I'm pretty confident that I am an average programmer. The operating systems class I took in college went almost entirely over my head. I'm pretty sure I got a C- or a D as my final grade and that was only because I ended up in a group that had a few people better than I was. I got C's in a lot of the higher level classes that I took.
The root cause of this, I think, is that I just don't like programming that much. I'm a smart person and I think I could be an above average programmer if I applied myself but I just don't care enough to do so. There are other things that I enjoy more that I want to spend my time and effort on.
I thought that this would be a problem when I graduated but it turns out that the world needs average programmers. My current project at work is a Windows Forms app written in C# to pull data out of a database and plug it into a Word template to generate a Word document. It's not glamorous and it's not trendy but it needs to be done by someone. Pay me a decent salary, give me good insurance, and I'll gladly clock 40 hours a week writing CRUD apps because it beats manual labor, retail, or going back to school.
Compared to coworkers in my last two companies I'd say I'm definitely well above average, but not the best. This might sound like boasting, but it boils down to being good at delivering on time, caring about the craft and being motivated to improve things.
I think if you care about what you do, then you're probably already in the upper 50%, because most people don't, and it shows. Now if you pair giving a fuck with some programming talent and interest in improving your skills and productivity you can easily get into the top 10%.
To get into the top 1% you need to be very focused on programming. I have too many other hobbies to be that focused only on this aspect of my life. But I'm ok with that.
If you start comparing yourself to internet people, there are just too many that you can compete with them on everything. There are too many experts in too many niches that you could read all the HN articles and compare favorably in comparison.
Never mind caring, in my experience a lot of people in this industry struggle to even write working code. You might not see them much in startups but do some work for enterprises and you soon discover there are a lot of them. They usually make up for their lack of technical skills with an abundance of political activity.
I care deeply about my craft. My code is as simple to understand as I can possibly make it. I spend almost zero time debugging. (OK, last week I had a WTF??? bug. The black screen turned out to be the lens cap still on.)
I feel no need to validate my achievements.
(This is a little bit trollish, forgive me.) You could use a matrix of pots, pans and knife work as a proxy for a chefs competency I suppose. Or, you know, you could taste the food he creates.
Automated testing is not a choice in many industries.
If you're not familiar with TDD, you haven't yet achieved that level of mastery.
There's a productivity boost to being able to change quickly without breaking things.
Is all unit/functional/integration testing and continuous integrating TDD? Is it still TDD if you write the tests after you write the function (and before you commit/merge)?
I think this competency matrix is a helpful resource. And I think that learning TDD is an important thing for a good programmer.
I'm a shitty programmer.
I've written code for gameboy, playstation, servers in C, assembly, mobile apps, tons of backends, a CPU simulator, assembler & disassembler. I'm in a leadership role now, but still hacking go, javascript/typescript, python, & prolog for the love of it. But am I a good programmer?
Not even close.
Ever heard of Jeff Dean, Linus? Carmack? Norvig? Then when I look at the multitudes of opensource projects in Github, I can only stay humble. I'm average at best if that.
What is a "good programmer"? What would you like to accomplish by soliciting the feedback? Without agreeing to a common definition and measurement, it's not a well-founded question.
I don't think of myself as a "good programmer" because "good" is too blunt a qualitative measure to be productive. It's a disagreeable and poorly specified measurement. I haven't seriously thought about whether or not I'm a good programmer, just as I haven't thought about whether or not I'm a good person. In fact I consciously disengage from assessment like that.
I validate my achievements on a case by case basis, and I validate them according to how close I came to maximal efficiency and minimal time in accomplishing a task. It would be deceptively attractive to use those two heuristics as a rhetorical scaffolding for the meaning of "good", except that I don't compare achievements; they're mostly orthogonal.
The question of whether or not I'm "good" has no meaning for me, because I only evaluate performance within the confines of discrete tasks and sets of related tasks. Further I personally don't have enough insight into the difficulty of all possible tasks, so I refuse to generalize my performance on any particular subset of them to how well I'd do on a majority of them. And to the extent that there are only so many tasks and skills are transferrable: any given task may have differing dimensions of deadline, efficiency or implementation requirements. To get a useful measurement, you'd have to draw arbitrary lines in the sand across each of these dimensions and convince everyone else in discussion that these lines are the sensible ones.
This probably isn't a satisfying answer. But it's not intended to be. The idea of a "good programmer" is conceptually attractive but practically meaningless.
The question has nothing to do with whether anyone is actually a good programmer or not - the OP asked "do you consider yourself to be a good programmer?".
It's a question about how you view yourself, not about objectively comparing your programming skills to someone else's, therefore it doesn't require a common definition or measurement.
Yes, exactly. And such a question would still have utility - despite being a subjective assessment - if the measures of the assessment were common. But that's not the case here. Not only are respondents subjectively assessing themselves, they're subjectively assessing themselves according to arbitrarily different measurement criteria which they need not disclose.
Therefore, the only thing anyone can conclude from responses is, "For some definition of 'good programmer' which is specific to each individual respondent, approximately x% of respondents believe they satisfy the definition." It's one thing to solicit opinions; it's another thing entirely to open the floor for opinions which may not even be the same. The OP may have received personal assessments and anecdotes about steak, apples and cauliflower when their intention was to solicit personal assessments about almonds.
I would consider myself a very average programmer. I have some good experience and a good knowledge set, but I'm not super passionate about programming to drive myself to be a "great" programmer.
edit: I think the biggest thing holding me to being average at best is practical experience in larger systems. In school, I was always good at the theory parts of computer science, but did so-so in projects. In my professional experience, I think that still holds true: I can manage language intricacies, and write pretty clean code for smaller problems, but I can get into trouble with architecture-level stuff like defining models. I also have a tendency to over-engineer solutions to complex problems.
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The root cause of this, I think, is that I just don't like programming that much. I'm a smart person and I think I could be an above average programmer if I applied myself but I just don't care enough to do so. There are other things that I enjoy more that I want to spend my time and effort on.
I thought that this would be a problem when I graduated but it turns out that the world needs average programmers. My current project at work is a Windows Forms app written in C# to pull data out of a database and plug it into a Word template to generate a Word document. It's not glamorous and it's not trendy but it needs to be done by someone. Pay me a decent salary, give me good insurance, and I'll gladly clock 40 hours a week writing CRUD apps because it beats manual labor, retail, or going back to school.
I think if you care about what you do, then you're probably already in the upper 50%, because most people don't, and it shows. Now if you pair giving a fuck with some programming talent and interest in improving your skills and productivity you can easily get into the top 10%.
To get into the top 1% you need to be very focused on programming. I have too many other hobbies to be that focused only on this aspect of my life. But I'm ok with that.
If you start comparing yourself to internet people, there are just too many that you can compete with them on everything. There are too many experts in too many niches that you could read all the HN articles and compare favorably in comparison.
I feel no need to validate my achievements.
(This is a little bit trollish, forgive me.) You could use a matrix of pots, pans and knife work as a proxy for a chefs competency I suppose. Or, you know, you could taste the food he creates.
> - http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
> - https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/
> - https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
If you're not familiar with TDD, you haven't yet achieved that level of mastery.
There's a productivity boost to being able to change quickly without breaking things.
Is all unit/functional/integration testing and continuous integrating TDD? Is it still TDD if you write the tests after you write the function (and before you commit/merge)?
I think this competency matrix is a helpful resource. And I think that learning TDD is an important thing for a good programmer.
Not even close.
Ever heard of Jeff Dean, Linus? Carmack? Norvig? Then when I look at the multitudes of opensource projects in Github, I can only stay humble. I'm average at best if that.
I don't think of myself as a "good programmer" because "good" is too blunt a qualitative measure to be productive. It's a disagreeable and poorly specified measurement. I haven't seriously thought about whether or not I'm a good programmer, just as I haven't thought about whether or not I'm a good person. In fact I consciously disengage from assessment like that.
I validate my achievements on a case by case basis, and I validate them according to how close I came to maximal efficiency and minimal time in accomplishing a task. It would be deceptively attractive to use those two heuristics as a rhetorical scaffolding for the meaning of "good", except that I don't compare achievements; they're mostly orthogonal.
The question of whether or not I'm "good" has no meaning for me, because I only evaluate performance within the confines of discrete tasks and sets of related tasks. Further I personally don't have enough insight into the difficulty of all possible tasks, so I refuse to generalize my performance on any particular subset of them to how well I'd do on a majority of them. And to the extent that there are only so many tasks and skills are transferrable: any given task may have differing dimensions of deadline, efficiency or implementation requirements. To get a useful measurement, you'd have to draw arbitrary lines in the sand across each of these dimensions and convince everyone else in discussion that these lines are the sensible ones.
This probably isn't a satisfying answer. But it's not intended to be. The idea of a "good programmer" is conceptually attractive but practically meaningless.
It's a question about how you view yourself, not about objectively comparing your programming skills to someone else's, therefore it doesn't require a common definition or measurement.
Therefore, the only thing anyone can conclude from responses is, "For some definition of 'good programmer' which is specific to each individual respondent, approximately x% of respondents believe they satisfy the definition." It's one thing to solicit opinions; it's another thing entirely to open the floor for opinions which may not even be the same. The OP may have received personal assessments and anecdotes about steak, apples and cauliflower when their intention was to solicit personal assessments about almonds.
edit: I think the biggest thing holding me to being average at best is practical experience in larger systems. In school, I was always good at the theory parts of computer science, but did so-so in projects. In my professional experience, I think that still holds true: I can manage language intricacies, and write pretty clean code for smaller problems, but I can get into trouble with architecture-level stuff like defining models. I also have a tendency to over-engineer solutions to complex problems.