Question
Can late-blooming developers ever catch up with the whiz-kids? If you didn't start programming until your 20s, can you pretty much forget about competing with these guys?
Answer
There may be empirical studies about this sort of thing, but I suspect the answer is no.
Programming is similar to mathematics or chess. It is a young person's game. The age of peak achievement may vary depending on what type of programming people get into, but I suspect all the great programmers start fairly early. No later than 25-30. And you have to keep at it continuously. Big breaks can cause irrecoverable use-it-or-lose-it losses.
You may be able to cross over from a sufficiently similar field, like mathematics or logic (or even certain kinds of art), but I don't think you can switch late in life from fields that require truly different kinds of thinking.
This is a falsifiable answer, and I'd love to be proven wrong on this one. If you can find even one person who STARTED in programming after age 40 and came from a field completely unrelated to computing and went on to do something truly significant, I'd be wrong.
If you can find me more than 25 such names and they all did it without exceptional circumstances, I won't even say "the exception proves the rule."
I am not talking low/mediocre since the question is specifically about competing with "whiz kids." You can get to low/mediocre quality skills at any age.
For the record, I am a mediocre programmer (started with BASIC in 8th grade). I've mostly lost even my mediocre skills due to disuse over the last 5 years. I suppose I could get back to mediocre if I tried, but I'll never be "good" let alone "whiz kid." My programming experience has been patchy with bouts of coding interspersed with bouts of non-coding (lasting months to years). Each time I get back into programming, it gets harder than the previous time. This suggests an aging effect.
Programming is similar to mathematics or chess. It is a young person's game. The age of peak achievement may vary depending on what type of programming people get into, but I suspect all the great programmers start fairly early. No later than 25-30. And you have to keep at it continuously. Big breaks can cause irrecoverable use-it-or-lose-it losses.
You may be able to cross over from a sufficiently similar field, like mathematics or logic (or even certain kinds of art), but I don't think you can switch late in life from fields that require truly different kinds of thinking.
This is a falsifiable answer, and I'd love to be proven wrong on this one. If you can find even one person who STARTED in programming after age 40 and came from a field completely unrelated to computing and went on to do something truly significant, I'd be wrong.
If you can find me more than 25 such names and they all did it without exceptional circumstances, I won't even say "the exception proves the rule."
I am not talking low/mediocre since the question is specifically about competing with "whiz kids." You can get to low/mediocre quality skills at any age.
For the record, I am a mediocre programmer (started with BASIC in 8th grade). I've mostly lost even my mediocre skills due to disuse over the last 5 years. I suppose I could get back to mediocre if I tried, but I'll never be "good" let alone "whiz kid." My programming experience has been patchy with bouts of coding interspersed with bouts of non-coding (lasting months to years). Each time I get back into programming, it gets harder than the previous time. This suggests an aging effect.