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No. I got started late because I did other things and graduate school in other fields before starting. If anything, people who get started late are more likely to become good developers because they come in with existing experience in the world that makes them less likely to succumb to institutionalization, so to speak. What I mean by that is a huge amount of software sucks for no good reason other than that's the way it's done. So people who come to software from other fields than computer science and didn't start programming young can bring this new insight that asks "why?". I learned Basic in junior high or something from the appendix from some VTech computer for like a week, and was like "ok, cool", and then left it alone.m and forgot about it. I didn't get my first job programming until I was 27 or 28 and had only programmed in Maple and Matlab for math courses before that. Maybe one shitty class in Java. If anything, software is an old person's game, similar to architects and movie directors. You need a lot of experience to get to a top level. Programming and software, on the whole, isn't remotely close to olympiads or programming competitions. Also, people's fascination with child prodigies is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion. Child prodigies are people that get to places faster but don't necessarily go further, in that other people catch up and even surpass. It's pretty rare that a child prodigy continues to outperform everyone else later in life, just like it is for anyone to outperform others. There are some, like Terrance Tao, who continue dominating, but I'm pretty sure he would have gotten there anyway without an accelerated childhood education, and he's rare enough that it's dumb to compare yourself to people like him. |