No. At 4 hours a day, you'll need 2500 days. [6.8 years]
If you did it full time (40 hours a week), you'll supposedly be fucking awesome in 4.8 years.
If this were true, I should be an awesome programmer. But I know I am not yet one. Far from it. So I call bullshit. (Some popular 'fucking awesome' programmers for reference: Steve Yegge, RMS, John Resig)
"Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis." (K. Anders Ericsson)
"A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of practice durations rangingfrom 1-8 hr per day.These studiesshowessentiallyno benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from practice
exceeding 2 hr (Welford, 1968; Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Many studiesof the acquisition oftyping skill (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Dvorak et al.. 1936) and other perceptual-motor skills (Henshaw& Holman, 1930) indicate that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1hr perday." (K. Anders Ericsson)
I consider myself to have about 1.5-2 hours of "genius" per day. I don't know if it really is genius, but during it, I'm operating at an intellectual level where I feel that I'm really making progress, and am able to grasp things, formulate clear questions and goals, and notice new connections.
After that time, my own thoughts start to elude capture, as if someone else's dream...
I can work longer, but I need to have a structured task - i.e. that doesn't require original thought, but is just a slog.
It's great to have a study to support my experience, and encourage me to value and nurture this "genius" time, with recovery time and activities.
EDIT at 1 hour per day, 10,000/365 = 27.4 years; say 30 years. If you are blessed with a naturally stronger constitution, enabling you to do 3 hours per day, you could do it in 10.
Are you really spending that much time trying to get better or are you mostly doing the same things over and over again. One of my favorite sayings: "I don't want someone that has the same year of experience repeated 10 times I want 10 different years of experience."
PS: If your in the top 5% of coders most people will consider you fucking awesome.
I've been coding since I was 11 (like many people here). I am 29 now. I'd say that I've been trying to get better than myself all the time. I don't think one would do the same things again and again unless it is a sad day job.
All I am saying is that may be 10,000 hours is not enough.
Ok, I am 28 and I started coding at 8 (my father was a programmer) but I don't think I really spend more than 100 hours coding before 12, and 1500 by 18, in collage I may have added 2000 hours of real effort, but once I started working I have spent little time learning and more time jumping though hoops. I just started working with the J2EE / Spring / Hibernate world and within 200 hours of effort it seems fairly easy and it's mostly grunt work at this point in time.
So while I am still closing in on those 10,000 hours it's going to take a lot more stretching for me to get there. There was plenty of time I could have spent getting better, but I have written ASM, high and low level networking code, Multi-threaded Apps, desktop apps, code parsers, scientific number crunchers, websites, and mostly I just wonder why other people find it hard.
I don't think of my self as Fucking Awesome but I do think I am close to that point.
It's 10000 hours of deliberate practice, not mere activity, that's necessary according to this theory. Deliberate practice requires that you're constantly challenging yourself and attacking more ambitious goals. The conversion ratio on paid work for very few jobs is anywhere close to 1.0; a job where it's 0.5 would generally be considered excellent.
