I think his levels are really stupid. I can write functional & OO code somewhat well (in dozens of languages (Java, ObjC, C++, Scheme, ...) - in 3-4 of them I'm

I think his levels are really stupid. I can write functional & OO code somewhat well (in dozens of languages (Java, ObjC, C++, Scheme, ...) - in 3-4 of them I'm more experienced but with the help of StackOverflow can do almost anything I want, given a few hours time), read/write bash scripts, can (and do) write iOS/Mac GUI applications, can use PHP and Ajaxish things, have good experience with MongoDB/MySQL and a lot of other things. I use OS X Terminal.app regularly and have no problems doing tricks with bash (from piping to xargs'ing); But, I spent almost a whole day a few months ago and couldn't install an OpenVPN server on a linux machine. I just couldn't. I knew about IPSec, and that I must create exceptions in the ipfw for this thing to work, etc. but it wouldn't work, and I didn't have a single clue how to fix that mess. So by his test, I wouldn't even pass the first level... You could be good at some aspects of programming and weak at other aspects. Programming is a multi-faceted art. You don't start at level 0 and move up; You learn different parts of it simultaneously.