How so? Many of the classic Valley proto-entrepreneurs (Gates, Jobs, etc) famously dropped out of college. From my own experience, I probably learned about 75% of what I needed to know about programming before I went to university. I'm not sure how easy it is to gain that valuable bedrock experience in an academic environment.

The key, then, is to gain that valuable bedrock experience outside the academic environment. This can obviously be hit-or-miss, and we shouldn't be surprised if we see someone miss.

I don't know about 'SV material', but I certainly didn't see a lot of "10x" software engineers who were not writing code by the time they were 13-15.

Clarification: I'm not saying that it's a necessary requirement; I'm just saying that I certainly see a correlation.

Formal CS study no, but I would think having some exposure to programming concepts would help. Sort of like how one would expect a music major to have had at least some curiosity about music, or an art student to have picked up a pencil or some paint.

I think they're more looking for a sign that you had an early and therefore natural curiosity to tinker with the mechanisms in the world. Not "CS" per se, but just... computer tinkering. If your family couldn't afford a computer, IMHO, if you at least, say, took a clock or motor apart or something, that would be a good indicator, too.

By the way, this has been brought up as the reason for the dropoff in the women who enter CS curricula in college. Ever since home PC's became affordable, freshman CS classes have basically assumed prior (and thorough) computer experience, and many women who might otherwise become good programmers, for whatever reason (society influence, etc.) have had waaaay less hands-on time with computers than boys, when they become freshmen.

That said, I have met some excellent programmers who started out doing something that is superficially completely different (musicians, for example).

>freshman CS classes have basically assumed prior (and thorough) computer experience

I imagine that it depends on the school but there's probably some truth to that. I've taken a couple of "Intro to Programming" type classes from top schools. I found the material quite manageable--but then I have a moderate amount of programming experience even though I don't do it for a living. I'm pretty sure that if this were the first time I saw a computer command line or wrote code, I'd have been lost. Freshman physics at those schools may be challenging but it doesn't assume a whole lot of prior exposure (other than an appropriate level of math).

I never had any distinct interest in computer science. My original interests were physics and art. In fact, I would say those are still my strengths over all. But I went into CS after I found it interesting in regards to what a person can do with a computer with little effort (in as much as the tools involved).

I think physics and art are nearly the perfect potential sources of a good programmer

I think it depends on what part of Silicon Valley you're aiming for. A lot of the big-name places seem to be weird and incredibly theory/algorithms-heavy, whereas most other places being good at organizing systems is more important. But go too far down the scale and you'll find lot of the small startups need you to have context across the entire stack - you might be doing Ruby one moment, CSS the next, then BGP configuration for your cloud gateway after that. Places that are medium-small to large-but-unsexy can provide more of the entry-level experience. (Not a lot of them are really good, though, so you can't always expect to stay working there forever.)

Well I don't know about that. When I interviewed for google during my last year in college(on campus interview), they asked for my high school grades, SAT scores, and if I learned any CS principles in middle or high school.

Why would you think that? You believe there is less than 4 years of material in all of CS?

How much CS knowledge do you need to hack on a simple CRUD app?

Depends, do you want it to actually work?

Perhaps, but since you have more than enough candidates who did start way before college, it's not unreasonable to priorities hiring them.

Something like that seems so easy to fake. If you have the knowledge now, how is anyone going to prove you wrong if you say you learned it at 13?