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by spiralhead 2763 days ago
This is a very complicated thing to answer concisely, but I'll take a stab at it from a product development perspective.

You know you're a good programmer if the things you build "just work." It should be near impossible to find flaws in your solutions. This is actually rare. Most developers I've worked with will declare something "done" well before all of the flaws have been worked out.

3 comments

You know you're a good programmer if the things you build "just work."

How do you quantify, "just works?" For a large enough project, perfection, or even just getting pretty close to it, ends up being pretty expensive.

It should be near impossible to find flaws in your solutions.

I had a boss who declared he could find a bug in any page of code, so long as you let him lawyer the specs in great enough detail. Granted, we were working in a pretty complex domain, but as far as I could see, he was always right about that.

As Matt Easton keeps saying: "Context!"

Maybe the company you're working for finds it much more valuable to do lots of iterations so they can tinker with the product and keep refining it. In that case, it might be even better than "perfection" if the things you build mostly work, but that you can respond to change and bugfix requests quickly. (Without introducing regressions.)

> It should be near impossible to find flaws in your solutions.

The number of open issues in most OSS repos would make me hold my tongue before saying something so farfetched.

I've used, worked on, and depended on an enormous amount of software and I have literally never seen such a thing.