[Joeri]

The necessity of the will to succeed (or rather the will to persist for 10k hours) is probably why it is not something most people are cut out for. In my CS studies, i noticed that most of us started out as pretty shoddy programmers, even those who had been dabbling for a few years, but that the people who improved steadily and got there and the people who didn't improve and dropped out were separated not by skill or talent, but by passion. If you are passionate about the act of programming itself, you can persist, but otherwise the required amount of willpower outstrips people's ability to provide it.

That's why i think it's a good idea to bring as many kids as possible into contact with programming, to find the ones passionate about it. It's also why i think it's a bad idea to push people in a programming course as a path to a job (if they haven't shown an interest in it themselves). I have been the person interviewing graduates of those courses too many times already, and in my experience they're mostly unhireable on serious software projects.