This was mentioned in Outliers, I think. I wonder what the equivalent one-in-a-billion “head start” technology is for kids today.

Call me crazy, but I think if there's any HS classes or earlier, teaching algorithmic thinking, those kids are have a crazy head start if they choose CS.

I don't mean these classes where they get out and write

    class Dog(Animal):
      def bark(self):
        print("a Dog is barking!")
    

but if there's young people being taught the difference between quadratic/exponential/polynomial algorithms, that's going to stew in their brains and ferment into gray matter that will ACTUALLY make them better programmers.

I'm not an educator, nor am I educated ABOUT education, but it's just my hunch. I've seen many a young buck come around with a fancy degree or whatever, and not be able to see a skip-list shaped hole for his skip-list shaped peg. That's hard to deal with at a meta scale. I can't develop a way to quickly train people OTJ how to think algorithmically. They either learned to think about the problems that way, or they learned to rely on some stupid Haskell/Python/Elixir/Kotlin/Blub thing, and can't get any meaningful work done quickly.

There’s already a trend in certain high schools where kids start doing competitive programming, hackathons, blog writing, etc. way before university starts. By the time they’re college freshmen they’re ahead of the average new grad already when it comes to interview skills. These kids end up interning for FAANG or unicorns in freshman or sophomore year. There’s thousands of them.

> teaching algorithmic thinking

Even outside of CS this will give them a huge head start.

Functional decomposition is one of the most valuable skill one can have. Knowing what an interface is and being able to see a system as a series of layers of abstraction is too.

My prediction is it will be students receiving education i with little to no technology. The paradox being modern technology is so streamlined UX wise you don’t inherently learn anything about modern tech by using them.

I would guess if your parents have a VR headset, a 3D printer, and some sort of home lab that you can tinker around with. And of course, as the OP indicates, without worrying about earning an income.

edit: and probably also superfast internet, and a machine with a GPU, and maybe even some way of setting up a server cluster

Not exactly a technology, but parents who are mathematicians would be my guess. Developing a reasonably deep and intuitive understanding of statistics, probability and linear algebra at a young age would be a huge advantage, especially when coupled with eg R or Python.

Most kids still don't have reliable internet access and computers at home. So I would say that is still the biggest tech head start.

I logged in with a throw-away account just to refute the down vote. However, it already looks "neutralised" after my login. Assuming it is true, why would anyone done vote this comment? Makes no sense lah.

Less controversial: High level, this comment seems believable. It seems reasonable and possible. Has this be written about? If yes, please kindly provide some links. I would like to read more about it. This high school was really something special!

It was discussed in the book Outliers. Here's another link I found discussing it.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Early-Days-as-a-...

His high school was out of the norm, but certainly not the best. At that time, a school in LA had an IBM 360 mainframe. Having an oil rig on school property sure helps.

Sure, and where are the rest of his classmates? Are they all billionaires? early head start is only one if utilized. For everyone that's rich, you can find critical junctions in there lives that really moved them forward to that part. for everyone that's not, we have all had critical moments in our lives where we made the wrong choice.

And Bill's mom provided the connection to IBM. That's a huge advantage.