Recently, I was talking with an old friend of mine and the conversation had shifted to our career interests. This friend is currently 19, a computer science major at university. However, he told me that in only having begun programming when he began his CS courses last year, he feels "behind" in the field.

This surprised me. How can anyone really be behind at anything at such a young age? We kept talking, and he revealed that it was a sort of self-esteem issue for him, seeing extremely accomplished people so much younger (I believe what he was using as an example was a young programmer about to earn his Master's at only 16 or 17 he'd seen on a documentary about child prodigies, but this can obviously be extended outside of the world of the prodigy-like).

That conversation did however get me thinking. It such a competitive modern world, is one inherently disadvantaged if he or she doesn't possess such sharp innate abilities (and got such an early start) in his or her professional field of choice? Is there more pressure to choose your career path at a earlier time so that you can already be training in it? Any general opinions?

Thanks, just thought it'd be an interesting topic to discuss.

I have changed careers 5 times. Sales-Small Business Owner-Consulting-Teaching-Engineering.

In each field, there is always something to learn. No one will ever know it all, and there will always be someone who knows more then you about something. You set your self apart not by what you know going in, but what you can learn for the job that you are paid to do, and being able to apply that successfully to the situation at hand.

Thing to remember is, post high school, you are learning how to learn. Even if you get a 4.0 at the best college in your field, you can pretty much throw out 95% of what you have learned as it won't apply to your specific job anyway. The company will teach you the specifics of what you need to know for your job. It is the ability to learn those new skills and tasks that someone goes to school for.

Your friend made a classic mistake: Computer science is NOT programming. Or at least, not just programming. Computer Science courses aren't necessarily there to teach you to be a great application developer, but to give you a foundation of computer science and all that it entails (which is much more than mere programming). The fact that they didn't instantly throw your friend into programming tells me the school isn't just cranking out java junkies -- and that's a good thing IMO. Logic, problem solving, mathematics, and understanding how computers "think" is all more important to computer science than actually writing code.

There are many great programmers that are horrible at computer science, and many computer science majors who are horrible at programming.

More to the general heart of your question: once you stop learning or think you know enough is the moment your future dies. So long as you have the desire to learn and know there is still much out there to learn, you will go far.

Back to your friend: If he wants to land a programming job then he needs to teach himself the ins and outs of a language in participate in open source projects. If he wants to truly be great, then he needs to understand the fundamentals being taught in his computer science courses too. Even a monkey can crank out code, but that doesn't necessarily make a monkey knowledgeable on the subject matter.

send your friend this link: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/115252/why-is-scheme-my-first-language-in-university

Great post! And thanks, I will.