If she was, the post was awfully unclear, and should contain the sentence “If you’ve been hacking since age 8, you should feel guilty.”

Since it doesn’t, let’s move along. What she’s saying is that if you had access to and interest in programming young, and you happen to be in a conversation with someone who says that they, say, started at age 30, once their kid started school, then it’s not correct to think “wow, I am 22 years more intrinsically interested than this slacker, if this person gets nowhere in their technical career its their own fault.”

Portrayed like that, it sounds like a fairly silly thing to think, but there are lots of geek bonding rituals around gentle “I was a teenage geek” “oh yeah? I was a pre-teen geek” “oh yeah? I was rocked to sleep on a printer” one-upgeekship, in which “I just started last year” falls rather flat, and there’s a fair bit of serious insider preference too based partly around privileged access. (Hiring bias against people without university credentials or with non-technical majors, ageist bias, non-participation in user groups or Open Source…)

All your comment proves is that you are unfamiliar with the concept of “privilege” and unable to locate resources to explain it to you. If your google’s broken you can use mine.

As a side note – for all the people chiming in to say they had access to computers without being privileged, don’t forget that there’s a response bias here. The people who wanted to learn computer science when they were young, but couldn’t find a way to do it and subsequently pursued another field, will not be frequenting a geek-focused website and posting their stories.

I’m guessing you didn’t grow up with a computer of that vintage. I had a TI-99/4A, not a C-64, but I’ve always thought that computers of that era were much more inclined to produce people who started programming than more modern machines. (By “modern” here, I mean everything after, say, 1990)

Back in the 1980s, there were these things called “computer magazines” which you can still find descendants of online in a few places. Anyway, if you were willing to shell out enough for a monthly fee, these things would arrive in the mail and would be full of BASIC programs that you would then type in. Usually, these programs would have variations for the different basic dialects out there – C-64, TI/99, TRS-80, etc. They’d also have ads for different mail-order places that would sell computer add-ons or other things, and reviews of upcoming games.

And the thing was, if you typed in those programs you got games that weren’t that far different from the professional games of the day. Sure, the pro. games had more polish, better music, and usually more levels, but you could see that, yes, you really were doing the same thing the pros were – they were just doing more of it.

And you had done it. Sure, someone else wrote it initially, but you had typed all the code in for hours, and so saw under the hood how it all worked. You might even tweak a bit here and there to see what happened. (Or maybe not intentionally, as typos happened, and you had to track them down)

These days, the gulf between what you can put together as a beginning non-professional and what you can play in your browser as a flash game (let alone the difference between what you can do yourself and, say, any Wii game) is just so huge, I don’t know how kids are able to stay inspired. When I started my daughter with the book “Hello World”, which uses the pygame library to make some of the things at the end of the book, her first reaction on seeing the graphics was to wrinkle her nose and say “Dad, those games look really boring and stupid”.

And she’s right. Compared to what she’s used to, compared to what’s thrown in the bargain bin routinely, they do. I don’t understand your implication that it’s easier for children to start in programming on a modern machine at all.

Getting off topic, but this is a very obtuse thing to say. That exact computer model you name may well be the single most hacking-inspiring machine in history. It’s probably responsible for the recruitment of one half of all programming professionals from that generation of children worldwide. It was the one machine that finally brought “computing to the masses”. In 2008, 26 years after it was released, there were still people discovering _new_ ways to hack it.

Also, “a bit of BASIC programming” goes a long, long way towards teaching a child computer science.

But I think the article goes too far in some of its other assumptions. In particular, it overestimates the significance that the CS world ascribes to the started-younger-than-thou contests.

Hacking at 8 is a genuine accomplishment, regardless of the degree of privilege that is often its precondition: a majority of privileged kids with early access to computers still never get to hack. Adults tend to treat it exactly that way – as a childhood accomplishment. It may provoke a juvenile prestige one-upmanship race in an online discussion, but in that way it’s like saying “oh yeah, well _my_ Little League baseball team won Championship So-and-So!” It’s something to shoot the breeze with, but nobody seriously believes that someone who started hacking at 4 is better at it as an adult than someone who started at 12. I’ve dealt with hundreds, probably more than a thousand computer science people in different environments and honestly a significant number of them are elitists, some to the degree of serious asshattery, but even so, no more than one or two ever gave me any reason at all to believe that they ascribed real merit to this kind of age differences.

I am involved in the hiring process at a large IT company. If I ever had a candidate try to draw particular attention to the fact they hacked something in their childhood, my typical first thought would be “That’s very nice, but does it mean you have no _real_ accomplishments you’d rather brag about?” – and I think that reaction would be pretty typical.

Now, on the other hand, I won’t deny that an early and lasting interest in pretty much anything is often assumed to correlate strongly to life-long success in that field. So it’s usually not about whether you started at 4 or 12, it’s about the fact that you were at some carefree age and that you could have chosen to spend your copious free time on just watching cartoons or playing in the sand or whatever, but instead you found enough interest in something that’s supposed to be hard and you stuck to it.

Yes, it correlates strongly with privilege, but I’d be careful about dismissing the statistical value of this particular predictor out of hand. After all, if you know I _didn’t_ get interested in music until I was 20, you shouldn’t of course assume I must be a bad musician, but everything else being equal, you have no outstanding reason to expect me to be good. If you know I got enthusiastic about it at 8, and kept an active interest in it (thanks in part to my parents buying an expensive instrument and maybe paying for lessons) there is some reasonable expectation that I might be good at it.

Of course, statistical predictors are good for statistics but unfair when applied to individuals. It would be good if we could get people with influence over others’ CS education and careers to be completely blind to this kind of information. But the bulk of the unfairness seems to lie at the point of entry into the computer science world. Once one’s in, well, the problem isn’t over, but I haven’t seen meaningful evidence that the dificulty _during_ studies or work even compares to the difficulty of getting in for those who are just not blessed with an early hacking experience.

If you give students a programming problem for homework, it will be easier for the ones who have been programming since childhood, and yes, that’s unfair in a way, but it’s infinitely more unfair that some talented kids never had a chance to be among your students in the first place. We can hardly expect a lecturer to assign easier homework to the students who came from less privileged backgrounds; the only hope of a fix is in levelling the playing field at the entry.

Let me add three minor nitpicks about some broad generalizations:

The article seems to strongly imply that early computer adoption is not to any significant degree a function of talent or work (“a ranking system that mistakes the social privileges of affluent white males for inborn geek inclinations”). I’m guessing this was not intended, but it comes across that way and probably ruffles up some feathers among commenters.

The paragraph commenting on the “basketball” excerpt practically equates all white males in CS studies with those people who engage in “disgusting flaunting of privilege” in “CS newsgroups”. Not even mentioning the privileged multitudes who don’t flaunt it, this is particularly unfair to the many white males who got into university just like the black interviewee himself, without the kind of economic privilege that gives one a computer in childhood.

The premise that early-age-adopter equals had-rich-parents is workable for a general discussion and has a lot of basis in fact, but it is too broad and too oversimplified to be used to draw as concrete and certain conclusions as the article tries to. In particular, it’s not reasonable to transform the finding that “About three-quarters of [interviewed male CS students] fit the profile of someone with an intense and immediate attraction to computing that started at a young age” into a claim that “At least 75% of male CS undergraduates had [affluent] parents”.

(To be specific, in fairness to early age adopters, a sizeable minority of them were not financially privileged. I know many, many anecdotes of kids getting hooked on hacking and then actively seeking out every opportunity to fiddle with a computer belonging to a neighbour, or cousin, or school – or kids whose parents chose to deprive themselves of some pretty basic comforts in order to save for the cheapest computer possible. This is not to say that there is a level playing field, just that the complete identification of early age adoption with economic privilege is overextended.)

A bit of an aside, but were you able to get to your local library on your own (say, walking or biking, or maybe riding the bus?). If so, that’s a privilege you had that I didn’t, even in Canada.

(I’m not trying to attack you–I just always hated living where I did as a kid, so posts like yours hit a couple sore spots for me.)

Don’t think any of us are attacking your skill–this isn’t about skill. It’s about the attitude that starting at an early age is PURELY a product of interest, when in reality it was a lot easier for some people than others to find ways to explore that interest. Obviously, some people were able to get there through a lot of effort. This post isn’t really about you–it’s about people WITH privilege, since they’re the ones who aren’t aware of how it shaped their lives. Those of us without have always known.