> Okay, I don't know the authors exact history here, but I seriously doubt that they've had anything that's even close to 10k hours of deliberate practice of programming. Why? Because programmers basically /never/ do any deliberate practice. We don't have anything that's even close to what a piano player does when they practice fingersetting, chord transition, scales, or the like. I'm not even sure what this would look like, but I suspect that it is fundamentally different. Most musical instruments have a physical or mechanical side to them that is completely disjoint from the "musical" part of it. For instance knowing how to play a cool solo a guitar (meaning knowing which notes to pick and how long to hold them for), and being able to have your left hand fingers in the right positions in the right times and your right hand picking the right strings has almost nothing to do with each other. The way it usually works (I'm an amateur player who hasn't played in years, so maybe some professionals can take over this analogy) is that you practice very slowly and ramp up quicker and quicker untill "magically" your muscle memory takes over and it all kind of just happens. The result is that you don't really pick each indivitual note anymore, you kinda just play that part (when practicing you've decomposed the whole piece into small parts), and each part is atomic to you. Starting in the middle of a part doesn't quite work.

Well, there is "learning new stuff(practices, tools, approaches) by applying it on a toy project" or "read the source code of $popular project", which I would classify as deliberate practice. But I agree, getting to 10k hours with only that is hard.

The feedback loop for noticing and weeding out behavioral errors is simply too long and even determining what led to a success/failure is too hard to be able to practice in a classic way.