You really do need privilege. Not everyone has regular access to a computer or internet even these days. And not every is in an environment where it's considered ok to sit and tinker with software all day.
More importantly we need people in our industry who have interests beyond just tinkering with things all days. We need balanced individuals who have skills beyond just code, who can look at problems from a wide array of viewpoints. If we only hire hackers who have been coding since they were young we're hiring an incredibly narrow set of people while trying to solve problems for billions of people around the world. That's not efficient! It's good for our ability to solve problems that we expand the tech community to include diverse individuals, including folk who didn't code as kids.
If you don't have regular access to a computer & the internet, then American CS college is miles away by cost comparison.
Like seriously, a $200 chromebook that you earn by working a local minimum wage job, a household that feeds and clothes you and your local public library wifi is what you would mostly need. The requirements for college far exceeds that by a mile.
The poster was walking widely about the industry as a whole not just college. And there are lots of scholarship students who had to work to help put food on the table, who couldn't afford a chromebook and the time to go tinker.
In many colleges, the cost of one or two textbooks outdoes the cost of a chromebook. If you have to work to put food on the table in college, you can work to put a chromebook on the table too and spend your college time on self study vs college itself
More importantly we need people in our industry who have interests beyond just tinkering with things all days. We need balanced individuals who have skills beyond just code, who can look at problems from a wide array of viewpoints. If we only hire hackers who have been coding since they were young we're hiring an incredibly narrow set of people while trying to solve problems for billions of people around the world. That's not efficient! It's good for our ability to solve problems that we expand the tech community to include diverse individuals, including folk who didn't code as kids.