There's a few other variants of this: When I was a TA marking assignments I saw a huge range in the number of lines of code between my students' assignments. I

There's a few other variants of this: When I was a TA marking assignments I saw a huge range in the number of lines of code between my students' assignments. If I took all the students who got full marks, there was often a 2x or 3x size difference between the smallest submission and the largest. And the large assignments didn't look bloated. If you gave me the code from a random student, it wasn't obvious where in the size range their code would land. And a couple years ago I worked as a professional programming interviewer. One of the assessments we did was a half hour programming problem. I interviewed over 400 interviews. Most of them had some professional experience as software engineers. Candidates use their favorite language and their own computer & tools. Quantitatively, there is a massive difference between the better candidates and the worst. The strongest candidates could get about 2-3x as much done in the same amount of time as the average. And the weaker candidates (even those with professional experience) could barely implement hello world within half an hour. As software engineers, we don't have a culture of practice. Its assumed that with enough time working professionally, we'll keep improving. But that might be naive. There are almost certainly ways to measure our skill and improve over time. Its weird we don't even have that conversation.