When you are slightly better or faster or just find doing it (whatever "it" is) more rewarding compared to your peers, then it takes lower effort to get the same reward. This means you are more likely to spend more time doing it. This means that after a while you have more practice than your peers, so the difference in ability is amplified. Now various grownups around you notice and complement you on it, get you lessons to do it better, provide you with supplies, &c. and the difference grows.

By the time you are looking at teenagers, it's hard to tell how much of the difference stems from natural ability, and how much of it is this snowball effect.

Ex teacher here:

Some people really really seems to have a harder time with certain subjects than others.

I took pride in being a good teacher but I have experienced one person who - despite being normal and being able to keep a normal job - just couldn't grasp the basics of computers.

And by basics I mean:

Connect power cable, press power button, wait for Windows to load, type password and open Internet explorer.

It would stop somewhere in between there each time.

There is nothing wrong with that just like there is nothing wrong with me never being able to become a long haul truck driver (falls asleep), pilot (partially colour blind), or soccer star (hopeless).

> but it's the enjoyment I derive from these things that I believe is the difference between some people and I.

Thus is huge as well. Possibly also underappreciated.

Programming is a form of expression for me, and I derive great satisfaction from solving and creating software which truly helps the users I work for. On the the other hand my lack of detachment from 'myself' and 'my work' also can cause some unnecessary pain at times, but it's a work in progress.

If anyone has achieved the balance I seek, I'd be glad to hear their story!

Right. Can (or should) appreciation and enjoyment of a particular kind of work be taught? Or is it an innate quality... a talent, even?

When I was an athlete in high school and college there were people who barely trained and ate whatever they wanted and were far better than people who worked their ass off and counted every calorie.

Programming is much the same. I've had lots of people want me to help them learn, some people are naturals and will make more progress in a few days than most people do in weeks or months.

I'm not sure why people get so defensive about it, nobody cares if you say someone short can't make it in the NBA, but say it about programming or some other mental endeavor people get upset.

It's the same for a lot of jobs. Intellectually I can do what pure business people or lawyers but I don't find it interesting so I don't have passion for it and will never do well.

On the other hand the first time I saw programming stuff I got excited immediately and had passion for it. I think that's my real talent.

That said, we build concrete skills around how to make the best use of those abilities. We build memory skills to be able to quickly bring things out of short term memory back in. We build abstractions and concepts that allow us to efficiently analyze complex situations. We learn to think better with the capacity that we have. However our capacity doesn't seem to be readily changed.

As a concrete anecdotal example, several who have taught CS for decades tell me that most students simply can't "get" pointer arithmetic or recursion. Their brains don't go that way no matter how much they try. People who do master it learn those things fairly quickly and then can move on. The specific abstractions can be taught, the ability to think through those types of abstractions seems innate.

None of this minimizes the effort needed to become a good programmer even if we have the capacity. However the fact that most humans can't become programmers is why there is a job that typically pays 6 figures where many who are successful in it are self-taught with no more than a high school degree or GED.

The above is a slight simplification, but I think it's a fair summary of the current consensus among intelligence researchers, given the word count.

The upshot was that genetics is probably more of an upper limit on IQ, and that for children raised in poor conditions, environment plays a much bigger role than genetics.

Plenty, of smart, dedicated people have been trying for decades to devise interventions to permanently boost IQ among children raised in poor (for the first world) conditions, and unfortunately not much has turned up. Instead, there is a familiar pattern of small pilot studies that show initial promise, but whose gains tend to wash out when the program scales up to a less than one-to-one child/child psychologist ratio, or even when the children are followed up on in adulthood.

The gains from permanently boosting IQ among low-IQ children would be so great that it might still be worth banging our heads against that wall on the off chance that we find something that might work. But we should keep in mind the base success rate of past interventions.

Or maybe they're just bad teachers.

Luckily, since I really wanted to learn, I had to seek alternate resources. I was fortunate to stumble on Stanford's Cs106a taught by Mehran Sahami and it changed my life forever. That man is the gold standard for what a teacher should be. He broke down complex ideas and made them look so simple.

Since then, I use a combination of different resources to learn said "difficult concepts". Recursion, got it...pointers, got it too. I have used Standford courses, Berkeley course, udemy, Udacity, Coursera and even youtube to learn. These sites have some really good teachers.

I have since come to understand that CS is really not that difficult. All is takes is a willingness to learn and a good resource to learn from.

Maybe so, maybe not. However I never had trouble when they tried to teach me things. And have heard good things from others who they taught.

One of the people who expressed this basic opinion to me is https://www.amazon.com/Randal-Schwartz/e/B000APA744. He is also someone whose expository abilities are widely recognized as being excellent. And he is also an example of a self-taught programmer with no degrees beyond graduating from high school.

And isn't it the most amazing coincidence that those who are thus exceptionally gifted are uniquely placed to benefit from the demand for those very abilities in an extravagantly lucrative profession?

I mean, imagine what would happen if everyone could program! Where would those six-figure salaries go then?

I mean, imagine what would happen if everyone could program! Where would those six-figure salaries go then?

That was the exact point that I was making.

There is no coincidence. It is economics 101. In a free market, the salary is set by the laws of supply and demand. If people who can program are in short supply and create lots of value, the supply/demand curves will meet at a high price point. That is good for programmers. If everyone could program, then the price point would be lower and programmers couldn't collect those salaries. Programming has low explicit barriers to entry AND high salaries. This could not continue without implicit barriers to entry of some sort.

How low are the explicit barriers? I personally know several programmers who were homeless teenagers, later received GED degrees, and are self-taught in programming. These are mostly highly paid professionals. (One that I know decided as an adult to go back and pursue university now that she could. She's only 30 - by the time she's my age I'm confident that she'll also be a highly paid professional.)

Let's continue with economics 101. When you move a person from a non-programming job to a programming job that pays more, it is obviously good for that person. It is also good for society as a whole - that person is doing something more productive. It isn't so good for other programmers, though, because it reduces their salary.

Speaking personally, I grew up in poverty. My life is much better than I feel I deserve, or than I need. I also like seeing the lives of others around me improve.

Therefore I have encouraged many to take up programming, and spent untold volunteer hours answering questions from people who want to become better programmers. I have zero interest in limiting who gets to program.

For a political example I completely oppose H1B programs in their current form. I think that we should allow free immigration for competent people AND once they arrive we shouldn't restrict them from finding the best job that they can. The current quota system which provides incentives for companies to swear up and down that they are paying a competitive wage, while in fact they are paying under the market price, and then trap the people that they import in jobs that don't make full use of their talents.

We absolutely should because it's a fundamental aspect of doing their job. The difference between me and a professional carpenter is literally the ability to use tools effectively to build an item. I know whether to use a dovetail or dowel joint as well as any professional, but I guarantee the pro will achieve a better finish in much less time.

It's like theoretical CS vs. real-world programming. It's good to know sorting strategies and whatnot, but knowing how to use the tools is what gets stuff done.

The problem is that we don't pay engineers to crank out pre-designed classes in a specified language with a specific editor. We do pay day laborers to go dig a certain trench over there with these particular shovels and picks.

Software engineering is so much more open-ended. We're paying people to "go help the team make the yard more water efficient".

In other words, if we had more well-defined roles for "coder" versus "engineer" versus "architect", it might make sense to test on the ability to use tools, but in general people in this thread aren't making that kind of distinction because the tech culture in general doesn't make a clear distinction. Otherwise, we'd have "coder" job interviews that didn't include algorithms or open-ended problem solving questions.

A rather trivially learned part of their job. It has little bearing on their ability to build a beautiful cabinet.

>The difference between me and a professional carpenter is literally the ability to use tools effectively to build an item

It's much more than that. How about Michelangelo? Do you think the only difference between you and him is that he's had more practice with a chisel? Doubtful.

>It's like theoretical CS vs. real-world programming. It's good to know sorting strategies and whatnot, but knowing how to use the tools is what gets stuff done.

This is the lone of thinking that leads hiring managers to build teams of mediocre devs with a lot of buzzwords in their CV. I don't care so much that you know e.g. C#, I care that you are a great problem solver. If you have that part down I'm fine with investing a little time into you so that you can learn C#, ASP.NET, whatever. The latter bit is easy.

Of course we do, but no one is saying only the best should be hired and the rest should go dig a ditch. Most programming tasks do not require top level talent to accomplish, but when I'm hiring I'm going after the best candidate I can get, and that has little to do with e.g. what web framework they are most familiar with.

That's actually the whole point of scientific training: teaching people to use the tools of science, including thinking logically and avoiding sources of bias and so on.

If you want to go back into antiquity, the ancient Greeks who started the whole Logic thing, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al, they never presented logic as some kind of innate ability of human beings, rather they set out to teach it as an instrument of thought that was far from innate. Because if it was innate, it wouldn't need all that work they put into it.

Ones ability to program is directly related to ones tenacity to practice programming.

That's not to say problem solving is not extremely important, but the time suck created by bad tool use (or not using tools out of ignorance of their existence) ultimately reduces the productivity of a programmer, or in some cases, whole teams.

Agreed. There's definitely a balance point there - I remember when I got to the point that I not only recognized that this a bad idea, but where they actively started bothering me even for one-off scripts. Something as simple as setting them as constants at the top of the script makes that feeling mostly go away and requires almost no extra effort when implementing.

There are many times when I think "This is really brittle. Surely there's a better way to do it...", which is usually quickly followed by "I'll figure out that better way later, for now, just isolate it and make a note to fix it when this is done."

How far down the rabbithole does this go?

I have never programmed iOS, but I'm completely positive I could program for iOS.

10 years of occasional programming, from python, to school projects, to database development, to android apps, to full stack react-native development.

I'm confident that I can build an iOS app.

Programming and understanding how computers handle inputs are tools. But programming is more mindset than anything. The only benefits of knowing the specific language or framework would be skipping the 1 month of learning syntax.

I'm a recreational programmer mostly, but at some point, you realize you can do full-stack and you realize that everything is possible with google and stack overflow.

What? Yes we absolutely would.

The metaphor is ridiculous.