Lots of people don’t have the opportunity to get into programming for fun or because they think it’s interesting. A person could reasonably go into programming

Lots of people don’t have the opportunity to get into programming for fun or because they think it’s interesting. A person could reasonably go into programming when choosing a major in college never having written a line of code, and end up doing great. Our perceptions of programmers are shaped by the PC revolution of the 1980s. A lot of people got exposed to programming because there was a PC in the house. Kids and teens so exposed tended to be the ones who went into programming as a career, just because they had a head start and because they were more familiar with it. The result is that many of the best programmers in the profession in the 90s and 00s were the ones who started as kids. But many of the mediocre and bad ones were too! Passion and early starts are overrated. As long as a person is smart in the right way and reasonably enjoys the stuff, they can be a great programmer. (And I say this as someone who started programming at the age of 6 and did it for free for many years.)