I attribute my barriers to entry as things that forced me to really learn. All my family could afford was a 386 with 16MB of ram when 486s where pretty common. I had to really hack to make things work. Working under constraints meant I was exploring limits and understanding efficiency.

I still carry that in my day job which I _think_ helps me write better code - even in unconstrained systems, thinking in terms of memory and instruction efficiency can still help make better/faster code.