

Ask HN: How do you define a 'top developer'? - marcosscriven

Someone said to me recently that if I was a &#x27;top developer&#x27;, that they could get me a job easily.<p>It always struck me as presumptuous describing oneself as in some way the best - so was curious what my fellow HNers thought?<p>Do you describe yourself as a &#x27;top developer&#x27;? How do you define it?
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digitalzombie
Using vocab correctly.

I got a couple of people that use function and method word interchangeably and
thinks a programming language reserve word is a method.

Biggest issue I have is the fact that they don't use the vocab correct. It
abstract and black box a concept at a higher level, so you don't have to spend
20 words describing a concept. Instead of describing closure you can just say
closure and just focus on solving the actual solution instead of the nitty
gritty mechanic.

Ability to be humble and admit that they don't know it, ask questions about
it, and not bullshit and pretend as if they know it.

We hired a person that said he was a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 in knowing
jQuery. Dude wrote a parser for json in 50 lines in one of his javascript
code. He did the same think for PHP but to parse xml files.

This isn't out of arrogrance, it's the fact that you can bullshit to your peer
and thinks they're stupid. Like not only can you not trust yourself to learn
from your colleague but they're full of it. They rather choose to pretend to
know it instead of actually learning and improving upon their craft. Top
developer? More like top bser for those management type position.

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rubberband
I agree that it's presumptuous to give yourself big ol' gold star, as a "top
developer".

I don't consider myself one, but if I had to define it, I would say that they
were within the top 10-20% percent of whatever arbitrary metrics are most
important to you. If you want a "top Python developer", I would expect a nice
Github (or whatever) profile with tons of relevant work. If you want a "top
enterprise C++ developer", I would expect they have a long list of successful
projects, and be able to walk you through the intricacies of each.

To me, it's highly contextual.

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sdoryapp
A 'top developer' is a relative term. I used to be a top developer few years
back at my startups coding and developing interfaces, backend, APIs and
everything in between. I would understand design, database and UI, as well as
the best implementation methods and optimize code. However, there were times,
when you just had to release something and get things done. So, my
perspective, a 'top developer' is the CEO of development who can get things
done and still think of scaling and long term viability of the code.

