It's not that simple.

So, one of the best illustrations of how talent works is in football placekickers. To make it in the NFL, you have to be able to reliably kick a field goal at X yards. X goes up every so often. Some athletes can do it, some can't. I read a story once about a guy trying to level up his skills to NFL-level. He spent weeks out on the field practicing his kick. He could hit the goal, but not reliably. One yard closer, and every kick sailed right in.

One of his buddies, a minor league baseball pitcher, went out with him one day, asked to give it a shot. On his very first try, he kicked it right in. A pitcher.

To be great, it requires getting out on the frontier of human ability. That frontier often looks very, very weird. One seemingly small additional challenge turns you into a puddle of mush. Getting there requires hard hard work.

But excelling over everyone else who also put in that hard work requires talent, and it's generally a binary proposition. Until it isn't. Once Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile, floods of athletes started doing it.

Then the frontier goes somewhere else, the talent required to get there is increased. But one can only put so many hours of their day into an activity. So when you're talking about greatness, talent ultimately matters more than hard work. One should ideally find out as quickly as possible whether one has the talent to make it out to the frontier of human ability. So they don't waste lots of time doing something they can never find greatness doing. The aforementioned aspiring placekicker? Gave it up. Now he's a successful author, real estate investor and football coach.

I agree that practice is integral to being successful as a concert pianist (I am a pianist also so I didn't make the comparison casually), but to give a truly inspiring performance (and not just be a human player-piano) requires much more than just memorisation and repetition. It requires creativity and instinct as much as skill.

Programming is similar. If you were to boil programming down to simply "engineer a list of commands to make the computer do X" then sure, most people can do it, with practice and documentation. But to make the computer do X with efficiency, or to make the computer do X in a new and novel way -- or even discover that X is the wrong way to go and the computer really should be doing Y -- also requires creativity and instinct, just like giving a great performance at the piano.

"Greatness does not come from programming by rote."

The thing about "coding" is that it's simply the means, not the end. The configurations you can program a Turing complete device with proper hardware into are, for practical purposes, boundless. Being a concert pianist can intersect with many fields as well (acoustics and music theory alone can get quite deep), but ultimately the immediate direction is much more narrow.

In fact, I would argue that just "coding coding coding coding" won't get you all that far alone. There's plenty of "reading reading reading reading" so you can actually have the skills and knowledge to write what's intended, and then there's all that lesser visible knowledge out there that is just as crucial, but hidden in (relatively) obscure references or papers - unless you intend on reinventing lots of square wheels.

It's not inaccurate or offensive to say that some people are more naturally gifted in some areas than other people. It's certainly possible that with 10,000 hours of practice the average person could become competent at just about anything, but there will be outliers on both ends of that spectrum.

I disagree with this. I think natural talent is what allows you to pass the "filters" from better tutors, people which just wont train you unless "you've got it"