I'm a big believer in the 10,000 hours thing, but people always forget the 'deliberate practice' part. The reason I'm still a bad driver after easily putting in

I'm a big believer in the 10,000 hours thing, but people always forget the 'deliberate practice' part. The reason I'm still a bad driver after easily putting in 10,000 hours is that I've never tried to get better. I started programming much later in life but my skills improved quickly because I made (and still make) an effort to put in 1-3 hours a night of practice, doing exercises, trying something new, etc. Writing 10k hours of code does not make one an expert (otherwise there wouldn't be so many awful programmers out there). The real advantage to those who start young is that later on in life they don't have the start up cost of lots of fumbling and learning just to get started. Additionally if they go the CS route a lot of the intro classes will be easier allowing them to get ahead faster if they so choose. The same is true of musicians, if you think back to high school there's tons of kids that play guitar, but the group that goes home and practices scales all night rather than just playing their favorite songs tend to be the ones that go one to be serious musicians later on.