Can We Rank Developers ?

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Article
web.archive.org/web/201407210...
By: Michael O. Church | / michaelochurch
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[@archthearchvile]

We already know Tom is a genius. What else do we need to know?

[@ripplecutter233]

Pls don't turn software development into tekken 8 ranked

[@thephoenix215-po2it]

Hmmmm..... Why not rank programmers by the number of leetcodes....lol

[@AlGorup]

Teaching is incentivized? Who looks at a teacher's salary and says "Sweet rewards for my hard work!" ?

[@orbatos]

I hate this idea. A black belt is just a degree, consider how often a degree means someone is actually competent at the subject of their degree on graduation.

[@samcalder6946]

Do you want Six Sigma? Because this is how you get Six Sigma.

[@SinCityGT3]

Honestly, letting business managers decide who is a black belt isn't a bad idea. A good engineer creates business value. You don't have to be the strongest at engineering to be the best "engineer". We exist to drive business value, not do cool things with technology. Maybe that's a byproduct, but it's not the point.

[@mechantl0up]

When Jigoro was alive, everyone had a family and often too much of it, resulting in rampant infanticide due to lack of resources. Few had education. So education was valued. Today, everyone has too much education but few have a family any more. So you must read these quotes in their original context. Hence, it is not the original quote that is the problem here but quoting it in this article.

[@gsgregory2022]

I think to rank software engineers you have to take at least 3 factors into consideration. Breadth of knowledge, Depth of knowledge, Application of knowledge. Someone can know a lot, but not be able to apply it, or have such a narrow level of knowledge that they don't know enough to do larger tasks/projects. I think the problem with any of this is you have to ask what a programmer, what a software engineer is. You don't have "apprentice tradesmen" and "expert tradesmen" rated on how many of the different trades they are masters of instead you have carpenters, welders, plumbers and so on. To actually rank software engineers you would need to split down a field that spans frontend, backend, dev ops, sre, machine learning, AI, game development, mobile development, embed, cloud, and more. That way you have actual defined roles and skills to rank on that are less subjective.

[@octavioavila6548]

The issue with granting titles to indicate skill level is that over time the achievement of the title becomes more important than the development of the skillset. This is what has happened to education with degrees and titles such as Master and PhD, where students are more concerned with attaining a degree or title rather than simply learning for the sake of learning. People are even willing to sacrifice the actuality, learning and or the development of skills, in favor of the token that measures the actuality. This has happened to cash as well. People are more interested in saving cash rather than increasing wealth. We focus more on the cash price of the item or service than on the benefit it provides. This has happened to League of Legends ranks, where people hire boosters to take them to a particular rank instead of developing their skillset.

[@michaelchurch1324]

I'm Michael O. Church, author of the article you critiqued, and I agree with basically everything you've said. It aged better than I thought it did--when I found out that an 11-year-old article of mine was being discussed on KZbin, I was expecting worse--but I basically agree that an all-purpose leveling system is a non-starter, for the reasons of specialization and siloization that you already discussed. I also tended to falsely correlate tastes in programming languages with capability. (If you want to see worse, check out Paul Graham's "The Python Paradox.") I'm older now, obviously, and while I value what FP teaches about aesthetics, it isn't the right solution for every problem.

[@7th_CAV_Trooper]

I hope to see Primeagen black belt coder ninja merch soon.

[@ldandco]

Dont tell a developer he ranks high. His prima donna instinct will kick in into overdrive mode

[@joe-skeen]

One problem I find with any kind of ranking/progression paradigm for programming is that they are almost always one-dimensional, progressing from beginner to expert. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that any way of ranking developers that reflects reality would be a multidimensional system. Yes learning/teaching is a valuable and important ability, but so is the ability to think at a system level, or be able to zero in during debugging on a single erroneous value... you would need to plot all these and more on an N-dimensional graph to get the full picture, where mastery in one area doesn't necessarily mean you are a master of all.

[@Dirkadin]

We should do capes instead of belts.

[@Harve6988]

Ignore the 10x stuff, but genuinely if you hire someone who is technically excellent, excellent at teaching and explaining, whilst still maintaining some humility and then fgve them a good amount of autonomy they can genuinely be transformative.

[@seancooper5007]

I rank devs by how certain they are about anything.

[@mitchierichie]

"Flip, sorry about the craziness of this one.."

[@89alcatraz89]

one thing about teaching aslong the way to excelence is that teaching others is a good way to learn yourself, to remeber the basics and it works just as good for programing judo and anything else

[@hanswoast7]

As you said, there is not one single skill tree. We could try to map out the skill tree and then assign a rank on each branch of progression. Like "I am a lvl 3 embedded dev" or "I am a lvl 5 UI dev" and so forth. Making it realistic would create too many branches, but having like 5 or so might be an ok-ish approximation that is usable.