4 ms·

I'm not so sure you can have millions of people apply and easily get to the top 10. Even if you look at something metric driven like sales, being the best sales

by ch4s3 10y ago

I'm not so sure you can have millions of people apply and easily get to the top 10. Even if you look at something metric driven like sales, being the best salesperson in the world last year isn't a good indicator of next year's performance. If you think about something more knowledge driven, how would you find the best physicist? The most cited? The most published? Do you grab the most recent Nobel winner? I think even with baseball you might have trouble putting together a definitive top 10. Coming back to whether or not writing well about technical topics indicates ability, I think it's a good proxy. If you can clearly explain how to do a difficult thing well, then you necessarily must be able understand and probably by extension do that thing. Clearly this breaks at some point, but I think it holds true for software development.

Retric 10y ago
In your baseball example I think you could pick 100 people and then say the top 10 on some criteria are on that list. I don't think we can say the top 10 are on this list of the top 100 for programming or most other professional fields. However, in my mind that does not mean the top 10 are not out their just that we can't rank the field that way. Which does not mean their is not actually 10 best programmers for any given task. Nor does not mean we should pick some proxy and say these people are the top paid and therefore the top 10 are on this list of 100 top paid programmers or something like that. Because, while ranking people like that might be amusing or fun it's simply not accurate which is my core problem with your line of thinking. It basically says I can't get what I want, so I am going to pretend that what I want is what I can get.