30000hours.scroll

date 7/18/2019
tags All Programming Life HasDataset MasterProgramming
title 30,000 Hours

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In 2013 I sent a brief email to 25 programmers whose programs I admired.
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quote
 "Would you be willing to share the # of hours you have spent practicing programming?
 
 Back of the envelope numbers are fine!"

Some emails bounced back.

Some went unanswered.

But five coders wrote back.

This turned out to be a tiny study, but given the great code these folks have written, I think the results are interesting--and a testament to practice!

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  Name,GitHub,Hours,YearOfEstimate,BornIn,NameLink,GitHubLink
  Donald Knuth,,56000,2013,1938,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth,
  Rob Pike,robpike,30000,2013,1956,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike,https://github.com/robpike
  Peter Norvig,norvig,30000,2013,1956,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig,https://github.com/norvig
  Stephen Wolfram,,50000,2013,1959,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram,
  Lars Bak,larsbak,30000,2013,1965,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer),https://github.com/larsbak

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# My Conclusion
No evidence has been found that the 10,000 hour strategy is flawed. :)

# Thank You
I hope these data points can encourage other aspiring programmers as much as they encouraged me.

I am eternally grateful to the programmers who responded.

Back then I was 5 years into my programming career, I had passed 10,000 hours of practice, and was starting to worry that the "10,000 hour strategy" I had been following and telling other aspiring programmers to follow may have been in vain, because I was still a pretty bad programmer (many would argue that today, 6 years later, I'm not much better, but now I can say that's just because I only have 29,000 hours of practice).

These busy coders answered my cold emails with not just a number but many encouraging words and thoughts.

One of my favorite responses was from Peter Norvig, who sent me a Python program computing his estimate:

code
 # sum(years *  (hours/week)) * (weeks/year)
 
 (4 * 10 # college
 + 2 * 30 # first job
 + 5 * 20 # grad school
 + 6 * 20 # faculty, research faculty
 + 6 * 25 # programming jobs
 + 15 * 10 # management jobs
 ) * 48

Thank you everyone!

****

# Notes
I promised I would compile the responses and publish the results to the public domain.

But, while waiting for more responses to trickle in, I slowly forgot about this project.

Until this morning (7/18/2019), when I stumbled upon one of those old emails.

Sorry for the delay!

# Related Posts
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// Originally posted here: https://github.com/breck7/30000hours

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