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Ask HN: Is "At which age did you start coding?” a good data point for hiring?

29 points by akhayam 3y ago

Was talking to someone I trust who told me this is a question that gives a solid data point on a candidate developer's hire-ability, with two qualifiers: 1/ Asked from young-ish developers, so the expected answer is always less than 18. 2/ Asked in addition to coding/system-design questions. Has anyone seen a study or even an anecdote on correlation between success of a developer if they started coding earlier (say 11yr), rather than later (say 15yr or 16yr) in their youth?

Bostonian 3y ago
It's my guess that in the U.S. and much of the Western world that this question would tend to select for males. For my sample size of three children (2 boys 1 girl), only one, a boy, started coding very young.
999900000999 3y ago
I personally wouldn't put too much stock in this. Just because you wrote a ruby script at 19 doesn't mean you actually started programing then.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Exactly, I wrote a visual basic program preteen, a little perl a bit later which made me give up. Later in college I discovered programming and have been since
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
It is not a solid data point because it assumes that everyone has equal access to computing hardware and knowledge. People from a more rural or economically poorer background would be discriminated against just because they did not have access to computers early in life. Having earlier access to a computer and 'coding earlier' is no indicator of superior talent or current coding ability.
eesmith 3y ago
I've seen solid evidence that this helps support gender bias. In "the West", disproportionately more boys than girls start to learn to program in the age range you mentioned. [1] A selection method which gives preferences for a younger start year will therefore also be biased in favor of males. If two candidates are equally competent at the coding/system-design questions, then I don't see what difference it makes if one candidate started at 11 and the other at 16. You'll also want to know how much time they spent programming - 1 hour per month? 1 hour per day? did they stop for a few years? Also, what was the actual programming? Because entering BASIC games from a book, as I did in the 1980s, vs. hacking Spice Lisp at CMU (as jwz did at age 16) are both "programming", but I know who you should have hired as an employee, and it wasn't me. [1] I'll quote https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3196839.3196867 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3196839.3196867 as the first paper I found which discusses the underlying issue, and with supporting evidence: > Computing education has experienced a falling popularity over the last decades, in particular among girls [15, 18, 29]. The situation does not seem to be improving, either in Norway or in other Western countries. We even see a drop in the number of women in computing studies in the humanities that used to attract more women [30]. > In contrast to the Western picture, certain Asian and Eastern European countries have not followed this trend and can boast a higher proportion of women in computer science [8, 50]. This leads us to conclude that there is no obvious, natural or biological reason for women being a minority in computing or for computing being associated with masculinity. > Such associations are rather results of social structures and specific cultural constructions that have made it less likely for women to choose computing across most of the Western world [8, 52]. > Cultural images and stereotypes have been documented as being vital in creating barriers for girls’ and women's engagement in IT [5, 10], also in Norway [18].
dorfwald 3y ago
I don't like the idea that you have to start early to be competent. I've met people in the industry who only got into software development in their late twenties, and were very good at their jobs.
magicalhippo 3y ago
There's roughly four main parts to programming: "getting it", creativity, experience and working hard. Some people are better at some of these aspects than others, and vice versa. Only experience requires having programmed a lot. However perhaps those who start young are more likely to "get it", making it fun for them, though I think it's a poor proxy since you can't control for who had exposure at an early age. I started programming at age 12, quite by chance. I stumbled over some code one day, and my buddy could tell me it looked like Basic and I could try QBasic on my machine. I was quite fascinated, and really wanted to learn more. However I didn't know anyone who could program, and we didn't have internet nor BBS access. So until I was 16 and we got our first modem, I spent a lot of time bumbling around alone. On the bright side I think it made me good at reading documentation. On the other hand, I could probably have done a lot more actual programming if hadn't had to spend a full week trying to find the one keyword I was looking for... Of course it didn't help that QBasic's built-in help was in English, and I had only started learning English that same year.
- cwbrandsma 3y ago
  At 12? Well, that is a little older than we usually expect, but I’d probably still interview you. I started at 10 with my subscription to Home Computing Magazine and my uncle was teaching me to make juke boxes.
- sgu999 3y ago
  > I started programming at age 12, quite by chance Most of your luck came from being born in a family that could afford a computer and let you spend time on it...
  - blep_ 3y ago
    That's still by chance.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Sure, and that was part of my point. Not everyone will have the same circumstances growing up. And the only thing it'll really affect is how much experience you have at say age 20. And as I said, experience is only part of what makes a productive programmer. That being said, our first computer was paid for by ny dad's work when we had to move, so he could part time remote (no modem tho, so floppys and paper back and forth).
lapcat 3y ago
Would you ask a doctor at what age they started surgery? It's irrelevant. You might as well ask about the wealth of the candidate's parents, which is significant factor in whether a child has access to a desktop computer on which they can do serious coding.
- ozim 3y ago
  Simply asking about starting age is trying to infer "genuine interest" based on a single data point. Which I agree is irrelevant.
- quechimba 3y ago
  Most kids had computers at home when I was a kid in the 90s/00s but they had more powerful computers than I did so they would just play games. I couldn't even play Counter Strike on mine so I learned to program instead.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
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 don't even need to be geniuses, it's just the extra amount of time they had with programming has given them a head start and is an indicator that they love what they're doing, giving a higher probability that they'll be passionate about the job.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  I started at age 4 and I am a competent but not amazing coder.
  - __123__ 3y ago
    It is not about when you started learning something, but how you learned it. It can be easy to learn the "wrong way" to do things when not classically trained, especially in engineering roles, that is hard to unlearn later. That is, you could have an understanding of something that works for what you have seen so far, but is fundamentally flawed and it is not until much later when you have seem more complicated scenarios that you understand how it was flawed. Someone learning later, though, from a professional, can be showed the bigger picture earlier and have a better understanding.
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      I agree! I was responding as an example to help disprove 'if somebody starts early, they're good.' I think there are benefits and drawbacks to each type of learning. There's also a lot of things I have some incomplete knowledge of but have never learned the appropriate way/have blind spots about and a lot of things I had to learn the hard way that would have gone way more smoothly if I'd opted for a CS education or learned differently.
samwaltmanjr 3y ago
[flagged]
livinglist 3y ago
Man I remember when I was little, I always wanted to make apps for iOS but my parents couldn’t even afford to buy me an iPod touch let along a Mac…
1827163 3y ago
I started at the age of 7, on a Sinclair ZX81, a Z80 based system. Getting it to print things to the screen. Then eventually progressed to an Acorn Archimedes at the age of 9, where I started to figure out how ARM assembly language worked, which is built in to BBC BASIC. At the age of 11 I was already fluent in assembler. Then programming C at the age of ~14 or so, and running Red Hat Linux 5.1 at the age of 16. But then I was set back at the age of 18, where I developed severe PTSD from a family abuse related incident, sadly. That was way back in 2001.
roland35 3y ago
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 learning basic and programming games on my TI-83 calculator in middle school, so I would probably benefit from this question!
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Exactly. I wrote my first hello world program before high school (I don't know exactly what age), and I know plenty of people that started in adulthood that would be better coders than me. I'm not bad, I just recognize that plenty of people learned later and are "better" at coding.
- xupybd 3y ago
  Yeah I had non technical parents and a school that considered excell to be computer science. I tried to learn at home but didn't get past simple scripts. I'm sure a more gifted person would have done better in my position but I think I could have done better if I'd had help.
- ianbicking 3y ago
  I think it detects a couple things: 1. Are you internally motivated and excited by coding? Lots of false negative potential, but if you did code early and kept with it then that's a good sign. But with all the STEM education and stuff now, I wouldn't necessarily trust that. I.e., this signal quality is falling. 2. Were you able to progress independently? Children tend to be less supported, including less supported by their own discipline, so there's some indication that early success implies some kind of natural talent. But it only really matters if you get some sense of what they mean by "started coding". It would be classic imposter syndrome for some groups of people to set a higher bar for "starting". 3. Did you have access? Help, equipment, someone to guide you in a direction that would be fun and motivating? We'd all like to think this is a false signal, but the challenge of privilege is that it might not be: privilege is often used to nurture actual skill and talent. That is even expected of parents! But it's also a problematic metric of course. If the question was useless then we wouldn't be having this conversation. That it's useful but problematic puts us in a jam. But it's also easy not to ask, and to put in the work to get the signals you care about with a less problematic question.
pjbeam 3y ago
I wouldn't ask anything age related at all in an interview.
- dllthomas 3y ago
  In fact, that the answer could theoretically be over 40 and that that would count against the candidate means it's probably illegal in the US without clear evidence that it directly relates to job performance.
reassembled 3y ago
I first programmed a computer in high school Computer Programming 1 class, in Turbo Pascal, running on a 486. But then I stopped programming for many years until I was around 35. I took up the pursuit in earnest and landed a QA engineering job at a hardware company which turned into a software engineering position. I’m doing a majority of Programming in C and C++ currently, as well as Python for writing test scripts.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
What do you think it will indicate? Quite honestly, I think this is an incredibly bad measure to try to correlate with job performance. I know plenty of people who coded from a young age and aren't good at coding, or they are great at coding, but wouldn't make good employees.
xen0 3y ago
Beyond a single course at school I took when I was 17, I only really started programming when I was 21 and started my career. I like to think I've enjoyed some success over the past 11 years, but I would definitely fail your friend's arbitrary criteria.
yarg 3y ago
Not really. You're filtering for wealth.
- badpun 3y ago
  Not really even for wealth. All of my friends in elementary school got 8-bit or 16-bit home computers. However, my father also got me a BASIC programming manual with it, and I also had an uncle who was already doing some basic tinkering with a ZX Spectrum. Hence, I was the only kid who learned programming in my whole group.
  - yarg 3y ago
    Yes, it's filtering for wealth; but it's not only filtering for wealth.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
This feels similar to asking “do sons of blacksmiths make better blacksmiths?” and a few steps later you end up with a guild system.
morelisp 3y ago
Please ask this question, it makes it much easier for me to hire.
tracer4201 3y ago
I worked at a big tech company in a staff/principal engineering position. I always had coworkers who didn’t start coding until college, who were better engineers, communicators, and overall leaders than I was. I turned to them for mentorship. For what it’s worth, I learned to code in grade school. I wasn’t terrible at my job, and left in that principal role. Not sure how conclusive my anecdote is, but I 100% do not believe there’s a strong relationship with starting to code earlier in life and being a better coder, engineer, or general employee than someone who started in college or even much later in life.
YuriNiyazov 3y ago
It’s a good data point in the sense that chances are, people that started doing that early are good. That doesn’t mean that the people that didn’t are bad. You’d be missing a large population of good coders if you use that data point as a high bit in decision making.
danmaz74 3y ago
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 reasoning here about the correlation with wealth? Besides any correlation between having started early and being a good prospective hire.
- morelisp 3y ago
  A C64 in 1983 cost the equivalent of ~$900 today.
  - jjk166 3y ago
    I don't think the mention of the C64 was with regards to its affordability at the time, but rather its computing power. If you find a 20 year old computer in a dumpster, yeah it may have been expensive back in the day, but its cheap as dirt now, and so long as you can get it to turn on it's still going to be perfectly adequate for hobby programming. Programming may have been an expensive hobby 40 years ago, but it's been cheap for a very long time now.
- xupybd 3y ago
  I was raised by a single mother. We couldn't afford to fix broken windows. I didn't have a bed for a year. My shoes were worn out and didn't fit. We couldn't afford a C64 in the 90s. I eventually got a home PC but I was 16. I had a paper run and a cleaning job.
clnq 3y ago
I guess I can offer a data point here. I started programming in C at around age 12. For a long period after that, I didn't know much about software engineering, I was writing really poor quality code, but I was tinkering with programming for years. Then I started learning it seriously in my late 20s and got to a senior role in a large tech company within about 3 years. It was easy for me to learn a lot quickly as I would intuitively "get" a lot of concepts. That is the main advantage in my case over many others who didn't start so early. Programming concepts are easier to understand, I can learn codebases quicker, and similar. But I can attest to being a very, very bad programmer for about 15 years before I started learning coding seriously. You shouldn't have hired me over a fresh grad when I was 22. Now, maybe I bring more to the table than some other engineers with formal education only. But then again, the advantage is so small that things like personality have a bigger influence on coding ability, I think. The question about when a candidate started coding can be a nice conversation starter. But starting early doesn't guarantee competency. In fact, a kid will almost definitely not follow great SWE practices for many years. So those years of experience aren't worth a lot, in my opinion. As others have said, the age at which someone starts programming might be a better predictor for their wealth and similar. I was the only kid in my neighbourhood in the 90s with a personal computer to code on. But what good does that do in describing me today as a professional, a software engineer, or a person?
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  >So those years of experience aren't worth a lot, in my opinion. That makes me feel better. :p I didn't start until SUPER late. When I began learning it, I feel like I took to all the concepts like a fish to water and found a passion for it which endures to this day. I have a hard time imagining what code my younger self would've written without cringing, but I always wondered whether I'd be godlike at it now or just as good plus cringeworthy memories if I started early.
- deleted 3y ago
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pudgeball 3y ago
This is not a good question to ask as a data point. There are lots of people in their second and third careers who bring a lot more to the table because of their experience. The age at which you start doesn’t guarantee anything other than you can say “I’ve been writing code since X”.
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Rebelgecko 3y ago
If an interviewer asked me this question as it's worded it would be a ginormous red flag.
akhayam 3y ago
I posted this question without an opinion because I have a strong bias that it doesn’t matter when you start coding in your youth. I had no access to computing until I was in 11th grade. I feel that it helped me build better mental models because reasoning and build better mental a that I wouldn’t have built if I was younger. Appreciate the community giving their perspectives, most which are spot on.
amir734jj 3y ago
30M. Started in middle school with BASIC. Being an introvert really helps too. I had no close friend, computer was more or less my childhood friend growing up.
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adelie 3y ago
genuinely, the fact that you're even considering this question as a signal for hirability is depressing. even if it's a useful signal, it sends a bad message. 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.
soganess 3y ago
I started coding at 10 in the mid-90s and I'm as garden variety as you can be developer-wise. I'm competent but not exceptional. While I love CS deeply and can't imagine my life without it, I write software for money. Once you clear the "sure I can do that without ruining the next person's life" threshold... Shrug. 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.
__123__ 3y ago
This is a horrible question that if not illegal, is extremely close to being illegal since it requires the candidate to give information about their age. 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.
- __123__ 3y ago
  For me, the biggest question, is what company does the person asking this interview question work for, so I can know to never interview with them ever.
- throwaway60607 3y ago
  I started programming when I was 6. How old am I? My father started when he was 11, how old is he?
  - kubanczyk 3y ago
    > to give information about their age You gave information about your age. Previously I didn't know whether you are below, at, or above 6 years old, now I know. What if some poor chap started when he was 54?
keskival 3y ago
I started coding when I was 6 years old on Commodore 64.
Gortal278 3y ago
That's q opens a can of worms around age discrimination. Best avoided.
vivegi 3y ago
Absolute BS. Correlation is not causation.
Agraillo 3y ago
I don't think 11yr vs 15yr/16yr is a big difference for measuring. I started early, probably falling into 11yr category. Many years passed, and recently I had a chance to look at my code of the age probably around 20. There were so many wrongs in the code that I stopped counting. Definitely I learned a lot since then. So the period between 11yr and 21yr was just fun for coding and getting things working as quickly as possible (youth just can not wait).
pdevr 3y ago
No. You will get fake answers from the dishonest, with the youngest possible age that will be accepted without too many questions. As for the honest ones, starting something early does not necessarily mean that they kept on doing it, or more importantly, it does not mean that they learned more than others about technologies that are fairly new. There are of course outliers, like competitive programmers who have successful software careers, but you can find them easily by other means. Any interview question, where the answer cannot be verified fairly quickly, if used as a criteria for hiring, will get you plenty of liars and a few good people.
time4tea 3y ago
This question, in an interview, seems to be likely to be illegal in many jurisdictions.
- randyrand 3y ago
  How? Years of experience is very standard question
  - time4tea 3y ago
    "Years of experience" is age discrimination in a single phrase. Sure, ask about competency and capability, but not years of experience. By asking about age you started programming, you may be discriminating against parental income levels, family situation, schooling, gender and all sorts of other things.
deafpolygon 3y ago
No. For one, this doesn't say anything about someone's ability. There are people who "started coding" at 5 and cannot made CRUD applications at 30. I had never used a computer in my life (except for a brief interaction with a TANDY) until I was 18, and I still went on to have a relatively good career as a Linux sysadmin.
KenArrari 3y ago
A lot of people will say something really early, but then that age means copying and pasting from a tutorial and then not revisiting until they're adults. If starting early actually did help them become better programmers, then it will be apparent from their current skill level and the accomplishments on their resume. Just focus on looking at that.
ian0 3y ago
I think there are traits (eg critical thinking) in people that make them suited to different roles including coding but whether they had the opportunity to be able to develop them early in life or later (even up until the point of getting their first interview with you) does not make much difference. Its a relatively small data point, but I do think its milk-able. For example for product managers without experience, finding out whether they have actively thought about how things are built the way they are or tend to be unnaturally frustrated by bad design they encounter in life is a relatively solid indicator of whether they will be succesfull. Its just one indicator though, your will still get false-positives and false-negatives.
zerohp 3y ago
One of the smartest engineers I know learned to program in college at 20 years old. He has never done much coding outside of coursework or the workplace and now works on the Windows kernel at Microsoft. This is a bad question.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  > One of the smartest engineers I know learned to program in college at 20 years old. To add more anecdotal evidence, I know someone like this too.
JohnFen 3y ago
A better question is "how long have you been programming, including as a hobby?"
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
The only relevant data point for hiring someone to do a job is whether or not they're capable of doing the job. The only way to know if someone is capable of doing a job is to give them the job and observe their performance.
lisasays 3y ago
Absolutely not. The person who told you that has no sound data or argument behind that view. It's just a gut feeling they have. Which says, basically: "The best people to hire are those who spent their formative years just like I did." It's also discriminatory. As another commenter put it, you might as well ask how much money their parents earned.
jjk166 3y ago
This question makes me wonder if there is a scientific discipline that actually empirically tests the efficacy of hiring questions and methods. Surely there must be, but a quick google search for career science and similar terms only brings up job postings for science positions.
tj-teej 3y ago
I think the problem with these kinds of posts is that they miss the fundamental fact that humans are so different from each other. The hobbyist who coded from age 10 because they just enjoy solving super complex problems will be helpful for fixing that thorny bug but may not be the right person to work with a Product Manager to break down an ambiguous project and launch something fast. A team will necessarily contain lots of different kind of people and I think managers should be looking to understand what a candidates strengths will be (and red flags) and ask themselves if this person could achieve the needs of the team.
austin-cheney 3y ago
I would argue that age is less important than, but inclusive to, source of learning. Sources of learning include university, boot camp, self taught, job/team, and so forth. Also, learning to code is too vague. I learned to code at a very young age but did not formally begin programming until much later in life.