How can you measure your skills as a programmer? [closed]

Question

At a previous interview I have been asked the question: 'From 0 to 10, how do you rate yourself as a programmer?'

I found it a very hard question to answer as I am not aware of a metric to measure how good my skills are. Moreover, knowing how well you perform would be useful to understand what you need to improve to be a better programmer.

So is there a way to know how well you do your work?

Answer 1

Call up your previous employer and talk to whoever inherited all your old code. They'll tell you how good of a programmer you are. ;)

Answer 2

That's a hard question. From a purely introspective standpoint, I think that one of the best metrics of "good programmership" is this: How much do you enjoy your craft? I've met plenty of developers, some of them very good, but I've never known anyone who was a 9-5 developer and managed anything better than mediocre results.

Of course, looking inward isn't the best way of measuring competency. I should think that your fellow programmers would be able to give you a fairly solid answer. There's social etiquette involved in phrasing such a question, but the potential is still there. In my experience, those you work with are going to have the best understanding of how well you're doing, if only because they're the ones who have to clean up the mess if you make a mistake. :-)

Final tidbit: programming is problem solving, pure and simple. Think about how you approach hard problems that come your way. First, how do you emotionally react to a tough challenge? And second, what is your code going to look like? Do you just hack your way blindly through the jungle until you arrive at some sort of result, or is your approach methodical, well-measured and (most importantly) heavily researched? The really good programmers aren't the ones who know everything or who can implement Dijkstra's algorithm in eight languages cold, they're the ones who spend hours pouring over text books and obscure blogs to find that tiny nugget of an idea which just so happens to be crucial to the issue at hand. If you have the patience and passion to work your way through a deep challenge, as well as the humility to look to others for ideas, then you're well on your way to that "10".