I don't think there is a good, established way. It's funny how many devs answer this question by waving their hands and saying, "everybody's a winner!" I thin

I don't think there is a good, established way. It's funny how many devs answer this question by waving their hands and saying, "everybody's a winner!" I think one way that might work is to have many programmers evaluate each other holistically. A competent judge could take into account experience, intelligence, personability, hardworkingness, and myriad other intangibles. You could have a bunch of devs rank everybody they've ever worked with; then combine all the rankings, and the ones near the top would be pretty close to the best. This system wouldn't be perfect because it would be affected by politics, but maybe those effects could be mitigated by keeping voting anonymous. And the people at bottom would hate it and never accept it as valid. But even with its flaws, I think this would be a pretty accurate measure. I would say the next best measure is option b mentioned by OP -- shipping lots of real products. There you have concrete metrics like dollars earned and development time required. But, of course, it takes many years to get a sufficient sample size to demonstrate improvement.