(I also think there's a huge spectrum of people between these two "types" of developers)

"Because of this, it's very hard to tell as people get older which camp they came from."

I agree, and I think that's a great thing. Being a hacker at a young age is awesome, and should be encouraged, but there are a lot of people who don't know what they're good at (or love) until later in life. In my experience people newer to the industry (at least on the level of "hacker at 13" vs college or later) often have less ego on them, and are more down to Earth about what they do.

If we slightly re-write parent's argument to remove the elitism and focus on the people it's possible to see the same message without the baggage.

Focused study can level the groups, but regardless of how people get there, the quality of any graduating class has a roughly bi-modal distribution. One group is the students who kept up in class, knew what they were doing, and learned a lot. It doesn't matter if they had experience going in, or worked hard to make up for lost time. And the other group half-assed it just well enough to make it over the finish line. Or to rephrase again - you had people who wanted (for whatever reason) a skillset that is marketable, and a group that thought they could buy a ticket to a good jobs.

Meanwhile, I knew a woman who first became a nurse and only second took up computer programming, to write software to track maternity progress, and she has no interest in the hype cycle, instead she just writes good, simple code that gets the job done.

And I know a guy who started as a statistician, and who later became a programmer so he could do serious data analysis. He doesn't get distracted by the flavor of the week. He sticks with good Python tools and he writes the code he needs to get the job done.

That said, I am one. And I don't think I'm that bad. I code with security in mind, I suppose a positive side to IRC PTSD I acquired at 16! Uni got me into thinking about testing while I code, and DBMS + algo + opsys courses Didn't hurt either. The math though... Wish I was quicker. But being a hacker has a disadvantage there I think in my case. I struggled due to not paying attention to math classes while defending our irc network against floods and tinkering with Linux and bsd. Not sure where that puts me on the list.

I also think what you fail to take into account is that peoples software skills often plateau. They'll soak up lots of stuff in the first 3 years then won't have any motivation to improve because they're good enough. I'd argue that attitude is much more an indication of skill than n number of years programming.

So in a sense I do kind of understand your bias. Our field is full of people who decided "the pay is pretty decent and they were always kind of good with computers.". But it's entirely possible to become a "hacker" at later age.

(Also as an aside, I wish more people would post controversial stuff on their main account. They're just make-believe internet points).

Nearly 40 years later I recognize fellow perpetual students during job interviews. To be fair I'm hiring for sys admin roles these days but the principle is the same: there are people with two years of butt-in-seat time who know more than folks with ten.

Now imagine how excited I am to meet a fellow perpetual student with 10, 15, or 20 years of experience!