[josegonzalez]

Why is that? Just a personal observation, but I only actually started to understand programming my junior year of college and would find myself to be pretty technically proficient, and I know plenty of terrific developers who started of programming after a career in something completely unrelated (selling phones, painting, vet school).

Yeah it's hard to start learning how to program and become efficient at it, but there is no reason that we can't attack the issue at later stages in the pipeline.

[protomyth]

Because by the late stages, people's loves and hates have already been defined. Things are cool or "I don't like X" has set in. If you don't love STEM early, you won't want to do it late. Attacking the issue later in the educational pipeline is like adding a cron job to restart the web servers because of crappy programming. The correct answer is to actually fix the problem. We've tried enough patches by now and it disgusts me that we are talking about diversity in tech when we are not talking about diversity in pre-K and K-8.