Your calling them "skills" prejudices the answer. My best understanding is that they aren't skills, they are hardwired abilities. My best guess based on research that I've seen on IQ is that about half of the hardwiring is genetic and half is a result of childhood upbringing, but by adulthood they are not readily changed.
That said, we build concrete skills around how to make the best use of those abilities. We build memory skills to be able to quickly bring things out of short term memory back in. We build abstractions and concepts that allow us to efficiently analyze complex situations. We learn to think better with the capacity that we have. However our capacity doesn't seem to be readily changed.
As a concrete anecdotal example, several who have taught CS for decades tell me that most students simply can't "get" pointer arithmetic or recursion. Their brains don't go that way no matter how much they try. People who do master it learn those things fairly quickly and then can move on. The specific abstractions can be taught, the ability to think through those types of abstractions seems innate.
None of this minimizes the effort needed to become a good programmer even if we have the capacity. However the fact that most humans can't become programmers is why there is a job that typically pays 6 figures where many who are successful in it are self-taught with no more than a high school degree or GED.
That said, we build concrete skills around how to make the best use of those abilities. We build memory skills to be able to quickly bring things out of short term memory back in. We build abstractions and concepts that allow us to efficiently analyze complex situations. We learn to think better with the capacity that we have. However our capacity doesn't seem to be readily changed.
As a concrete anecdotal example, several who have taught CS for decades tell me that most students simply can't "get" pointer arithmetic or recursion. Their brains don't go that way no matter how much they try. People who do master it learn those things fairly quickly and then can move on. The specific abstractions can be taught, the ability to think through those types of abstractions seems innate.
None of this minimizes the effort needed to become a good programmer even if we have the capacity. However the fact that most humans can't become programmers is why there is a job that typically pays 6 figures where many who are successful in it are self-taught with no more than a high school degree or GED.