30,000 Hours

30,000 Hours

In 2013 I emailed 50 programmers whose projects I studied and admired asking them "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.

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! 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!):

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

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 Lisp program computing his estimate:

# 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!

Contribute

Please feel free to send pull requests with your own data added to "data.csv".

License

This is released to the public domain.