I'm wondering how engineers perceive their own value and their intelligence to the rest of the world, and how many coders, think they are a top coder? So do you think you are one of the best?
I am in the top 10% of people who code cheminformatics software.<p>I am in bottom 90% of the people who code first person shooters, mobile apps, payroll software, ...<p>More people use the latter than the former, so I'll answer "no."<p>To mrchess - how in the world can anyone compare the value and intelligence of, say, the developers of the BLAST molecular sequence search algorithm to, say, the developers of DOOM? Number of research papers which cite the work? Or amount of cash earned by the developers? Or amount of CPU time used for either?<p>(To be honest, I can't guess within several orders of magnitude how much CPU time has been spent on either BLAST or DOOM.)
That's such a nebulous question :-)<p>For example, I'm hopelessly disorganized, unstructured and often overly-passionate. That put's me in the bottom 5% as a regular coder. However I'm also good at making intuitive leaps, grokking new ideas, thinking out of the box and writing half decent code, which in the past made me very hireable and in my employers perception in the top 5%.<p>Really hard to answer that question!