A guy at a meetup in Denver told me it takes 10,000 hours to get good at coding and I almost quit that night

Casey King · 2026-10-09T08:45:04.169592+00:00

I went to my first coding meetup last month at a coffee shop in Denver and a guy there said the 10,000 hour rule applies to programming, so I did the math on the drive home. If I code 2 hours a day, that is almost 14 years before I am "good." I sat in my car in the parking lot feeling like I wasted the $12 I spent on cold brew and a muffin. Then I looked it up and the whole 10,000 hour idea came from a study on violin players, not coders, and the researcher himself said it was never meant to be a hard rule. I have been at this for about 7 months now and I can already build small stuff that works, which sure does not feel like 14 years away. So my real question is, who told you some version of this number when you started, and did it mess with your head like it did with mine?

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A guy at a meetup in Denver told me it takes 10,000 hours to get good at coding and I almost quit that night | Coding For Beginners - Pinecone Attack