You know you are a good programmer when you know what over-engineered code is. Let me explain. The one and only metric is: how quick do you ship. I know what y

You know you are a good programmer when you know what over-engineered code is. Let me explain. The one and only metric is: how quick do you ship. I know what you think: this leads to unmaintainable code. That is wrong because a programmer who produce unmaintainable code doesn't ship quickly, by definition. Thats because programming works by iteration, and then it doesn't matter you can ship one iteration quickly, what matters is that you ship iterations quickly, over and over again. Now, the game is simple, you can do two kind of mistakes: you can ship too "quickly" by writing rushed code, or you can ship too "slowly", by writing over-engineered code, for a given iteration. If you rush one iteration, you will have technical debt for the next iterations, and if you over-engineer one iteration, you are wasting time AND you are piling supposedly well written code which has no value and gonna stand in your way on later iterations (it always do, thats what level 2 programmers dont get). Of course, and thats the best part, programmers in practice tend to do both mistakes, which confuses them squared: they have a fair amount of technical debt in an over-engineered codebase. Programmers in their career though tend to first do mostly rushed code (level 1 programmers) and then they do over-engineered code for the rest of their life (level 2 programmers). So you know you are a good programmer when you know what over-engineered code is. Is the code readable? Sorry this is just way to subjective. What you want is a code that's easy-to-learn. The difference? Easy-to-learn is really powerful while "readable" is not. That's because programming doesn't happen on your screen, programming happens between your ears. But first, a spectrum again, at one end you don't know anything about the code you have in front of you which means you cant do nothing; at the other end, you know the whole source code in which case you can do everything: fix, rewrite, extend, debug, run, anything. A code that's absolutely obfuscated by all standard isnt easy-to-learn, so dont worry, yes "readability" matters of some sort. But a super readable code can be crap too, because it can just be as obfuscated as the former, it's just another form of obfuscation: flood. A code written to be easy-to-learn means it has been written to help you getting closer to "you can do anything in the code" as quickly as possible. And guess what, the closer and quicker you are from being able to do anything in the code, the faster you ship. Rinse and repeat.