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Discussion on: Playing catch-up

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Daniel Cherubini

The only measurement of a good engineer is by ones peers. If you can do a good job your colleagues will be the ones who are in a position to make a judgment call on if your a good engineer or not.

It's not twitter followers
It's not GitHub stars.
It's not how many open source libraries/packages/etc you have.

It's how much you contribute in your workplace. If you are making life easier for your coworkers then you're a good engineer. There's no other really good mark of skill.

I've seen some new devs who contribute and I've seen old devs who are useless. Age or experience isn't really a factor.

The only time experience comes into play is depth of knowledge, but that doesn't make a good dev. Wanting to help everyone around oneself with creative solutions that solve the problem well, secure, and fast... this is what makes a good dev.

Those who use their giant popular repos, or massive twitter followings, are self serving and perhaps don't actually contribute well in teams. I've met a few of these people. Not to suggest everyone who fits into this category is this type of person, but I've seen it a little too often. They are strong personalities, whom usually have strong opinions, and refuse to think outside their knowledge base.

Junior devs bring ideas to teams. That's why we hire junior devs in teams.