To follow the reading/writing literacy analogy: If we were talking about reading/writing literacy, you'd be looking at people's ability to write novels as a mea

To follow the reading/writing literacy analogy: If we were talking about reading/writing literacy, you'd be looking at people's ability to write novels as a measure of their literacy. That's a pretty high standard, one by which I doubt either one of us could be considered literate (I've tried to write novels--haven't finished one yet). There are some real masterpieces of code: I'd point to the Lua or SQLite codebases as examples. But the majority of novels are not at that level and the majority of code is not at that level. I certainly have no respect for, say Stephanie Meyer (the author of Twilight) as an author, but I'm not going to look at her writing and say she's illiterate. In some sense, one could argue that it's more important a measure of code literacy for people to be able to read code than to write it. One area where this is very important is in management of software development. A core problem I'm trying to solve right now is that I'm essentially self-managed: my managers aren't code literate, so they can't actually tell whether I'm doing a good job or not. I've written reams of shitty code in a short time because of time pressure and gotten better reviews than when I spent the time to do things right, even though from my perspective I could see that the bugs that came out of doing things quick and dirty cost us more time in the long run (or even in the next few days). It's something I believed in theory before, but now I'm in a much higher-pressure environment and I've actually made the mistake a few times. If my managers were code literate, they could read my check-ins and sign off on them. And since they're not, they're essentially glorified middle-men, and I'm not sure what function they actually serve. The above problem would be solved if they were like your ex-colleagues. They don't have to know how to model, they just have to be able to understand how I modeled something.