> Why is it ideal that a candidate has been coding since before they were in college?
Imagine if civil engineering students were taught arithmetic for the first time at college. Firms would favor applicants with an interest from a much younger age, no?
The problem with software engineering is that understanding it well is as fundamental as understanding arithmetic. We teach arithmetic from the age of around six, yet we expect that starting to code only at college is somehow equivalent.
This is a quite unintelligent response - people can learn if they put their minds to it.
Case in point, I'm a PhD dropout from a top 15 math program in the US - I did not really code at all to any serious degree. After pouring a lot of time & effort, even after starting, I became very good at what I do. I have encountered plenty of people in the profession who have become solid to very good developers, including a former grad school colleague. The people have come from all sorts of walks of life, from college dropouts to sales.
Also to contrast, I have also worked with not great developers who have CS degrees. A degree does not tell me if you are passionate about what you do, or if you retained any knowledge from schooling - nor does various indicators that you have coded prior.
You seem to have assumed that I exclude anyone who did not code before college as incompetent, but I never said anything like this. I only assumed the context of the regular "attempted to become competent through college" route.
> ...people can learn if they put their minds to it.
Sure. I never said that it isn't possible to learn. All I'm saying is that there is a correlation when you consider the population in aggregate.
I'm sure the civil engineering industry (to continue my example) would be happy to accept somebody who started to learn later in life. However, given that it takes years to learn engineering if you start at the beginning of the knowledge tree (say, arithmetic), why should coding be any different (say, your first "Hello, world!")?
Since the current education system puts the learning of the beginning of this knowledge tree many years apart, it makes sense that the acquisition of competence at the other end is also years apart. Hence, if you follow the regular education system to learn software engineering, someone who started early will be years ahead of you. This is common in our field because the current education system is so far behind. Therefore, employers in our industry (as opposed to other industries) value those who started early more, and this is reasonable behavior.
> After pouring a lot of time & effort...
Right - and people who pour in a lot of time & effort are correlated with people who started early. This does not necessarily exclude people who pour in a lot of time & effort at other times.
I think I might not have made myself clear enough, sorry. Let me add some context to what I meant:
The problem with software engineering is that understanding [things like indirection] well is as fundamental [to software engineering] as understanding arithmetic [is fundamental to civil engineering].
I presume that this assertion, then, is uncontroversial?
Indirection may be fundamental to programming, but it is a fairly self-contained concept that in my experience can be grokked quickly. The math required for an engineering degree is based on arithmetic, algebra, trig and calculus, all of which are taught over a period of years.
I may still not be understanding you, but my own experience, when I learned programming as part of an EE degree (first language was C with lots of pointer manipulation) was that concepts like indirection are a lot simpler to pick up de novo than Partial Differential Equations, Fourier Transforms and other college-level math concepts are, even with 12 year grade school background.
Imagine if civil engineering students were taught arithmetic for the first time at college. Firms would favor applicants with an interest from a much younger age, no?
The problem with software engineering is that understanding it well is as fundamental as understanding arithmetic. We teach arithmetic from the age of around six, yet we expect that starting to code only at college is somehow equivalent.