Can We Rank Developers ?

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By: Michael O. Church | / michaelochurch
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[@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.

[@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. I also agree that, far too much in the capitalist world, there is an emphasis on becoming a teacher. Within a company, it's probably harmless and, indeed, the only way a lot of companies can retain good people is by putting them into teaching or R&D roles... but there's definitely a grift right now of people who haven't done X teaching and selling courses online on how to do X. This is something I should have foreseen back then, but I was, as you've said, unduly idealistic. Excellent response. Thanks for taking the time to go through that.

[@archthearchvile]

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

[@platin2148]

That i implemented YDSL for a project but it uses git 😂

[@GuyFromJupiter]

That Jake is stupid and deserved to get fired?

[@TheRyulord]

Tom's at least a 4.0

[@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

[@JGComments]

My last boss told me that I did three times the work of a typical employee. My first 3 thoughts were: resent my teammates, wonder if deserved a 200 percent raise, and wonder if I should start slacking when they don’t give me the raise. So yah it was an L move, lol.

[@gabrielnuetzi]

🤣🤣🤣

[@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. I think it genuinely is the most important thing a company can do - hired skilled people who care, and then trust them.

[@thephoenix215-po2it]

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

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

truest measurement

[@tensor5113]

The pseudointellectual dev

[@TheJoYo]

@@tensor5113more like sudo intellectual

[@JGComments]

lol

[@uuu12343]

Isnt leetcode paid? You are literally paywalling and gatekeepings the ranking lmao, the worst part honestly

[@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.

[@blarghblargh]

please do. also red noses

[@JacobSantosDev]

No better way to signify that you are off the market than wearing a cape.

[@_KondoIsami_]

it should really be a coffee mug

[@ripplecutter233]

Pls don't turn software development into tekken 8 ranked

[@seancooper5007]

I rank devs by how certain they are about anything.

[@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.

[@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

[@MZachary21]

As a Ludwig fan the comment at 18:30 was very unexpected, especially knowing about otto. Has prime reacted to any of this projects?

[@threefour1598]

Right when he hit Enter, an ad popped up for me, and I thought it was what the link opened in full screen. Coincidense? I mean, how many times does this exact timing in this context happens to someone?

[@mitchierichie]

"Flip, sorry about the craziness of this one.." Flip: "No problem 😜"

[@dwhxyz]

Michael Church's article "Why Agile and especially Scrum are terrible" is worth a read. If my memory serves me his LinkedIn profile used to say something like - don't talk to me about user stories 😅

[@Salantor]

The number of comments under that article scared me, cause at first I thought the article itself is so damn long that the scrollbar almost disappeared.

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

I bet the Agile Andy set is mad as hell at that article, nice tip.

[@chauchau0825]

This article is gold especially the war room metaphor because I am thinking the same thing for a long time

[@thewiirocks]

@@chauchau0825 Church almost... _almost_ puts his finger on an important point. For those of us old enough to remember large Waterfall projects, I can tell you that we spent 8 months or more supposedly coding up the project. We'd usually end up behind which wouldn't be detected until month 7, at which point "crunch time" kicked in. At that point we chucked out even more code. None of which worked as soon as QA came on the project and started trying to verify the solution. With none of the code working, a manager would step in and setup a war room. All of the issues would be prioritized and each engineer would volunteer to take the one on the top. If you weren't participating, you were told what to do. (Not a great career look, BTW.) Rapid iteration in this war room was when the real work got done. The project suddenly became secretly Agile and made progress. Any project that was too big to pull together into a War Room scenario typically failed outright. The original of these projects was the System 360 project at IBM. Scrum and Agile practices pull the War Room forward because the War Room was just a bad Scrum. By pulling it forward, we can use the time more effectively and not have to be "crunched" like we did back in the day. What I see today is that the new generation of developers never experienced the Waterfall environment. So they tend not to understand how to make best use of this up-front push to keep things moving. They think it's about blame, so they turtle up and take multiple tasks (which they think are the same thing as user stories) to protect themselves when they get stuck. In the end, their own intransigence recreates the very problem that Scrum was trying to solve. Now with that said, teaching on Scrum has gotten _really_ bad. The industry has tried to codify all the bad practices rather than recognizing them as bad practices. For example, if I were to ask anyone what the "three questions of standup are", pretty much everyone would say "What did you do yesterday?, today?, and any blocker?" WRONG. There are no "three questions". Those questions were originally introduced as a phasing mechanism away from Waterfall. Trainers used to say, "If you're still using these in a month, you're not progressing." 4 Signs your Scrum project is secretly waterfall: 1. Stories in the sprint "carry over" to the next sprint. There is no carry over in Scrum. Only wasted work that should probably be cancelled and/or rescheduled for a later date. 2. Your "Scrum Master" (probably a full time underqualified resource who took a Udemy course once) has turned on Swim lanes, thereby guaranteeing that every team member is out for themselves rather than working as a team. 3. Creating tasks on "stories" to try and "break down the work". This level of failure is just... amazing. There are so many things wrong with it that I'd have to write a novel. 4. WIP of 2-3x the number of team members. Everyone's got to have 2-3 "things" they're working on, right? That way we know we're busy! Even though humans can only do one thing at a time. And DORA research shows that WIP of significantly less than the number of team members is much, much faster. I use 1/2 the team size as a rule of thumb. I'll go all the way down to 1 story at a time if my team is stuck on something or I'm training up a new team that doesn't understand how to work with agility. Get out your Bingo card. How many of the above did you have? I'm guessing all four. "But Scrum is just like Communism!" Target, Microsoft Bing, Google, and innumerable companies you've never heard of have successfully implemented Scrum. If Communism was like Scrum, then we'd all be moving to Cuba for their finally successful implementation. Except Communism has *never* worked, but Scrum has. Also, I hate to say it, but even bad Scrum is better than full on Waterfall. At least you have checkpoints and some sense of progress. All of that information was completely fictitious in traditional Waterfall. In faux Scrum, we get the bad news at the last minute, but the last minute was only 1 month or 3 months out, versus the 1-2 _years_ in Waterfall. Amusingly, most teams start doing Scrum when they say they're ditching Scrum and all of its "problems" for more "pure" Agile. This is kind of hilarious to watch, even as I root them on. They're ditching all the problem created by their own misunderstanding and unease.

[@davidcummins8125]

I think it's a bit like IQ tests. There are different areas of strength, and boiling it down to one metric is always hard. I know for example that I'm not the best at environment setup or tests of pure speed. However I have some BA skills and I'm proactive. There are definitely areas I need to round out my skills, but does it make me better/worse than someone else? And it feels like certain skillsets are harder to find training for.

[@1jerrycamacho497]

Can we Dank Revelopers?

[@neko6]

It feels like having a standard across the industry would be great, but practically it's just like in Martial Arts. The rank only means something in the context of the organization that manages it, and after one introduces, other would follow, and it would soon get feagmented and meaningless, just like any existing ranking systems

[@cinoss5]

WE REMEMBER 10% of what we read 20% of what we hear 30% of what we see 50% of what we see and hear 70% of what we discuss with others 80% of what we personally experience 95% or what we teach others - Edgar Dale

[@pencilcheck]

the belt is all about memorizing kata, if that is how programming is going to work, those descriptions need to be very specific and clear so it can be repeated in front of an instructor.

[@joshman1019]

The progression of technology far outpaces even the greatest of engineers.

[@thisbridgehascables]

Not sure how one could gate keep a skill.. in this day and age, you have a colossal amount of literature and videos.. on tons of skills..

[@chickenduckhappy]

Code reviews are often necessary as a teaching tool and very small chunks of code are initially a great place to start. Better to untangle a huge mess together after never looking into a fast Junior's code for an entire month. Otoh, untangling the mess can be a rewarding experience, too, as it demonstrates *why* it's nicer to do in a different manner. Takes time, though.

[@j-wenning]

xkcd 927 + a thirst for quantitiative assessment of qualitative work

[@zxuiji]

21:30, you missed the ball there prime, the point of programming is to solve problems. Some problems are about how to make producing X faster, some are about making the act of Y easier, in all cases it's about solving a problem of some kind. Creation and teaching are just byproducts of the process.

[@MrAwesomeTheAwesome]

I think it's just as valid to think of it the other way around - 'problem solving is just a byproduct of creation'. You *can* approach programming always with a problem and the question of how to solve it, but you can also approach it the other way as well. Think of it like 'rain is hitting my head, oh I should build a roof' vs. 'I want to make a video game, how do I do it?' Or often these coexist within the same project. Maybe you want the roof to be part of a beautiful structure as you're building it, then you need to solve the problem of understanding aesthetics and how not to let them get in the way of functionality. You could get philosophical/psychological and argue that desire to make a beautiful structure or a game is born out of a desire to 'solve the problem' of boredom or poor aesthetics, but you could just as easily make the argument that every problem we try to solve is simply another creation that we make in the course of plotting out our lives. I think it's very common for programmers to view programming as problem-solving-oriented, and that may be why it strikes one as odd when someone like Primeagen takes such an aesthetics/creation-oriented perspective on programming. He's not just here to solve problems, he's here to make things. That's how I think of programming as well, and part of what draws me to his videos and to enjoy his way of thinking.

[@zxuiji]

@@MrAwesomeTheAwesome That sounded so convoluted it sounds like you're just grasping at straws to make the other way round work. It's always for solving a problem, even if that problem is creating beauty.

[@MrAwesomeTheAwesome]

@@zxuiji That sounds much more convoluted to me. 'Create beauty' is an initial directive, 'how do I create beauty?' is the problem-solving aspect.

[@zxuiji]

@@MrAwesomeTheAwesome If creating beauty was the initial directive then the drive to program it would not be there because it is 100x easier to create beauty with our own hands than it is to program it. Programming it becomes the solution to the problem of "How do I create beauty automatically?" which is obviously a problem which satisfies the conclusion that the reason for programming is ALWAYS to solve a problem.

[@MrAwesomeTheAwesome]

​@@zxuiji These are very subjective claims which do not agree with my personal experience. Especially the implication that programming itself cannot be beautiful, but that beauty must be automated by the program. You can of course view programming any way you like. If, for you, programming is only an instrumental means to an end - a means to solve problems, then more power to you. That's a fantastic way to use programming, and I use it that way often as well. But for me, programming is also a creative act in and of itself. Programming has aesthetic quality all on its own, and there is beautiful, elegant code, and ugly, terrible code, and sometimes that code does the same thing. If it was all about solving problems, that would be all that matters to me. I often write code in different ways just to see it in different ways. I play with shaders constantly and code for fun just to see what happens. It's just like the math I'm drawn to alongside it - instrumentally useful, but to many beautiful in its own right. If I had to guess, the difference in perspective might come from the reasons people started to program in the first place. For some, it's a necessity to solve problems. For others, it's just fascinating to play around and make the machine *do stuff*. I use programming instrumentally, too, of course, but one of my passions is programming creatively for its own sake.

[@StTrina]

Haha, this reminds me of a guy I worked with. He claimed to be one of the top 10 developers in the country. One day during lunch, we saw a trophy store so we had a trophy engraved with "John Doe - Top 10 Developer - USA" and it was a runner breaking through the ribbon. We placed it on his desk and his reaction was hilarious. He was mad at first, asking who did this, threw it in the trash. Hour later, took it out and put it back on his desk and was walking around asking in a playful way like he thought it was funny.

[@uuu12343]

To be fair, its a possibility that he saw this as a "friend"-moment after that few hours and really accepted/appreciated that, hence taking it out of the trash regardless of whether he liked it or not

[@StTrina]

@@uuu12343 Hard to tell. The guy snapped at the interns a lot and seemed to just have a short fuse. Lacked social awareness as well. For example, he sent photos to the entire IT group of his baby being born, including very inappropriate ones of his wife. Our boss told him "hey I think you might of accidentally included some photos that your wife wouldn't be so happy about" and the guy says he meant to and didn't see the problem. His wife also worked there in a different department. She didn't come back after that lol.

[@indiesigi7807]

@@StTrina sounds like bs.

[@GodsAutobiography]

The answer to that problem is already in the solution. A black belt is TKD doesn't mean you're good at BJJ right away. So there's no generic purple belt. Someone could be a purple belt in frontend or something

[@lukemccarron-gamedev6685]

I think the idea of a universal ranking system for programming is fantastic. However, it might be even more beneficial to make it more style-based, similar to martial arts. Instead of achieving a general blackbelt in programming, it would make more sense to have blackbelts specific to each programming style or language. This way, mastery is recognized within the context of a particular style or language.

[@johansmith2840]

belts are earned by a series of competitions with people of the same level, studying martial arts is an art of discipline, with constant practice embedding muscle memory.

[@vl4394]

Yes, rank all of the things to get the humans trying to game the metrics you've established, further driving quality, genuine talent, and innovation into the ground. While also inspiring imitation, as those who see who is rewarded will seek to become rewarded themselves, being social animals submerged in the psychosocial garbage dump that is society and having no conception or concern for genuine quality. I'm sure it will work.... oh wait, it already happened.

[@Voidstroyer]

The last company I worked for actually did make a product that could rank developers. The software would analyse source code and look at git history for what a developer contributed. It was "smart" enough to not just look at lines of code, but also at the impact of what the change was. For example, if you just changed the indentation of a million lines of code, than the overall impact that change made was 0. If however you made a change that added a new feature, or improved performance, etc, than you would get a score. They used 2 metrics for this, developer equivalent, and developer value. And based on this score over a certain amount of time you would get ranked compared to other developers working in the same code base. I honestly didn't like the product of the company, but they allowed me to work from home so I didn't complain.

[@adambickford8720]

I bet no such mechanism existed for ranking the 'leaders'

[@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.

[@besknighter]

Timestamp for live videos only work when the live ends. But to be honest, it should work...

[@TheChillBison]

Shodan should also mean you are excellent at being a beginner. You are curious, you now have a greater understanding of everything you don't know, and are humble about what you do know. A deserving shodan also has not forgotten what it's like to be a beginner, whether they're amped up or fearful, and can speak with and coach other beginners because they've been there. A shodan is passionate about seeing others rise up, not lording over others with their experience.

[@zxuiji]

Including this vid link in my CVs now under "Suggested Link/s of Business Value", I'd put myself at about 3rd kyu rank

[@takeiteasyeh]

always doing something 50% new should be the way of life

[@JacobSantosDev]

I like the idea. Whether using blacksmithing or karate ranking. The issue is knowing the qualifications. I might be a master of CSS or a language but not have a lot of skill with vim. I might have a lot of skill with vim but not with IntelliJ. So it would be useful to know what the definitions were in order to train and teach myself or others. Too often with interviews and posting, the issue is that you have no idea what skills will be required. If you know the domain then you could guess but it is also based on the architecture. Part of it might be that computer science and computer engineering is still new and hasn't yet formalized or is not capable of formalizing what skills mean. Hackerrank and codewars might be useful but it also requires industry acceptance. If IEEE or another international standards body will not then whom? We essentially have a form of standard with college degrees but someone can self teach themselves without going to class or getting a certification. MIT famously provides all of the materials so that you can teach yourself without going to a single class, even providing some of the lectures online.

[@UnderTrack_]

I personaly think of programming as a macro field/domain rather than a specific job; so just like in artisanry there is carpentery, tanners or blacksmiths amongst others, in programming there are those that work on GUI, those that work on server backend, those that work on embbeds, with much more relevant breakdowns than those possible, and the same way you can't compare carpenters to blacksmiths and they both have their individual peer-ranking, programming should accordingly be ranked within those domains by peers, ei UI devs ranking themselves on their ability to code and solve problems around a UI code rather than some corporate with no programming knowledge ranking UI and server devs exactly alike.

[@conundrum2u]

not calling primagen out, but you've got to see the abstract factory patterns for what they are. not dislike them because they feel icky or less artsy. they're in those languages because it's a part of the game. the structure of the language and how you satisfy condtions sometimes need those patterns. plus if you know them you can 10x through where they're written easily. don't like the factory pattern? great! there's dependency injection. they're not far off from each other. don't like dependency injection, sure, there are other ways you can structure your application (though I wouldn't recommend it if you're writing something that's intended to be extendable or parts of it replaceable)

[@BorisTheDev]

I just want to say we need to understand that this article was written more than 10 years ago…

[@perplexedon9834]

So the colors go on your programmer socks, right?

[@ep1499]

The thing is you don't get a black belt in martial arts, you get a black belt in judo or karate or BJJ. Put the best devops engineer in the world on the front end of mobile app development and their belt rank is going to go way down all the sudden

[@thewiirocks]

Any rank system is driven by those at the top. Which makes it subject to the Peter Principal. Which will ultimately corrupt the system.

[@TurtleKwitty]

"Every silo of programmer style is differnet" okay? You do know that the tests for karate are not the same as kung-fu nor jiu-jitsi etc tc right ? They each have a silo for the various martial arts, and even within them you can have silos of styles no one said it needed to be a one size fits all ?

[@cariyaputta]

Google SWE Levels is a quite standard way to categorize yourself.

[@JGComments]

YES, but only if we give them the exact same task, and then wait ten years to see how their decisions panned out.

[@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.

[@FrederikSchumacher]

Prime gate-keeping the term gate-keeping, it's a Gategate.

[@mdlamar]

It's not the age, honey, it's the miles.

[@samanderson4881]

This is what codewars did!

[@johnred6584]

I only liked the video because of the Kano impression :))

[@samcalder6946]

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

[@wurf5336]

so much talk about Gae keeping -.-

[@gjermundification]

3:45 They forgot Deep Purple

[@ult1873]

Wait, so why couldn't you rank for each style. A table, I say, a table!

[@EricVulgaris]

When prime ranked family over education you can see he has a blackbelt in marital arts

[@jasonkirby43]

Its Six Sigma, but for programers! I love the concept, but once they build an industry around it...

[@ThatJay283]

linus torvalds would be a black belt

[@asagiai4965]

I'm technically teaching, But not really incentivize. I'm just teaching. But I do get your point on other people (or teacher), especially in the programming industry. It's not bad. What's bad is scamming people or promising things that won't happen.

[@microcolonel]

Everyone who works with anyone competent: yes, obviously. Bugman soydev: nooo, not comparison!

[@KerchumA222]

Here me out: character sheets. I'm a level 6 backend web dev and a level 3 frontend dev.

[@blarghblargh]

"kyu" is pronounced "Q". as far as "it's a meritocracy" - this is absolutely true at the entry level. if you can code, if you can manage your tasks, if you can think about how to solve problems, if you can work well with other people: I don't give a crap about your certificates or degrees. if you are great at some of those and limp along at others, we can probably teach you the rest. unfortunately the word is also carried on further into career development, well past the point where its usefulness breaks down.

[@samcalder6946]

So on this scale, Linus Torvalds' infamous "teaching skills" would prevent him exceeding a 2?

[@replikvltyoutube3727]

No we can't and shouldn't!!

[@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.

[@FrederikSchumacher]

You forgot the /sarcasm... I hope.

[@v0id_d3m0n]

​@@FrederikSchumacher or "/doomer"

[@creativecraving]

So... As soon as I register an LLC, I can appoint myself the highest possible rank? That doesn't work. Not every manager has the competence to even understand how they themselves impact the business. Only a highly-qualified manager could recognize the rank of a developer. Additionally, the value provided to the world by an entire company can change overnight. Does a programmer's rank change based on the effectiveness of his leadership or by the whims of the future?

[@uuu12343]

Honestly, with programming...StackOverflow is either ALL gonna be black belt, or never going to be black belt, no in-betweens Also, anyone who can become a black belt probably has too much free time compared to most programmers

[@monad_tcp]

1:27 totally 100% family over education. "education"

[@samcalder6946]

Better rating scale for programmers: "On a scale from Notch to Donald Knuth..."

[@AlGorup]

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

[@monad_tcp]

25:21 Functional programming isn't superior to Structured programming, its can't be, as the Turing Machine is exactly equivalent to Lambda Calculus, there's nothing extra, its just different notations. The thing is that Functional programming came from academia and structured programming came from engineering. Both are useful for different cases and solutions for different problems. Its like top-down and bottom-up problem solving, its not a dichotomy, they're complimentary and can be used together. Case in point F# is functional first, but has structured, C# is structured first but has functional.

[@bbsara0146]

why would you rank programmers to begin with? I get that technically you could but it doesnt really make sense as to why. Or why programmers would participate.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

I agree that the article makes a major mistake of thinking that functional programming is the end goal. Functional programming has some pros and some cons. Good software engineering requires considering both pros and cons for every decision made for the project, especially when it comes to choosing the language to implement the project. For practical software engineering, I've yet to see highly successful functional programming projects. Do you think we have any highly successful operating systems, web browsers, office suites, web servers, NAS servers or AI systems written in any functional programming language? I think the most successful project is Emacs and I think that's pretty much simpler system than full operating systems or web browsers or GPU drivers. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

[@user-zi2zv1jo7g]

yes

[@andyk2181]

I volunteer to be the baseline as a developer of unit value.

[@blarghblargh]

sounds good. the scale will be 0.0-1.0, and you can be the 1.

[@andyk2181]

@@blarghblargh I never seem to progress so no recalibration would be required, and everyone else would have such high numbers they'd learn about integer overflow 🥲

[@k98killer]

Personally, I think that programmers should be ranked by how large our dicts are.

[@Aliamus_]

Programing belts 🚫 Programing socks ✅

[@sumitpurohit8849]

If you think just making tutorials is teaching then you are wrong, people like Rich Harris, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, Andrej Karpathy, are also teachers. When they provide their knowledge to the world in the form of their work, github repos, blogs and interviews, people learn from them. Teaching is not just a classroom teacher-student thing.

[@TheFoyer13]

I don't think programming can be taught, it can only be learned. And you have to want to learn how to do it, all the resources are out there

[@TheFoyer13]

You could teach someone guitar chords, but does that make them a guitar player?

[@threefour1598]

26:30 What happened at 1st kyu? Why did the gender suddenly change? Is this article made with ChatGPT? It didn't keep context continuity. Weird

[@DeSpaceFairy]

For me programming is closer to MMA constantly changing constantly moving than a martial art frozen in one shape, there's millions ways to practising it and only few ways that always wins. Some practice are good but fail and other are bad failing harder, but in specific circumstances will succeed despite being less practical. The median at their best is light years apart from the few people in top of their game, all this little world has to continuously perform to stay in the spot light and these felling off are quickly replaced by the famish mob tailing them. And of course there are the outliers, more cryptid than human, they are harder, better, faster, stronger no matter what situation.

[@matt566]

this guy rly said using functional languages is superior to non and then creating functional languages is cream of the crop? what a delulu take

[@channelofpublication]

.....If you think there's an apt comparison between throwing people on the ground and strangling them vs programming, you're either meant to be a manager or you should take a little less time on the mat. You do lose brain cells that way, you know. Standards aren't a bad thing, they're just never done standardly. One person's Olympic standard is another's Kodokan banality.

[@keshavprajapati5761]

Can you just not select the from the start of second letter and end on second last letter of the words it really triggers my OCD aaaaahhhhhh!!!!!

[@pif5023]

Meritocracy is an illusion and unjust at best. In a meritocratic system you would have a lot less chances. On what criteria do we attribute merit? There are too many answers to this fundamental question.

[@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.

[@MikeKasprzak]

Is programming teaching a computer? 🦋

[@ionuttiplea4666]

He should have used Bandanas in the article, imagine every programmer wearing a bandana XDD Hint, everyone would buy a black one, cause why tf not :)

[@platin2148]

Well neither VP nor CTO means you have any knowledge about anything software at least for companies that start there digital journey now.

[@pencilcheck]

a lot of those levels are unrealistic, makes no sense but idealistic and might be cool if it is tweaked the right way and used the right way. but given people will use this to do stupid stuff, not recommended.

[@arcuscerebellumus8797]

Programming != judo. Programming is a "field", judo is more like a "path". If you tweak and extend this analogy, being able to program is more like "having a body" or maybe "physical activity" as a whole. Judo wold therefore be some domain-specific proficiency within programming that you could in fact measure somewhat accurately... how that would help avoid asshole managers - I have no idea.

[@michaelgabriel1069]

Article creator seriously took a system which, by his own admission, does not measure competency ("viciousness") and tried using it to measure developer proficiency. Wat.

[@bbsara0146]

I feel like this person conflates coding and leadership ability. they are NOT usually correlated. like a person who is autism level vim user and haskell user would probably make a bad CTO. they would just harp on about monads to anyone who will listen. instead a CTO will make sure all the junior devs feel appreciated and included and are able to access and contribute to the system... I feel annoyed when there is some autism level savant who only codes in haskell and then hates on the rest of the team for not understanding it as a "skill issue" if they dont know every in and out of the language... I am like "bro just write normal code you dont need to use the most obsure atribute of the language for every taskk" this one guy was bit shifting stuff to multiply instead of just multiplying to save miliseconds when the code took like 2 seconds to run once a day anyway...

[@tabsc3489]

if you look into it even IQ level is just... biased af

[@arcaneminded]

Article written by a middle-aged gut-hanging-out karate instructor weeb blessing us all with his 8x programmer lisp routines.

[@PaulSebastianM]

We can rank anything, subjectively or objectively. This lamp is more beautiful than this lamp. This door knob is shinier. This developer is better at identifying the right abstractions for the job. But in the end what matters is who is a better human.

[@zeusdeux]

why is this happening

[@batatanna]

Capitalism

[@blarghblargh]

managers always trying to show off their pokemans so they have things to put on a slide when asking for a raise/throwing their peers under the bus.

[@JehovahsaysNetworth]

😒 why are the intelligent humans and robots having a disagreement over who has better coding skills? 🤖

[@BloodEyePact]

I'm more of the mind that developers should be treated as tradespeople. Apprentices are really there to learn from masters, and may do some things on their own, journeymen are the backbone of the team and do most of the work, sometimes with an apprentice to do some grunt work, under the guidance and advice of masters, masters are teachers, make important decisions, and do the work where you absolutely can't get it wrong, and grandmasters are masters so experienced, possibly even retired, that even masters go to them when they are unsure or need advice. Don't need any of these colored belts or number bullshit.