The programming talent myth

Posted May 3, 2015 10:05 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
In reply to: The programming talent myth by pbonzini
Parent article: The programming talent myth

In an attempt to bring some facts to the discussion I did a 5 minute Google search on the topic. It seems like drawing like so many occupations is mostly a matter of practice:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2134898/My...

This is not the only source I found claiming this. From personal experience, I've always believed, that I simply cannot draw, so I've never really tried it either. Until I started doing free hand UI mockups on paper and discovered, that they actually look quite ok. So I wonder, what I could do with a little more practice.

On programming, I really think most programmers are closer to average than to one of the extremes. And team members where I wasn't sure if they would become good programmers have become quite good.

The programming talent myth

Posted May 9, 2015 0:36 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

From the music world, "the typical child prodigy has done more practice by the age of eleven, than the average person does in a lifetime".

And, don't know the link to the paper, but it looked at students at The Royal School of Music or The Academy of Music (we have two such schools in London). They looked at all the students, and found that their skill levels bore very little correlation with the amount of practice they were doing. BUT.

Once they looked at when the students started playing, and how hard they'd practised over their entire playing "career", there was a very strong correlation with how good they were.

(For the record, practice was defined not as just playing, but as "working at improving something you couldn't do (well)". And sadly, for the second rankers, they also came to the following conclusion - "to convert a second-ranker into a front-ranker, they need to do an extra hour's practice a day for five years. But they're already practising on the verge of burn-out, any more will tip them over the edge".)

So if you want one of those "rock-star" programmers, you need to find someone who's been programming for fun since childhood ...

Cheers,
Wol

The programming talent myth

Posted May 21, 2015 11:51 UTC (Thu) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link] (1 responses)

I've been programming for fun since childhood. I certainly would not claim to be a 10x programmer. (One of the reasons that I chose system administration over development as a career.)

How much of this can be attributed to my childhood dabblings having been in BASIC, as with most Britons of my age, is up for debate of course. :)

The talk's premise is extremely sound. All this evidence-free "U-shaped curve with two bell curves at each end" nonsense from the comments simply reinforces that people are likewise mostly mediocre at commenting on things on the Internet.

The programming talent myth

Posted Jun 1, 2015 14:45 UTC (Mon) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

"All this evidence-free "U-shaped curve with two bell curves at each end" ..."

Clearly there is no broad population-wise (or even profession-wide) analysis of programming aptitude, so the commenters were opining based on their personal experiences. The speaker's assertion of normal distribution-ness was just as underwhelming with evidentiary background.