Around that time (early 90s) I was nearly a teenager passionate about programming looking for "mentors". The most brilliant programmers I met were adult people that already had daily jobs completely unrelated to computing.

I guess they got into computers too late in their path (or, maybe, computers got too late for them) and missed the time window to make that their main job.

One of them (he is in medicine, actually) still today write very complex and crazy algorithms in GW Basic that blow up my mind. A true hacker.