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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 w

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.

wilsonnb2 8y ago
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.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  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.

wilsonnb2 8y ago

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.

throwawaymath 8y ago
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.