I don't disagree with the comments about the triteness of this page and other articles like it. That doesn't mean it's entirely without value though. Think of it as like a financial budget: you know you're not going to hit it completely and some of the items you've budgeted for will turn out to be unnecessary or wasteful. At the end of the budget period, though, it gives you something to measure actual performance against.
Isn't this the sort of table that shows its author is a L337 hax0r because he's in the top category of everything? Anyone who automatically puts things like DVCS, TDD, and practices obviously related to Open Source development in the top tier sounds more like a Kool-Aid drinker than an objective observer making a sincere attempt to provide a useful resource.
Hmm... as joe_the_user said, it's a nice checklist for holes in one's background, but I'm not sure if it should serve as a list for "hireability" - I know people that are probably on the higher end of most of the points, but are terrible at real-world situations.<p>These probably are crucial for the kind of programming done at the startups, though.<p>I score as Level 1 or Level 2 at most on almost all the items, some Level 3 points don't seem relevant (why should I need a license header for my work programming?).<p>What I believe is that some of the points are WAY more important than others, I personally place great value on my domain and business knowledge and believe that is a trend going forward.<p>Still, thanks for making it available, reminded me I have to do some more studies.
Must be a slow week - this particular "very simplistic" article has been here at least 3 times before in the last month.<p>Its very cute to divide programmer competency into a clean matrix - its never that simple.
He misses a few points subjects like computer graphics, computational geometry, understanding of databases (did he mention this?), numerical simulations, GUI design, general math skills, compression algorithm, heuristic algorithm, etc<p>That's what just comes in my mind..
All is fine so long as one does not assume 'great programmer' = 'competent'. This matrix really only differentiates 'well-educated' programmers.<p>There are many well-educated failures, and as many (some might say more) un-/under-educated successes.
This matrix is a bunch of crap. The ability to "get things done" is the most important factor of programmer competency. Every thing else is incidental.
The books category is especially ridiculous. You might have read some books in each one of those levels, and they're not exactly prerequisites to one another.<p>I also use Git exclusively, that doesn't mean I'm proficient with SVN.<p>Et cetera.
<i>Thanks to John Haugeland for a reformatting of it that works much more nicely on the web.</i><p>Where does "basic HTML" come in the matrix?<p>PS Flagged, dupe.