If it really takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, then my own mastery of programming is a counterexample. I literally coded for 8 hours a day (pretty much all of the time when I wasn’t asleep or at school, time that most people would allocate to homework included), which would translate into 4 years of coding to attain mastery. I wrote some amazing things at 12, but nothing I would consider a masterwork (Metasquarer included; the first version was riddled with bugs). I don’t think I truly mastered the skill until 17 or so – 9 years and approximately 26,000 hours of work.

And I was always way ahead of my peers in this skill, from the early stages onward, so it’s not as if I had some below-average progression or anything.

System administration, by contrast, is something I’ve spent very little time on. I started at 16ish and spent about 2 hours a day at most on it. By 19, I had attained mastery in the domains I had studied (which is to say that I’m not a master at every aspect of the skill; just the ones I’ve used. But this tends to be enough).

So I’m not sure I’m following the pattern here.