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Comment by dataexec | Hacker News Reader

We can assume the two are so strongly correlated that it's not worth it to differentiate. Even though many exceptions exist.

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I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. The biggest barrier in my opinion are child labor laws that get in the way of people getting experience.

If you do something 80 hours per week for 2 years it totals 8320 hours? This is far from average behavior even if you have nothing else to do except coding.

Yes. That is why we have many 18 years old better at programming than fresh graduates. Teenagers have a lot of free time to code.

I will be extremely concerned if my teenage boy spending >10 hours everyday, in 2 years, just sitting in front of computer screen.

> I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things.

They can, if they practice with feedback 8 hours a day.

Typically, young people, as a group, are not famous for practicing something 8 hours a day.

This means, for the group as a whole, it is true.

The audacity to paint child labor laws as a "barrier for experience"...

Children can work open source and rack up experience there. This is like the most humane way in any job ever to get experience as a minor.

In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work since there are significant barriers to access employers able to pay market rate. Even open source itself can potentially be exploitative due to being free work.

While open source may be okay for coding, there are other skills which may not be so easy to do from your own home. In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work

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