Nothing wrong with that, but if I ask you why did you become a developer and you list that as a main reason, then I will immediately dismiss you as not being serious.
By the parent’s criteria, I am “not serious”. My record on OSS and early work at companies which were acquired or have outsized valuations suggests the parent is 100% wrong, however.
Tell me, when you typed your first line of "Hello world" in C, Python etc. Was your motivation to have an easy life?
If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited.
Perhaps I should have articulated it better above.
What I meant is that many of these bootcampers don't have that curiosity or drive to have touched code before their course. Even after getting a job, I've asked them about coding outside of work etc. they're not interested.
This part I fully agree with.
Do not equate "boot camp" and "would rather sit at a computer than mine coal" for a lack of intellectual curiousity though. I have personally met grads _from the boot camp in question in this article_ who clearly do have it - while spending their work days writing Ruby for web apps, they were spending evenings learning C, assembler and the operating system fundamentals that their particular route into the industry meant they missed out on.
I should add I don't have a CS degree, yet I'm doing the homework for the "dedicated" "curious" "high aptitude" etc. CS grads you'll be hiring later. Ha.
Our perceptions of programmers are shaped by the PC revolution of the 1980s. A lot of people got exposed to programming because there was a PC in the house. Kids and teens so exposed tended to be the ones who went into programming as a career, just because they had a head start and because they were more familiar with it. The result is that many of the best programmers in the profession in the 90s and 00s were the ones who started as kids. But many of the mediocre and bad ones were too!
Passion and early starts are overrated. As long as a person is smart in the right way and reasonably enjoys the stuff, they can be a great programmer. (And I say this as someone who started programming at the age of 6 and did it for free for many years.)
I’ve blended in pretty well all through upper management
but arbitrary screening questions for interviews and silly coding exercises have no bearing on that