unacceptable due to having somethign similar to asbergers IIRC.
> It's interesting having been early and poor (or relatively so), isn't it?
Yes. The older I get, the more I realize how much of a difference that has made in my entire worldview. More importantly, I notice how often differences in childhood socioeconomic status can make real communication and understanding difficult. In both directions.
> That's part of what makes it harder: [...]
Wow.
That hits close to home.
I have never had any interest in climbing career ladders -- I am a professional dev largely because that's the only marketable skill I have as a consequence of my love of computers. The money is certainly nice and I feel gratitude literally every day for it, but it's not even a small factor in why I do what I do.
That said, I have still been focused on my own world to the extent that I have not done as your mom did. I have not planted trees for the next generation to shade in.
Outside of my own children, who all have the hacker spirit even if their interests are in things other than computers, I have been a part of the very trends that we are worrying about here. I can see a little more clearly now. If nothing else, I owe a debt.
> especially since I often feel crazy
The only people I've known who never questioned their sanity were ones who weren't actually all that sane.
> I think we need to decouple our cultural insights from specific tech skills and teach them to everybody.
>Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do
The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself, by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised.
There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money, equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want.
(As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make living, acting things with just your thoughts.)
>violent videos
So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it.
>social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around
You might be shady for all I know, but it doesn't matter unless we meet in person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house are perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult.
As far as Facebook, the shady characters are exactly the same shady characters at school.
>Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.
These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is pretty important if you're going to target these media.
> everyone should know how to go about general problem-solving, but not how to code
General problem-solving ability seems like a synonym for fluid intelligence, which is not very malleable. Learning to code, on the other hand, is possible with effort. I learned to program in the 4th grade, with videos and books I myself bought, without having internet access. (I could use dial-up if I really needed it, but it was expensive and slow, so I used it very sparingly; I don't remember how much, but around 5 hours per month seems an upper bound.) I had no support whatsoever from anyone (except that my dad paid for the books and videos), my mom only let me use my computer for like 3 hours a week (shared between gaming and doing anything else), my computer was old and slow, ... . Now, I sure have a high IQ, but I doubt that we couldn't have 20% of the urban population reach some basic computer literacy when they are 24 years old. Heck, calculus is known by more people than coding. Most non-poor people waste 16+ years of their life in K12 and undergrad, and learn very few useful skills. Imagine what would happen if we taught people a curriculum that did something other than pure signalling.
> I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
Agreed! Those were about the ages I was when I learned to program and fell in love with computers. I became too sensitive to social pressures after that. (One memory I have is of being 13 and intentionally typing slowly in a class so that people wouldn't know that I was a fast typer, and therefore a computer nerd. The horror!) But that age was key to forming my passion for programming. Did I stumble upon "age-inappropriate" material? Of course, but so does any kid that rides a school bus.
>Teaching and computers don't mix. Certainly not before eighth grade.
I believe this is categorically and catastrophically wrong.
I have led a very privileged life. I'm 45 and I was exposed to computer programming when I was in third grade. That's 1983. With old Atari computers. It was basically 10 print "Jonathan is great" 20 GOTO 10 But already we had an understanding of job flow and loops. By 5th grade I was playing Robot Odyssey. At the time I never took it seriously; there's only so much you can do with BASIC but myself and my friends already "got" how computers worked by the age of 8.
I can't tell you how much of an advantage I have over not only my peers but even people younger than I am. Those precious few moments I spent in the computer lab hacking (yes, hacking. I figured out how to change the color of the background/border and the main screen, figured out how the color codes were expressed and learned how to generate random numbers, and wrote a program that would probably induce a seizure in some epileptics) resulted in me having a fundamental understanding of not only how computers work, but how to hack.
Trust me, 8, even 6 & 7 year olds can learn how to program computers. Even if it's LOGO/Turtle Graphics. You can gamify problem solving and instill in young kids a fundamental understanding of things that will serve them for their entire professional career.
Thanks for bringing this up because I have struggled to understand why I seem to have such an advantage over my peers when it comes to working on computers and I just realized why. None of my peers were "programming" before high school. To me "hacking" comes naturally because I first learned it at such a young age.
I wouldn't worry so much about the future of our country if every 3rd grader got the EXACT same exposure and opportunity to play with programming and computers that I did. Granted, not all kids are going to take to it like I did, but the point is to expose every young American school kid to these activities so that if and when they choose to become software devs or machine learning engineers or even just spreadsheet jockeys, they get logic, programming, and computers on a fundamental level.
> have always been deeply interested in computers, but have nonetheless felt inexplicably out of place for it
You know what stopped me from becoming a professional programmer? It wasn't the fact that I didn't get to study CS in high-school, nor that I didn't have a PC until I was a university student, nor the lack of Internet access at home until I was 20+ years old, nor the language barrier (English is my third language), nor being limited to free resources by my finances.
Nothing. Nothing stopped me from pursuing my interest.
>I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.
While starting early is obviously a tremendous advantage, it's a shame that it's often discussed in such an exclusive way.
For reference, I am a female programmer who got a /relatively/ late start. I took my first cs class because I was embarrassed that I used my computer like an Internet Explorer box. Barely three years later, here I am knee-deep in code with a job offer from Google. Am I an exceptional hacker? No. Can I hold my own with the 'started-at-12' crowd? Pretty much.
It saddens me that more people don't feel empowered to dive into a new field. Many people, especially high-achieving students, suffer from the misconception that to succeed in various technical fields, you must specialize early. Whenever an outsider expresses any interest in programming or math, I encourage them to try it. "It's too late for me," and "I'm just not an X person," are common responses. These attitudes are caused in part by the way we STEM folks don't bother as much with non-children. You might tell a little kid about how cool programming is, but do you even attempt a real explanation of your work with a young adult? Your uncle? If so, gold star. If not, you are only contributing to the wall between the tech-savvy and general populace. It's never too late for someone to learn.
Too much stress on the early start just adds another barrier to entry for people like myself who lacked either the exposure or awareness to get started sooner.
If our goal is to make the tech universe more accessible, we shouldn't be perpetuating the idea that you need a certain background to participate or excel.
I am by most standards a successful founder. I was not hacking on computers at age 13. Why not? My family could not afford a computer at age 13. I got my first computer at 15-16 by essentially fishing it out of a garbage can.
How long did it take me to write my first C program? About a year. Why? Because I was the only person in my (very, very small) hometown who had any affinity or interest in computers in general, let alone programming in particular.
That is why that statement "reeks of privilege."
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