> why those kids that were reading at an early age are typically not that ahead in a few years.

That's often because they are dropped in a single pace system, where they are forced to sit with kids learning the alphabet, wasting valuable time, getting bored.

Certainly possible. My priors speak otherwise, though. Just seeing my own kids accelerate in reading at different ages makes me think early success is as indicative of kid's abilities as it is executive impact. Certainly not zero. But mostly overstated.

Sometimes I'm really surprised that people have such a hard time extrapolating from their own experiences learning to children and school.

Individuals will tend to learn things at their own pace. Individuals will tend to learn different things at different paces.

Example: I despised history in school. The only subject I ever scored less than a B in during a quarter. I discovered it was mostly just down to how it was being taught, as a series of factual but mostly disjointed events. I found that I enjoy learning about history, as long as I'm understanding the complex causation and linking between those different events.

Example: I've hired people that had zero experience in one of our programming languages. They typically end up completing their first PR in that language within a month or two -- with assistance, of course. People tend to pick things up pretty fast when it's part of their job expectations. (I always make it clear during interviewing and the hiring process that such an expectation would be present.)

Example: My son didn't begin to talk until after his third birthday. Now he is almost entirely caught up, with only minor speech issues.

> Example: I've hired people that had zero experience in one of our programming languages. They typically end up completing their first PR in that language within a month or two -- with assistance, of course. People tend to pick things up pretty fast when it's part of their job expectations. (I always make it clear during interviewing and the hiring process that such an expectation would be present.)

This seems... extremely slow to me.

I've been doing this as a career for fifteen years, and in that time have taken three jobs in languages I'd never used. I started with JavaScript and PHP, because that was what was in use the first place I worked. I discovered Python and slowly transitioned to it and staying away from the front-end as much as possible. In the fifteen years since then, I've taken jobs where Ruby, Scala, and Clojure were the primary languages. In no case did it take me more than about a week before I was able to make minor changes, and within a month I was focusing mostly on making sure I understood the idioms in use by the language's community. At the company where Scala was the primary language, I was asked to learn Kotlin and re-implement a core part of the application stack in that language. I was able to begin that about two months after being hired, and launched the service into production about a month later. It only took that long because the ORM that I was using lacked a feature needed to support our legacy database layout, so I had to write, test, and submit a patch for it.

The above is n=1, obviously. I feel like picking up new concepts is one of my strengths, so it wouldn't surprise me much if I were able to progress more rapidly that is typical. That's not been what I've seen, though. I've mentored several junior developers who were in similar situations, including a handful whose only experience with programming with an eight week "bootcamp". I don't recall anyone who wasn't contributing simple changes without assistance a month after joining the team.

Perhaps by "with assistance", you mean that they were guided toward what concepts were important to learn quickly, and which were better deferred? If that's the case, then I completely agree: being able to ask "Should I spend time learning this?" is probably the most impactful thing that can be provided for someone learning a new skill.

Personally, I also don't care much what language I'm in. But not everyone has a brain that works that way.

Also, some of the people I'm referring to are also of non-traditional backgrounds. Meaning they don't have a foundation in abstract computer science in order to ground such transitions.

I'm also not counting changes like, "modify this one if-statement to work this way." I'm talking about actual meaningful changes.

That makes sense.

While I don't technically have formal education in computer science, it's obvious that my mind just kind of... works that way. That's definitely an advantage both in learning new things and in teaching.

I can only agree, if we are talking about kids who are already going to do well. For those kids who only went to school because it was socially demanded and part of life, then I could not disagree more. I know a headmaster of multiple schools in a deprived area near where I live, who said his kids will never recover because they've forgotten how to go to school (or never learned, depending on the timing).