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

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].