Two pseudo-scientific books as proof. Seems legit.
In all seriousness, this is ridiculous, of course natural talent exists, what gladwell et al are really getting at to me is that it's not enough to have natural talent and execute once. That isn't how success works in the real world, even if it outwardly appears that way. I have Los of friends who are artists and I moved cities last year from one where the local ar school was very practically focused to one where the prominent art school is obsessed with concept and object art. The art and quality of artists in the new city is laughable, apart from those who have been trained in and practiced their craft elsewhere or in their own time however. It's an inescapable fact that if you want to be good at something you need to practice and fail.
Well then, what is natural talent, how do you objectify and measure it in a person, if it so obviously exists?
Success is best correlated with time invested in skill development. Natural talent is bullshit, it's like attributing height to a basketball player's success.
There are some areas where I am quite frankly talented. Once I get Perl coding on accounting software, there is very little that can stop me and quite frankly I can outperform nearly any programmer I have ever worked with.
On the other hand, there are also things which I cannot do very well no matter how hard I try. When I was in college for example I used to be able to help struggling students in areas like analytical geometry understand the problems and go from getting C's to getting A's. But I couldn't get above a C myself.
That isn't what natural talent is supposed to be though. You're good at programming Perl probably because you've practiced more, or you care more and thus have thought about it more. Software writing is a skill which you have honed by practice, not naturality.
I don't know why you can't score A's at math though. It makes no sense to me as to why you can help others get good grades but can't get good grades yourself. It probably means you lack the hours applying through repetitive practice.
One thing is I have ADD. I run into mental blocks sometimes and can't get started on some things. Or I make transposition errors. These occur in times and places that make no logical sense. Analytical geometry, but only to a lesser extent in trig, and not so much in calculus. Similarly in chemistry, subatomic orbitals are fine but molecular orbitals, which are conceptually simpler, are not.
Similarly in chemistry lab, I could help anyone else but I would invariably run all the right tests on all the wrong samples. This made me a great lab partner but a disaster on my own.
As I have gotten older I have learned coping mechanisms but some things I can't do and I pass those onto others.
At the same time I have always been top of my class in many things, while putting in quite a bit less effort than average. These ranged from history to some of the sciences, to some cases of math (calculus, some algebra).
My point was, skill and hours practiced are far better predictors of success than a voodoo attribute like natural talent. In the above case, I tried to use height as an example of a "natural ability" person could be advantaged in.
Gladwell was arguing that it takes 10,000 hours to go from a knowing nothing to becoming a master at any craft. At 8 hours a day, every single day, is ~3.5 years.
For programmers, most of the initial chunk of that time is through hobby programming or through formal training at a college or the like. That's 3000 hours that the company didn't pay for. That's probably the experience most programmers walk in to any company as a Jr Developer, and they are paid accordingly. Nobody is being offered $150k/yr with that level of experience. Maybe $30-$40 depending on where they are working, and then are promoted and given raises above that.
When I say $75 an hour including overheads I don't mean a salary of $150,000 - I mean a salary of $60,000 plus tax plus health insurance plus pension contribution plus office space plus a desk plus a computer plus the calls to IT Helpdesk plus the line manager's time plus any commercial software plus other developers' time coaching plus the 20% cut paid to the recruiter plus the HR and payroll people's time plus networking and internet connection plus the backed up storage space on file and mail servers plus the car parking space plus a phone line plus cleaning plus the break room food and coffee.
Of course these things are company-dependent, but I'm a comparatively junior developer and for purposes of internal costing my employer costs my time at $75 an hour.
See books: Outliers, The Talent Code