| There are several things here in your views that I disagree a lot with. First, you don't need to be a "kid prodigy" to be a great programmer. But even then, you don't need to be a great programmer at all as long as you're happy and do the things you like. In the end we'll all be dead, we might as well enjoy the ride. Another note about the "kid prodigy" thing: just because someone wasn't a "kid prodigy" doesn't mean they were incapable to be a "kid prodigy". Prodigies aren't just hard work + intelligence, there's also opportunity, support, luck... I bet there's a lot of people out there that would have made excellent programmers but didn't have access to enough resources when they were growing up. There's also a lot of bias in thinking that "great programmers" dropped down in skill after their 30s. They might not make headlines anymore but that's not correlated with skill. Linus Torvalds wrote Git when he was 36, for example. I'm sure that if you search for kernel contributors you'll also find "old" people there. Another thing is that, as someone who has a degree both in computer science and mathematics, math and programming aren't really close at all. The thing that would be the closest one would be writing algorithms, but most algorithms you'll ever need are already written and implemented for you. And now for the actual piece of advice: in every area of programming you will get better as you get older. There's so much about programming that comes from experience. I always tell juniors the same thing when I solve in two minutes a problem they've been struggling with: it's not that I'm smarter than you, I have just seen this problem or something similar already many times. You might want to find an area you like, and then keep on being curious, humble, and learning. That's what matters in programming. |