Indeed.

A friend of mine wanted to give back and started teaching programming to disadvantaged kids.

He was shocked to ultimately discover that for most of his students, they simply didn't seem to be fundamentally capable of the abstract thought required, and it didn't matter how much time he spent with them. He came away from the experience fairly disillusioned, and I also never expected the difference in ability to be so extreme.

I personally really wonder -- is this something "genetic", like an athletic ability? Is it something learned, but somehow acquired at a young age? Is it a mindset, that we just haven't figured out how to communicate? Or a question of motivation, if it seems "hard" to think that way?

I recommend to everyone to get outside your tribe and comfort zones and spend real time with people who are genuinely different than you.

For me, the biggest such time was being a conscript in my small European country. Not a great time, but holy shit, did it open my eyes to the existence of people I would never have thought were real!

Emigrating to California was comparatively a mild culture shock. Turns out I had more in common with muslim Pakistani software engineers than farm boys from half an hour outside my home town.

I work as a software professional in the US Midwest. A few times conversations about what the average American citizen looks like, and I remind my coworkers that it’s not us, and if they want to view a more accurate cross section of society to visit the DMV.

>Are you are Muslim ?

BurningFrog is not Muslim. BurningFrog was pointing out that religious difference between BurningFrog and BurningFrog's coworkers (muslim Pakistani software engineers).

>If I dropped you in the middle of Pakistan I am pretty sure you would have nothing in common with most people in Pakistan.

That's pretty much the point BurningFrog was making. BurningFrog has a lot of similarities with software engineers willing to move to California even if they're of different religions and nationalities. But BurningFrog was very different from "most people in" "[BurningFrog's] small European country". And BurningFrog is similarly very different from "most people in Pakistan".

Exactly.

To be fair, one reason I got along so well with people from every corner of the planet writing software in Silicon Valley was just that I had learned about strangers in the military.

When I first got interested in tech it was called "being a geek". Now with the broification of tech, and the influx of people from cultures that optimize solely for income and prestige rather than passion, it seems to be forgotten that some people are just geeks and some (most) aren't.

I think plenty of people wanted to be in tech for more money in the past too. And there were those people who were just happy to be able to play with computers and happily surprised to be paid well for it. It's not a new thing.

This is what bothers me about the concept of meritocracy. Sure, hard work is unquestionably a necessary component to success, but humans also require a large amount of capital investment (education, medicine, etc.) to reach their full potential; without that, they are doomed to the pool of unskilled labor. People are generally sorted into career hierarchies before they are even given a choice.

What is the solution? I haven't a clue. Maybe an education system similar to Germany's, though I doubt that would catch on in the US.

But I don't think that's really true in this day and age when it comes to programming. All the information to learn programming is out there. You have direct access to all of the lectures and materials of university courses.

I speculate there are more intelligent people than people with strong psychologies (those who are committed to learning), but by filtering for the intersection you're throwing lots of industry advantage away.

I also say that the problem people are bothered by is human suffering. Even if you don't like how meritocracy is conducted today, like maybe you feel that 50% of positions in society are not sufficiently merited, and even if you could snap your fingers and magically sort people by potential like an oracle, you are still left with a meritorious race where few people win and losers suffer bad.

As a society we should contemplate more deliberately the fate of losers.

I failed out of college multiple times. My life was bad and unstable and I had panic attack and depression. I also have difficulty visualizing future rewards. I have one of these “weak” psychologies.

I met my wife, who helped “smooth out” my moods, and went from someone who couldn’t hold down a job at Walmart to a software engineer making many multiples of what I did just five years ago.

Even with the stability it mostly allowed me to take adderall without horrible behavioral side effects like compulsive gambling.

You’re right though, for me I was basically forgotten and nobody cared at that point. It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom sleeping on my moms couch that things got better. I feel like I was pulled up out of a hell I didn’t know I could escape from.

Yeah, but then you still need the time and environment to be able to do it which can be hard if you are working long hours in two jobs or whatever to make rent.

Then you have the old problem that in many companies HR will still want a degree cert.

I think technical and professional education should be always available to people - it helps us all if people can reach their potential after all.

I would say that genetics have a large part to play. A certain proportion of the population just isn't wired to think this way, I don't think it's strictly an intelligence thing either. Some tests have been devised that do predict with some certainty which group a particular person belongs in but these are controversial - and it's understandable why.

The saddest part is dealing with those who weren't cut out to do this yet somehow ended up in the profession. They may well have missed their true calling in life and go on to wreak havoc in organizations where you get to witness their frustration and perpetual confusion on a daily basis.

I don’t know, I met a guy who is not a great dev but he makes bank, he migrates from job to job but gets compensated far better than he would at anything else. And the labor market is constrained by bodies in seats, he can hack out some pretty bad code and get himself stuck, but in a long period of time he’ll eventually pester enough people for enough obvious questions that he figures out the solution.

For him it seems way better than the alternatives, really. Dev work pays really well.

I will disagree with most of the comments and say that the barrier to entry in programming isn't abstract though or critical thinking but quirks, inconsistencies and obscurities. That is really why programming favors having an interest in it. Because you need to some extent be excited about banging your head against the wall, in one way or another. That is why very smart people with PhDs aren't necessarily good programmers. And why if you don't have some relationship with programming, or something related, you might just think it is stupid.

So I do think it is to a large question of motivation and time. That is why so many programmers, even those with qualifications, are self-taught. Of course it helps to be smart, but programming isn't unforgiving enough that you can't be average. So that isn't really the barrier.

" Because you need to some extent be excited about banging your head against the wall, in one way or another. "

I think that's really important. Most good programmers are very persistent.

All fields have quirks but I think software has among the fewest quirks, and at least software is very aware of its own quirks and tries to fix them. Law, medicine, or literature are by far more quirky subjects of study, areas of study which will never be amenable to the lens of something as simplifying as the lambda calculus.

I wouldn't be surprised if abstract thought/problem solving and critical thinking need to be taught quite young to stick. Sort of similar to how much easier it is for young children to learn new languages compared to adults.

Wasn't there a HN post recently arguing about the lack of difference between adults and children learning languages?

I believe so, a large crux of the argument was that true immersion learning becomes much more difficult if not impossible as an adult because while children will just speak to other children normally, an adult will “tone it down” and talk to someone struggling with a new language, ultimately putting the adult at a disadvantage, since the adult might not hear as much natural language in the new tongue.

Just having the social, familial, and cultural freedom and encouragement to practice abstract thought would be an important first step, otherwise the teaching isn’t very effective.

A friend's been telling me to read a controversial book called "The Bell Curve" about the genetic basis of intelligence.

The reason the book's controversial is that it builds a case that intelligence has a genetic basis, and some races are smarter (on average) than others (although there's tremendous individual variation, and environment / upbringing plays roles too).

If that's indeed the way the world actually is, would that be a truth our society could accept?

On the one hand, I'm no racist, nor do I aspire to ever be one. On the other hand, I want to say that I aspire to a proper scientific worldview, understanding the world according to evidence and reason. If I dismiss The Bell Curve's argument, am I being properly skeptical of unproven claims, or am I just going along with societal pressure and my own wish to live in a world where race really doesn't matter?

I haven’t seen it mentioned here but isn’t childhood nutrition and things like getting enough iodine, avoiding exposure to lead, and not getting abused huge in terms of how intelligent someone might become?

We might not be good at augmenting intelligence but it’s pretty easy to ruin potential, and all of these things are far more likely to happen to a disadvantaged child.

Not genetics usually but rather simply screwed up educational system system that discourages thought

So true. Always takes a bit of a spark to free your mind from the way the educational system makes you do things. Once you get away from the comfort of routine and embrace the danger of thinking in ways that the machine likes to discourage, the sky's the limit.

This may be true to a degree, but there is certainly some genetics to it too

My guess would be a mindset learned early + the impact of being poor (food, clothing, shelter).

who doesn't have food clothing and shelter in the US?

Not many, but enough to point at and hyperbolically claim that things are not good in the US.

Not at all true. If you're on the coasts or big cities, things are better. When you navigate away from those loci, things get a lot worse, quick.

Homeless in my city has grown by 200% in the last 4 years. We regularly have new homeless show up in Bloomington, IN because we try to care for and support getting out of poverty and homelessness... However this is exacerbated by communities all around shipping us their homeless. Greyhound Therapy is a thing, and it happens more than you think.

The homeless problem is getting worse, by far. Wages have stagnated, rents inexorably go up, and overall cost of living goes up as well. Sure, some company makes more money, but the result too is people move. Sometimes it's to a different apartment, and sometimes it's to Main St. The big problem why "we" don't see it are the city, municipal, and state governments don't want to make a count of it. It's embarrassing - and the thought is 'If we don't count it, they'll go away'.

We in IT have been relatively immune, but I too suspect that will go by the wayside in the coming decades with the factorization and commodification of programming and IT administration.

Lots of people, including far too many families with children.

I hope your friend was able to positively impact a few children's lives. It is a Nobel cause to do that sort of thing. I think the programming skill you are referring to it some combination of all of the above. Many very successful people come from poor backgrounds, but going to a good school and having a steady household certainly increase the odds of success

I would agree. In addition to abstract thinking being a software dev also means to be willing to put up with a lot of boring and tedious tasks most people would find extremely boring. Also, constantly learning new stuff is not everyone.

Yes, staying in software development, even as a trainer requires a daily and constant investment of time to advance. This is not something most people can keep up for decades on end. At 61 years old, I still maintain "a daily student schedule" to learn SOMETHING new every day with programming. I must study daily to keep advancing, or at least maintain "even position" with my peers, and not be passed by because things advance so fast in software and biotechnology.

He teaches them. In my experience, only a few people in an undergrad EE EM class understand divergence and curl. Those that don’t probably won’t do well in certain EE disciplines.

When I was a young kid I came across a mini golf game for the computer (can't remember which platform, could have been Atari 130XE, IBM PC XT, or Apple iigs) that represented sloped surfaces as vector fields. So I knew if there were arrows pointing left, my golf ball going right would slow down and roll back to the left.

That kind of early exposure made it much easier to understand vector fields later on.

That is part of the teaching process, no?

I'm asking how he assesses their capacity, not asserting that he is not able to.

Not a statement hiding in a question :|