> Is there any reason to measure by percentage? It adds friction all over the place. It's more difficult for a company to find the competent programmers, more

> Is there any reason to measure by percentage? It adds friction all over the place. It's more difficult for a company to find the competent programmers, more difficult to find good books among the dreck, more difficult to judge which product is excellent and which isn't (without significant effort, in some cases). Rating systems can (and will be) abused, and finding the needle is harder when the haystack is larger. Looking at hiring, a company might have to spend considerably more effort sorting through the "bad" programmers. There will be false positives+negatives in their search. How much damage will be done to the "good" products and the productivity of the "good" programmers because someone was misjudged when they were hired? How many skilled and passionate but less marketing-savvy programmers end up working for the quantity-over-quality companies? If we had cheap, fast, and reliable ways to actually gauge the quality/skill of media/people/whatever, then more options would always be good, even if they're of widely-varying quality. As it is, we don't, so the extra options are something of a mixed blessing.