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by sagitariusrex 2627 days ago
We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-pro...

2 comments

I'm not so sure about this conclusion. I feel that below-average developers are less likely to answer stack overflow surveys at all. In my anecdotal experience, below-average devs usually have little interest in interacting with the overall "developer community" or reading about development more than the absolute minimum needed to finish their assigned tasks.
That was my takeaway as well. It’s also somewhat ambiguous; who are you comparing yourself to? All coworkers, everyone in your graduating class, people the same age as you?

I’m sure that we’re seeing at least a bit of everyone thinking they’re more skilled than they are, but it’s more slight than that caption would lead you to believe.

It's the same with car drivers, right? Illusory superiority