This post just completely rubbed me the wrong way. It came off as an arrogant boast by an immature developer framed as an admission of shortcomings. But it was only an admission of shortcomings in title. He spends the majority of the post tooting his own horn about how people want to hire him, and how he's actually a good programmer because he ships code, and because he's worked at startups. He keeps posing these meatball questions and then answers them in a way that makes him look as good as possible but doesn't really provide an answer to the question "what makes a good programmer" (probably because it's a loaded question and depends on context). He's just setting himself up to say "a good programmer is like me because in this example I did a certain thing that made sense at the time." He also mentions that he's a college junior at least three times on that page and makes sure that we all know that all this insight and maturity is coming from someone still in college who's not even studying computer science!
>Sorry, bud, I worked with a couple of guys like you before - very bright, smart, self-confident, young, yet started coding before they started drinking, but with not a lot of mileage in the industry - and the problem was that this style of work is not compatible with other people.
Me too. And it's not just the code they write that's a headache - they're usually a pain in the ass to work with because they always know way more than everyone about everything. They know more about algorithms, they know more about software engineering, they know more about software design, they know more about human nature and the industry. They even know more about things they know nothing about. Meh.
I am young in the Industry and I already see examples of such people. They go through a recursive cycle of "visible productivity" in terms of fancy features which break three months later. Then, they are on a "fire fight" trying to fix this "broken feature". The worst thing you could do is try to look at their code and attempt to reuse components for anything you want. I however don't completely blame such people, I think it is the nature of the startup world we are living in where the idea is to ship as fast as possible and technical debt be damned.
>Sorry, bud, I worked with a couple of guys like you before - very bright, smart, self-confident, young, yet started coding before they started drinking, but with not a lot of mileage in the industry - and the problem was that this style of work is not compatible with other people.
Me too. And it's not just the code they write that's a headache - they're usually a pain in the ass to work with because they always know way more than everyone about everything. They know more about algorithms, they know more about software engineering, they know more about software design, they know more about human nature and the industry. They even know more about things they know nothing about. Meh.