I was talking to a friend today about how people learned to code and how that impacted their eventual style later on, often to great effect. My friend had been reading Flash Boys and came across a passage about Russian programmers learning to code with tremendous scarcity of computing time. To compensate, they had to very carefully map out and hone their code to fit the time and space they were granted on their shared computers in the USSR. This apparently made them excellent at creating high frequency trading algorithms that were hyper-efficient. There was no wasted computing power in their sequences because that was how they had to program before out of necessity while they were learning. So their code was faster, which meant more profitable in a high speed trading ecosystem.
Similarly, a my friend is a developer who learned to code from an intensive bootcamp that structured learning from nothing to skilled independent development over a series of exercises. My friend says he knows when a project is too much for him and how to get help from another more specialized dev. A former coworker is a self taught developer; he learned on his own through hours of trial, error, and effort. He apparently knows no such thing as "fear" of a development task too big or unfamiliar. He'll tackle any project and just figure it out as he goes. In the same way the Russian devs were formed by their leading circumstances, it seems many are formed as significantly by how they learned as they are by what they learned.
I have a hunch that this effect can extend much further than a single person's style. Google and much of Silicon Valley have an unofficial motto: "move fast and break stuff." Coincidentally, the seminal members of the Valley had learning circumstances that strongly support that ethos. Bill Gates and his childhood friends learned programming on shared computer time similar to how the Russians referenced above did. They managed to hustle their way into shared time on university computers after a fair bit of schmoozing and negotiating. The main difference was they were granted access as children on the condition that they use most of their time looking for weaknesses in the system. They were hired to test and break the machines for quality improvement purposes, and were paid in computing time in exchange. In essence, their job was to break stuff, and the faster they did it, the more computer time they had for their own fun. Sound familiar?
The point behind this is more than how developers develop their style. On a larger scale, it's fair to assume we all develop our impact and style based on how we learn. And while a good deal of this is shaped by our environment, just as much maybe more, is predicated on what environment we wriggle our way into, and how we choose to interact with it. So we end up with a great deal of control over our style and skill set only most of us don't realize the long term choices we are making bit by bit as we learn in a certain way. Those of us whose impact grows large enough to shape industries and cultures should take time to notice what effects learning had and is having on the world around us and the future we want.