Sijin Joseph's blog

My experiences with .Net

Programmer Competency Matrix

Having worked with programmers with an extreme variance in skills, I sometimes get the feeling that there is an big lack of good programmers but when I thought about it a little more I realized that it's not very clear cut, some of the programmers have strong areas and if you confine the tasks into their strong areas then they tend to deliver well. So I started thinking about all the lines on which we can evaluate a programmer, here's what I have so far...

Programmer Competency Matrix (the table is too big to fit on this blog post and needs a whole page of it's own)

After having spent a whole afternoon on this I realize that even this is not comprehensive, this matrix is more biased towards non-visual programmers, so a big majority of web devs will not be able to relate well to this matrix, but I am tired and will come back to this at a later time.

Comments

jaimedp said:

Very interesting list, I agree, it would be very difficult to find someone with proficiency in all areas. And depending on the type of job, you would be looking for different abilities in different areas. In any case I would also add the following topics to you matrix.

+ Interaction Design

UI Design

Aesthetics

Action Flow

+ Professionalism

Basic work ethics

Objectives / Learning goals

Enthusiasm

# April 30, 2008 2:55 PM

Jason Haley said:

# May 1, 2008 10:07 AM

Bahador said:

Awesome!

Favorite rows:

problem decomposition

books

blogs

Thanks for sharing!

# May 1, 2008 10:54 AM

kevin dan said:

from wikipedia, Competency includes altitude and behavior as well, it's far more important than technical skills, IMHO.

Bo be good programmer in a team, altitude comes first.

# May 2, 2008 8:02 AM

John Haugeland said:

Apparently this got cross-posted to someone else's site.  I reformatted it for them; you are of course also welcome to it, since it's your content originally.

www.starling-software.com/.../programmer-competency-matrix.html

# February 24, 2009 12:48 PM

Soy Buen Programador ? said:

Pingback from  Soy Buen Programador ?

# July 28, 2009 2:05 AM

Soy Buen Programador ? | Chile-Internet.com said:

Pingback from  Soy Buen Programador ? | Chile-Internet.com

# July 28, 2009 5:39 AM

Adamantium said:

do not agree with levels in algorithms. things such as dynamic programming aren't more guru than classic sorts. for example, it's more difficult to understand quick sort than to use various optimization methods.

the same thing with NP-completeness - it doesn't take more effort to identify NP-problems than to handle collisions in hash table.

# September 6, 2009 5:16 PM

Programmer Competency Matrix – how to measure programming skill | Psychology of Programming said:

Pingback from  Programmer Competency Matrix – how to measure programming skill | Psychology of Programming

# September 28, 2009 2:08 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)