Being a good developer is largely about practice. Who has more time to practice than a 14 year old armed with an entire summer vacation of free time and no worries about having to pay bills? I'm more impressed when a 35 year old with a family is able to learn to be a developer.
You certainly have a point here. When I was in high school I could spend exorbitant amounts of time debugging stupid errors caused by inexperience. I could read programming books, play around with code, build completely useless stuff just to learn, etc. for entire months. Now that I work for a startup and am a full time student, I only dream for that type of time.
Though, I think there is a pretty fair trade-off between time and understanding. I can pick up new skills (non-technical included) in less than half the time it would have taken me at 14. I've learned how to learn. Shipping an app at 14 is impressive not because they were able to do something difficult, but because they were able to do something difficult with much, much less life experience than is expected. This is to say that, although they have more time, it is, in general, more difficult for a young person to learn how to program. That is why I'm impressed when I see a 14 year old ship.
However actually shipping when you're that young is hard. It was not til I was 19 or 20 that I finally felt like I could write "real" software. The pieces just never fell into place before that despite dabbling for a decade or more as a child. Granted the web as it exists today makes it infinitely easier to learn today than it was when I was a kid, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse. Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.
> Granted the web as it exists today makes it infinitely easier to learn today than it was when I was a kid, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse.
You should. It's not just Google: Communities like HN, stackoverflow and reddit provide motivation and help when you need it. Now, with MOOCs being the latest trend in education, anyone can take university-level courses from world-renown on many topics for free.
> Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.
Are you sure? Why do you think age actually plays a role in a person's ability to ship code?
