The programming talent myth

Success in any craft (and science) in 5% talent / luck and 90% hard work. But the love to the craft / science makes exerting this effort massively more rewarding. I don't think that training oneself to be a master is not attainable for someone who does not have a burning passion for this specific mastery. For instance, a mastery of programming might be a gateway to other things, for which the passion is burning.

The number of things for which ability to code is now a gateway is growing, be it financial modeling, computational chemistry, linguistics, etc.

Also, there's mastery and there is peak achievement. Everyone (except severely mentally disabled) can be taught writing skills and write nice, clean, well-organized texts. But probably not everyone can become Hemingway or Borges or Nabokov.

Equally, everyone can be taught to write nice, clean, well-organized code. But probably not everyone can be a superstar like Knuth or Norvig or Carmack.

So I'd reserve the word "talent" for the highest achievers. Talent is not required to be a decent programmer.

What you are talking about is programmers that in addition to their technical skills have also leadership and management capabilities, which make them absolutely invaluable in a company, but not necessarily more skilled or "talented" at programming than others.

1. Draw two circles.

2. Draw the rest of the owl.

This is a common problem in art, music, sport and programming - you have an expert trying to teach newbies, and they say "just do this". The newbies have no idea how to begin to do it and the expert knows it so intuitively they cannot break it down further. Everyone ends up staring blankly at one another.

Getting people past that point seems to be a skill of its own. Certainly it's not been easily packaged for programming. Learning involves a lot of guided experimentation, and keeping the student's morale up is just as important as the material itself.

There are different types of skills -- and if you can combine them, you are the 10 to 100x times person;

Understand the business problem, and then have enough tech skill to solve it and you can move mountains. Most managers know neither the business domain, nor the technology, which makes it even harder.

Like in everything in life, 90 to 95% is BS.

I disagree respectfully with that statement. First you devote a lot of your time to try to teach peeps about CS and I think that's great. But I'd argue that music and coding, to your comparison are essentially languages (former is a language of rhythm and melody and wielded by a physical/electronic instrument, latter is a language of algorithm and logic and dictated by a PC) and learning them is akin to language acquisition.

So IMHO, there is an illusion of talent when you have native speakers who can speak with perfect accent, grammar and fluidity; just like there are "native" musicians who have perfect pitch, can transcribe and improvise on the fly, play with speed/style. Because they have internalized the grammar, and that language's vocabulary and phrasing are by definition the native's first nature.

But non-native speakers can learn a foreign language albeit very painfully, perhaps with an accent and pauses that they'll never get rid of. But they can still express themselves successfully. Put it simply, I believe anyone can be taught the basic's of web development/CRUD, OOP, basic flow-control just most people can be taught how to play "Chopsticks" or conversational English. The programming equivalent of writing "The Great Gatsby" or composing a sonata, I'll concede that to the real talented.