Ask HN: Do you consider yourself to be a good programmer?

No, at least not compared to some of the people that I work with. I really like the creative parts of programming, but I actually have a really hard time getting into a headspace where I can pick up a problem and just go. I can produce a high-quality product quickly enough that my employer is happy with my performance, but I don’t feel like I have the kind of raw talent that makes someone really good. I miss doing things where I spend most of my day working with humans. I don’t feel like I’m making the most of my time by doing dev work.

Compared to coworkers in my last two companies I'd say I'm definitely well above average, but not the best. This might sound like boasting, but it boils down to being good at delivering on time, caring about the craft and being motivated to improve things.

I think if you care about what you do, then you're probably already in the upper 50%, because most people don't, and it shows. Now if you pair giving a fuck with some programming talent and interest in improving your skills and productivity you can easily get into the top 10%.

To get into the top 1% you need to be very focused on programming. I have too many other hobbies to be that focused only on this aspect of my life. But I'm ok with that.

If you start comparing yourself to internet people, there are just too many that you can compete with them on everything. There are too many experts in too many niches that you could read all the HN articles and compare favorably in comparison.

What is a "good programmer"? What would you like to accomplish by soliciting the feedback? Without agreeing to a common definition and measurement, it's not a well-founded question.

I don't think of myself as a "good programmer" because "good" is too blunt a qualitative measure to be productive. It's a disagreeable and poorly specified measurement. I haven't seriously thought about whether or not I'm a good programmer, just as I haven't thought about whether or not I'm a good person. In fact I consciously disengage from assessment like that.

I validate my achievements on a case by case basis, and I validate them according to how close I came to maximal efficiency and minimal time in accomplishing a task. It would be deceptively attractive to use those two heuristics as a rhetorical scaffolding for the meaning of "good", except that I don't compare achievements; they're mostly orthogonal.

The question of whether or not I'm "good" has no meaning for me, because I only evaluate performance within the confines of discrete tasks and sets of related tasks. Further I personally don't have enough insight into the difficulty of all possible tasks, so I refuse to generalize my performance on any particular subset of them to how well I'd do on a majority of them. And to the extent that there are only so many tasks and skills are transferrable: any given task may have differing dimensions of deadline, efficiency or implementation requirements. To get a useful measurement, you'd have to draw arbitrary lines in the sand across each of these dimensions and convince everyone else in discussion that these lines are the sensible ones.

This probably isn't a satisfying answer. But it's not intended to be. The idea of a "good programmer" is conceptually attractive but practically meaningless.

Yes, exactly. And such a question would still have utility - despite being a subjective assessment - if the measures of the assessment were common. But that's not the case here. Not only are respondents subjectively assessing themselves, they're subjectively assessing themselves according to arbitrarily different measurement criteria which they need not disclose.

Therefore, the only thing anyone can conclude from responses is, "For some definition of 'good programmer' which is specific to each individual respondent, approximately x% of respondents believe they satisfy the definition." It's one thing to solicit opinions; it's another thing entirely to open the floor for opinions which may not even be the same. The OP may have received personal assessments and anecdotes about steak, apples and cauliflower when their intention was to solicit personal assessments about almonds.

Never mind caring, in my experience a lot of people in this industry struggle to even write working code. You might not see them much in startups but do some work for enterprises and you soon discover there are a lot of them. They usually make up for their lack of technical skills with an abundance of political activity.