I'd like to tackle your supposition of "privilege" and "catching up to boy wonders".

I've been "hacking" since I was 12. You can call it privilege, but if so, it was western privilege, not male privilege:

- I was introduced to computers largely in elementary school, along with the rest of the class. I loved them.

- I spent an entire summer, when I was 12, mowing lawns, weeding, hauling wood, laying down bark and sod, and babysitting until I finally had enough money to buy myself a low-end Mac.

- I had a 2400 baud hand-me-down modem. It was all I could afford. I dialed up BBSs, and when it became available, paid for my own dial-up internet access.

I had western privilege, in that our school had computers, and that we had neighbors that would pay me less than minimum wage to do yard work. However, I didn't have any more 'western privilege' than the other people in my class, including the girls.

Once I had the machine, I spent the next two decades working hard to learn (and keep learning). I taught myself how to use HyperCard, write AppleScript, and eventually some Pascal. I taught myself enough 68k assembly to crack software (mowing lawns does not pay well. I buy my software now). I scrounged a SCSI ZIP drive and used it to install NetBSD (my Mac was one of the rare 68k Macs that used IDE, and NetBSD/mac68k required SCSI), and then eventually moved to Linux on my Mac -- version 2.0.36.

I voraciously read books, I taught myself C, and then ObjC, and eventually ML and Haskell and Ocaml. I taught myself Java, and then I taught myself how to write applications and then larger-scale systems. I have code in the FreeBSD kernel, Mac OS X user-land, and in a number of major commercial products. This took me about 20 years in total, covered far more bases and languages and hardware/software combinations than I can possibly list here, and catapulted me into the career that I have today.

That depth and breadth of experience is not something you can replicate in a year of CS education, or even 4 years of CS education. I haven't stopped learning, and I absolutely disagree with your conclusion about being able to catch up with "boy wonders": unless you put in equivalent effort, you CAN NOT catch up with "boy wonders".

(also, it has nothing to do with being a boy.)

This doesn't mean less experienced people can't contribute. Of course they can contribute. I was doing "useful" stuff when I was just getting started, although I'm certainly embarrassed of most of what I wrote now, and more so for the pieces that are still in active use.

What I take umbrage with is the notion that we must devalue genuine expertise because otherwise we risk turning away potential contributors. That's wrong -- we must value expertise, rather than encourage self-aggrandizement of the inexperienced.

If we genuinely fail to recognize and take advantage of expertise, we'll simply be doomed to an ongoing cyclic re-invention of the wheel across each new generation of software engineers.

Personally, I've come to view the word "privilege" as loaded and poisonous. It has been used rightly and wrongly – but wrongly as a weapon or as a way to assert its own sort of superiority – or, even, an unassailable right to talk down to others without actually understanding where those others are coming from (ironically) so much so that, personally, I see it as a word that carries too much baggage to be worth using.

But that's just my $.02

Make that $0.04 -- I can't stand the use of the word "privilege" in that context, since it invariably causes discussions to turn into accusatory bile-fests. This can be cleverly avoided by replacing the word with its definition.

Thanks for the links. I agree, privilege might be a better term.

What about "technical incompetence projection"? They seem to be scared they're not good enough, so they try to make other people feel like they're not good enough instead.

Just having privilege doesn't make people around you feel as bad as wielding that privilege offensively.