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by layoutIfNeeded 2366 days ago
Not in a way that's relevant for your employer 10 years later. It can be a nice anecdote to mention, but don't put it on your CV.

By the way, I started coding at the age of 13.

2 comments

Maybe you're just not as good as OP. I started writing code at 10 and being properly employed (contract, office hours every day, etc etc) at 14. I'm 28.

The extra years of experience in Delphi, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, Ruby (before Rails even :-) that I had before the age of 18 are certainly a significant part of why I'm ahead both in seniority and pay of many people who work side-by-side to me, or for me.

The unpaid screwing-around-with-computers I did from ~13 through college is very relevant for my employers. I'd be a way shittier developer if you took out especially the Linux admin and networking stuff I picked up then, most of which I would not have picked up at any of my employers since, nor in college—I'd have just been among the other developers without a clue why X is happening or Y is broken—though it's consistently been extremely useful.

For the record, I did paid screwing-around-with-computers from 15 on, but the unpaid stuff added at least as much value to me as an employee.

Ditto my abandoned humanities degree, which I also don't put on my résumé. More valuable to my work as a software developer than the CS degree I eventually got. I wouldn't present it that way for obvious reasons, but that doesn't change the reality of it.