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Has anyone seen a study or even an anecdote on correlation between success of a developer if they started coding earlier (say 11yr), rather than later (say 15yr or 16yr) in their youth?
Just because you wrote a ruby script at 19 doesn't mean you actually started programing then.
People from a more rural or economically poorer background would be discriminated against just because they did not have access to computers early in life.
Having earlier access to a computer and 'coding earlier' is no indicator of superior talent or current coding ability.
If two candidates are equally competent at the coding/system-design questions, then I don't see what difference it makes if one candidate started at 11 and the other at 16. You'll also want to know how much time they spent programming - 1 hour per month? 1 hour per day? did they stop for a few years? Also, what was the actual programming? Because entering BASIC games from a book, as I did in the 1980s, vs. hacking Spice Lisp at CMU (as jwz did at age 16) are both "programming", but I know who you should have hired as an employee, and it wasn't me.
[1] I'll quote https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3196839.3196867 as the first paper I found which discusses the underlying issue, and with supporting evidence:
> Computing education has experienced a falling popularity over the last decades, in particular among girls [15, 18, 29]. The situation does not seem to be improving, either in Norway or in other Western countries. We even see a drop in the number of women in computing studies in the humanities that used to attract more women [30].
> In contrast to the Western picture, certain Asian and Eastern European countries have not followed this trend and can boast a higher proportion of women in computer science [8, 50]. This leads us to conclude that there is no obvious, natural or biological reason for women being a minority in computing or for computing being associated with masculinity.
> Such associations are rather results of social structures and specific cultural constructions that have made it less likely for women to choose computing across most of the Western world [8, 52].
> Cultural images and stereotypes have been documented as being vital in creating barriers for girls’ and women's engagement in IT [5, 10], also in Norway [18].
I personally wouldn't put too much stock in this. Just because you wrote a ruby script at 19 doesn't mean you actually started programing then.
Later in college I discovered programming and have been since
Some people are better at some of these aspects than others, and vice versa. Only experience requires having programmed a lot. However perhaps those who start young are more likely to "get it", making it fun for them, though I think it's a poor proxy since you can't control for who had exposure at an early age.
I started programming at age 12, quite by chance. I stumbled over some code one day, and my buddy could tell me it looked like Basic and I could try QBasic on my machine. I was quite fascinated, and really wanted to learn more. However I didn't know anyone who could program, and we didn't have internet nor BBS access. So until I was 16 and we got our first modem, I spent a lot of time bumbling around alone.
On the bright side I think it made me good at reading documentation. On the other hand, I could probably have done a lot more actual programming if hadn't had to spend a full week trying to find the one keyword I was looking for... Of course it didn't help that QBasic's built-in help was in English, and I had only started learning English that same year.
It's irrelevant.
You might as well ask about the wealth of the candidate's parents, which is significant factor in whether a child has access to a desktop computer on which they can do serious coding.
So they don't even need to be geniuses, it's just the extra amount of time they had with programming has given them a head start and is an indicator that they love what they're doing, giving a higher probability that they'll be passionate about the job.