[sloxy]

That's interesting because I also picked up on that: "I am a world-class software developer living in New York’s East Village"

and I just thought, hmm, here's this guy with ~5 years of ~professional dev(mainly with iOS) and he self qualifies himself as world class.

Looking at his bio, I see he's worked for 3 companies doing quite ordinary things.

I would love to know what gave him the confidence/ignorance to describe himself as such.

[ZvG_Bonjwa]

Oh, come on. So the guy uses some harmless exaggeration when selling himself on his own personal website & you're taking him to programmer jail over it?

Do you frequently launch into personal attacks on authors whose articles you disagree with?

[sloxy]

If a medical doctors classifies himself as world class and then posts articles about medical matters, then my expectation would be his world class-ness is evident.

This guy's not writing an opinion piece about which brand ketchup tastes best. He has published an opinion piece in which he speaks authoritatively about matters related to the domain he claims he's a world expert in.

As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.

[parzivalm]

> As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.

Now you seem to be the one exaggerating there. While yes I agree that is a crappy way of describing himself, there is no reason to start being so mean about it.

[mkirklions]

What does world class mean?

That you are good enough that people would accept your work in the United States?

[ben509]

It's typically used in sports and means an athlete or team has won championships in an international league, or a person is an Olympic athlete.

Coding is less explicitly competitive, but there is an element of competition to it. If you were a major contributor to a project that had displaced multiple international competitors, that'd clearly be world class. For example, Linus is a "world-class" coder because Linux is used all over the world and has displaced many operating systems.

[justwalt]

No less than Don Knuth’s protégé.

[dx034]

No but on HN you should expect that criticism in that direction is valid. You can be world-class in certain niches but I doubt that calling oneself a world-class developer holds in the context of parts of the audience here.

It's ok to sell oneself but I'd be careful with exaggerations in a field with probably >1 million professionals.

[handbanana]

I think its valid to point out.

If the author is joking about being world class, that would be kind of odd. So is saying you're world class at something in general (unless you're the tiger woods of that something and can demonstrate/back it up).

I have found it is commonly a trend with frontend/javascript/rails devs to be senior/lead/etc after a few years of experience. I think there's a variety of reasons for this, but going back to the author he probably is very adept at his given field. But to brand yourself as world class seems a bit much.

Personal attack? Nope. But if I saw that line before interviewing a candidate - I'd definitely probe them about it

[jrs95]

Yeah, I think pretty much any ordinary asshole that goes around calling himself world class ought to be mocked for it

[mratzloff]

Let's stick to the content of the article and not tear down our fellow engineers.

[petagonoral]

Regardless of whether tech or not, any opinion piece is framed within the context of the author of the piece.

I personally blame Jeff Atwood who pretty much green lit a lot of developers to consider themselves "elite" just because they were reading a blog about programming.

That attitude is something I'd love to see stamped out.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

He is kind of inviting it by declaring himself "world-class". You don't get to make an assertion like that and then complain when it is challenged.

[philfrasty]

calculatePaycheck("i am a world class programmer") > calculatePaycheck("i am a programmer")

[RandallBrown]

That 5 years blog post is from 4 years ago.

Ash is a pretty well known developer in the iOS world. He contributes to a lot of well used open source projects and what Artsy is doing (open source by default) isn't something I would describe as "quite ordinary" even if what they're working on is.

I don't know if those credentials are enough to be described as world class, but I would bet it's a bit tongue in cheek anyway.