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by perlgeek 2953 days ago
> Is there room for below average programmers?

Yes!

If we assume that about a third of all programmers are "average" (whatever that means), another third is "above average", and one third is "below average". So, it's not actually a tiny minority, despite what Hackernews might make you think.

Programming consists of many different aspects: creating an architecture, designing algorithms, implementing them, hunting bugs, testing etc.

If you think you are "below average" in one of these areas, you can team up with other developers who are good in that area, and let them guide you.

For example, I work with somebody who is amazing at digging deep and really understand the low-level nitty gritty of bugs. But, they are not that great at building high-level abstractions. So when a task involves building high-level abstractions, we discuss these abstractions beforehand, write some mock examples that use the new abstractions etc.

Some developers aren't good at low-level stuff, but build great user interfaces. Some don't do that very well, but shine when it comes to automation.

To sum it up, "below average" programmers can be very useful to an organization with the right amount of specialization and collaboration/mentoring.

1 comments

I've been slowly learning to program as a side project (I'm an architect, buildings not IT) and considering to adapt my career to a suitable niche in IT. Front-end/UI-UX seems to be the answer.

I used to hate (the lack of elegance of) JS but I got used. After a lot of dabbling, I'm still between React and Vue. While I prefer Vue, all jobs ask for React. Framework marketability seems to be crucial when/while you perceive yourself as below average.