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

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.