I'd like to tackle your supposition of "privilege" and "catching up to boy wonders". I've been "hacking" since I was 12. You can call it privilege, but if so,

I'd like to tackle your supposition of "privilege" and "catching up to boy wonders". I've been "hacking" since I was 12. You can call it privilege, but if so, it was western privilege, not male privilege: - I was introduced to computers largely in elementary school, along with the rest of the class. I loved them. - I spent an entire summer, when I was 12, mowing lawns, weeding, hauling wood, laying down bark and sod, and babysitting until I finally had enough money to buy myself a low-end Mac. - I had a 2400 baud hand-me-down modem. It was all I could afford. I dialed up BBSs, and when it became available, paid for my own dial-up internet access. I had western privilege, in that our school had computers, and that we had neighbors that would pay me less than minimum wage to do yard work. However, I didn't have any more 'western privilege' than the other people in my class, including the girls. Once I had the machine, I spent the next two decades working hard to learn (and keep learning). I taught myself how to use HyperCard, write AppleScript, and eventually some Pascal. I taught myself enough 68k assembly to crack software (mowing lawns does not pay well. I buy my software now). I scrounged a SCSI ZIP drive and used it to install NetBSD (my Mac was one of the rare 68k Macs that used IDE, and NetBSD/mac68k required SCSI), and then eventually moved to Linux on my Mac -- version 2.0.36. I voraciously read books, I taught myself C, and then ObjC, and eventually ML and Haskell and Ocaml. I taught myself Java, and then I taught myself how to write applications and then larger-scale systems. I have code in the FreeBSD kernel, Mac OS X user-land, and in a number of major commercial products. This took me about 20 years in total, covered far more bases and languages and hardware/software combinations than I can possibly list here, and catapulted me into the career that I have today. That depth and breadth of experience is not something you can replicate in a year of CS education, or even 4 years of CS education. I haven't stopped learning, and I absolutely disagree with your conclusion about being able to catch up with "boy wonders": unless you put in equivalent effort, you CAN NOT catch up with "boy wonders". (also, it has nothing to do with being a boy.) This doesn't mean less experienced people can't contribute. Of course they can contribute. I was doing "useful" stuff when I was just getting started, although I'm certainly embarrassed of most of what I wrote now, and more so for the pieces that are still in active use. What I take umbrage with is the notion that we must devalue genuine expertise because otherwise we risk turning away potential contributors. That's wrong -- we must value expertise, rather than encourage self-aggrandizement of the inexperienced. If we genuinely fail to recognize and take advantage of expertise, we'll simply be doomed to an ongoing cyclic re-invention of the wheel across each new generation of software engineers.