> If anything I'd say the opposite: we'd expect most of the Harvard graduating class to be on roughly the same level, it seems a lot less wild that some self-taught people could be 10x better than others.
That's not the point I was trying to make- I'm saying that in programming we both prize talent born of nature, and skill honed by nurture. (Though admittedly that may exist in many other disciplines.) Because of the latter emphasis on grit, hacker culture encourages self-improvement and going beyond the capacities one started with. That dogma of self-improvement goes against the notion that people are not cut out to be programmers.
Though of course, this could also be a marketing ploy for recruitment on behalf of management: "Anyone can code, you should learn to. But we only hire from the best." By encouraging an increase in talent, they have a larger labor pool to choose from (and potentially undercut wages), while plucking out the few that can pass their interviews.
> This happens in every field though?
To some degree, but the details vary. Medicine or law used to be seen as safe secure careers into the (upper) middle class, but doctors are limited through the AMA, and currently law is a notoriously difficult and costly profession with dwindling prospects. Entertainment and the arts is universally known as a risky proposition. We're talking about software, which has had the reputation of being the current surefire path to a stable, even successful, career, for at least the past two or three decades.
> Well, if we told people outright that programming is a matter of IQ, and gave an actual IQ test rather than an IQ-like test in interviews, that might help some people realise it's not for them.
Leaving aside the legality of using IQ tests to exclude candidates, that opens up the questions of if there is a direct correlation between programming good software and IQ, why programming out of all STEM fields should focus so heavily on IQ, and why all of those other technical and engineering professions don't need to resort to IQ tests for hiring.
That's not the point I was trying to make- I'm saying that in programming we both prize talent born of nature, and skill honed by nurture. (Though admittedly that may exist in many other disciplines.) Because of the latter emphasis on grit, hacker culture encourages self-improvement and going beyond the capacities one started with. That dogma of self-improvement goes against the notion that people are not cut out to be programmers.
Though of course, this could also be a marketing ploy for recruitment on behalf of management: "Anyone can code, you should learn to. But we only hire from the best." By encouraging an increase in talent, they have a larger labor pool to choose from (and potentially undercut wages), while plucking out the few that can pass their interviews.
> This happens in every field though?
To some degree, but the details vary. Medicine or law used to be seen as safe secure careers into the (upper) middle class, but doctors are limited through the AMA, and currently law is a notoriously difficult and costly profession with dwindling prospects. Entertainment and the arts is universally known as a risky proposition. We're talking about software, which has had the reputation of being the current surefire path to a stable, even successful, career, for at least the past two or three decades.
> Well, if we told people outright that programming is a matter of IQ, and gave an actual IQ test rather than an IQ-like test in interviews, that might help some people realise it's not for them.
Leaving aside the legality of using IQ tests to exclude candidates, that opens up the questions of if there is a direct correlation between programming good software and IQ, why programming out of all STEM fields should focus so heavily on IQ, and why all of those other technical and engineering professions don't need to resort to IQ tests for hiring.