41–50 of 90 posts
Appreciate the community giving their perspectives, most which are spot on.
my first exposure to programming was college and it was incredibly discouraging for me to discover that many of my peers had been programming for years; i felt like it was hard to 'compete' with my peers simply because my parents didn't encourage me to work with computers when i was a child. ironically, i ended up doing well on exams and getting a minor teaching position because i didn't have self-taught bad habits and could explain the coursework better than those who already 'got' the concepts from prior experience.
I am strongly against this question. You're basically looking at who's parents provided an opportunity for them to learn coding early. I'm sure you would find that most people who started programming at a young age (and are still doing it obviously) are probably better than average and also enthusiastic. However, I think it is still a disservice to anyone who didn't have support as a child. For the record I was learn…
Personally, I learned Basic from a RSTS/E BASIC-PLUS manual at age 9. At the time I was interested in mathematics and would go to the local library to read up on it. When my older brother came home with a printout of a simple program incrementing a variable by one and printing it I was pretty confused, since "A=A+1" doesn't make sense mathematically. When the assignment was explained to me, that you could automate mathematics, it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen.
I am strongly against this question. You're basically looking at who's parents provided an opportunity for them to learn coding early. I'm sure you would find that most people who started programming at a young age (and are still doing it obviously) are probably better than average and also enthusiastic. However, I think it is still a disservice to anyone who didn't have support as a child. For the record I was learn…
This a meta comment. Many other comments here talk about a correlation between wealth and programming early in life, which really surprised me. I started programming on a commodore 64 in the early eighties, and I don't understand mentions of needing a desktop computer or powerful/expensive hardware; on the contrary, you could learn programming on any old computer with a keyboard. Anybody cares to explain their reason…
I eventually got a home PC but I was 16. I had a paper run and a cleaning job.
Learning to code early did not make me a better anything. I'm sure an adult could learn my entire childhood's worth of tinkering in 6 months to a year. And that is me being quite flattering to my younger self.
Long-term professional experience on large (50k-100k loc and up) projects is where you cut your teeth. That knowledge is hard to learn, hard to teach, and hard to transform into constraints when architecting something. No ten-year-old has those skills, and learning to code young doesn't somehow predispose you to better acquiring them. I'm fairly sure I don't have them yet.
I think it is a very good indicator. Some comments here try to defend people who started later on and still might be very good, but that's besides the point I think. If you have someone who started at young age, you can be pretty sure they're really good. After all, they must have done it because it was actually fun to them, because no 12yo would be like "this sucks but it will be good for me later in life". So they…
The signal this question provides is a signal about the person giving the interview (and the company as a whole) and nothing about the candidate.
That is, if someone asked me this question in an interview, I would immediately know that I want nothing to do with the company. I would probably politely end the interview on the spot, and would definitely not answer the question.
What the question is asking is whether the candidate was able to have access to a computer as well as resources on how to develop on that computer when you were growing up.
This is extremely biased because many people may not have been able to have a computer to program on, could not get access to such a computer, or, if they could, did not have access to information on how to program the computer.
The point is, all of those details are irrelevant.
That is, if two candidates have the same number of years of professional experience, it doesn't matter when they first started getting interested in the field they are interviewing for.