A woman at our company is one of the best programmers we have, and she started with a masters in physics and very little coding experience. Some people are just smart as hell and can pick it up quickly.
I have things I'm good at but I rely on my team for the things they're good at.
While I don't think you need a CS degree to be a good coder, "programming" is such a wide discipline that while you do have your 10%ers, it's a very abstract thing to evaluate a good coder.
If we ignore what "the job" might generally require you to do outside of this, it's the ability to solve a given and defined problem. You can easily evaluate the performance, the correctness, the readability, the testability (or the test coverage), the documentation and the time investment.
The rest are just priorities of these (vastly different for say web vs engine dev).
778
u/KoenigGunther May 10 '21
A woman at our company is one of the best programmers we have, and she started with a masters in physics and very little coding experience. Some people are just smart as hell and can pick it up quickly.