No. You don't factor in switching costs and opportunity costs. Human professional development is path dependent. Starting to code earlier means you start to g

No. You don't factor in switching costs and opportunity costs. Human professional development is path dependent. Starting to code earlier means you start to get monetary or psychological utility out of it before you learn other marketable or self-actualizing skills. That creates a positive feedback loop that is not available in most other disciplines for a young person. As soon as one invests significant effort in becoming a marketer or a banker or a physicist, the opportunity cost of spending time on learning programming is so high, most opt out of it. While in the long term, skill combination might exponentially increase monetary utility, happiness utility growth doesn't have the exponential curve. So yeah, it's really important to start as early as possible before one is invested in his or her primary field or picking up computer science could be an irrational choice. While one could certainly learn CS in the later life stages the probability of doing that is quite lower. If you agree, consider to tell this o parents of young kids you care about.