Ask HN: As a programmer, how do you know if you're a good one or not?

I always want to be a better version of myself, but it's unclear how to quantify my quality. In sporting, there're many stats about athletes to look at. In academia, you can look at some indirect indexes about your research quality. But as a programmer at work, I often receive feedbacks from 1 or 2 persons at most. It's easy to think that I'm good enough, when the truth may be not.

So, as a programmer, how do you quantify or estimate how good you are?

Thank you,

1. read others code. think. ask questions. why and how certain code is written in certain way.

2. Read more code.

3. Write more code.

4. If your code which you wrote few years back looks bad to you, then you are on right path.

5. How much you understand the core concepts. New languages and frameworks are more of an glitter.

6. You want to be better version of yourself, then your progess is your stats you need look at. How many books did you read year on year? How much code you read year on year ? How much code you wrote ? How much fun you had :)

7. Adding, if you can think of the future maintainer of your code in mind and code, then you are lot better than many programmers out there in business.

8. Try to be a clean code enthusiast.

The more experience I get, the more I realize that I'm pretty average.

Does my code still make sense to me 6 months later?

Did I introduce new bugs?

Are people using my building blocks to add features or working around them/ redoing them?

These are not good metrics. I have researched this and it seems there is no good way to measure coding improvement except subjective measurements.

I just purchased a coffee mug that says “World’s Okayest Developer” so I’m right there with you.

In all seriousness, though: I’ve learned that it’s better to just accept that sometimes you’ll do really good or exceptional work, sometimes you’ll do awful work, and most of the time you’ll do work that’s pretty good and gets the job done but isn’t perfect.