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Viliam_Bur comments on Checking for the Programming Gear - Less Wrong
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I think you should give a more precise definition of the aptitude needed to be labelled has-a-gear.
I program for a living, and I would like to think that I fall among "those who can" on the bimodal distribution (if one exists). I've seen programmers and non-programmers of all levels of ability (except for far above mine, because those are hard to recognize). One man's programmer is another man's deadweight.
Individual people grow in talent until they stop (and maybe they resume later). So if there exists a test to predict whether they'll stop at some future level, it probably doesn't involve actual programming. (For instance, testing people's understanding of variable semantics is pointless unless you've taught them those semantics first.) It would have to test something else that happens to be strongly correlated with it. So
Incidentally, this was this was recently discussed on Programmers Stack Exchange:
And the next step for a reductionist is to split this "gear" to smaller (and smaller and smaller... if necessary) parts, and design a course to teach each one of them separately. And only then teach programming.
People have some innate differences, but I feel that speaking about innate talent is often just worshiping our ignorance as teachers.
Of course, it may turn out that the innate differences in this specific topic are too big to overcome, or that overcoming them is possible but not cost-effective... but I think we haven't tried hard enough yet.