[kamaal]

Its not necessarily starting early in programming. Its being in general being good at 'scoring marks' vs 'doing projects'. The former and latter take very different skill sets, and their returns too are often very different.

If you are good at doing projects. Along the way you learn a lot of other very important life skills. Things like resourcefulness, persisting at things, immunity to failure, trying many times etc. And these come handy and are usable to to many things that actually matter in the real world. That is building things.

These things are harder to gain at a later stage in life because expectations from one's life at that time are different and you have to worry more about monthly payments and putting food on the table. You don't have 10 - 15 years lying around to do what other programmers have done in their early years where it was cheap to that in terms of time.

You are also discounting the accumulative effects of these things. After a while due to years of practice, early starters are likely to get very good at things in a far more disproportionate way than those who come later.

[linkregister]

Would participation in athletics or math competitions fulfill your requirements for early hard work and adversity? I do agree with your premise. I just don't see where you actually disagree with mine.

I'm not discounting anything. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a given that engineers who got into the field late are automatically less able.

> early starters are likely to get very good at things in a far more disproportionate way than those who come later.

We think that but it's not actually demonstrated. Entering a field at the age of 18 or 20 isn't actually late. Until we actually have evidence that people who programmed before college have better outcomes, we need to stop talking about it as if it's a known truth.

[kamaal]

>>Would participation in athletics or math competitions fulfill your requirements for early hard work and adversity?

Yes, but in School and a little higher- math is about learning heuristics and ready made procedures to solve problems in algebra and plugging numbers in formulas to get answers. And that is one of the biggest reasons why Nerds go onto to do things like projects to bail from the what is largely a useless academic exercise that gives you nothing real at the end.

Sports has a binary distribution, you either make the big league money or you don't.

>>I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a given that engineers who got into the field late are automatically less able.

They won't be treated as such. They will be evaluated on the same grounds as the long slog people. And that is precisely the problem. Somethings come only with time.

>>Entering a field at the age of 18 or 20 isn't actually late.

Its isn't late in absolute terms. But everything in the world is comparative.

The world is essentially a stack ranking system. You can do anything at any age you want. But there are costs associated with starting late, and they are in comparison with people who are long there.