Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope) 
Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people.I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this.Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gung-ho about college, if I had gone to California in 2010 after graduation instead of remaining in New Hampshire. I don't even know any programmers in person outside of my work. My "network" isn't something to put on a pedestal.And yet by all accounts I live an extremely comfortable life, I wrote enough to get noticed and get a book deal just two years out of college, my friends think I'm of superhuman intellect, I'm able to walk to work every day, etc.I think the kind of worry in this post is a response to the world born out of hyper-competitiveness, and I don't think its a healthy one. It's not a positive message, and the events that could turn it into a positive message for this person, the qualifications for "not being a loser", should never involve anything five or six sigma from the norm.Look around you and relax. You've probably already won.