<story><title>Being a &quot;Great Coder&quot; and 10000 Hours</title><url>http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/d52aff66b951b460</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>singular</author><text>There really is a meme here I think, and it relates to ego.&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I definitely do think there is truth in massive variations between programmers, though I personally think that is a combination of a small pre-requisite talent (the ability to code at all, which I think a surprisingly small amount of people have - simply a genetically determine brain configuration), and mostly attitude + hard work.&lt;p&gt;For example, I took part in the recent Stanford AI class, though not about programming specifically, I was utterly down-heartened when I heard they sent out those &apos;send me your CVs you clever people!&apos; emails to the top 1k students, it just made me feel like a lot of people were taking part in order to participate in a &apos;look how much cleverer I am than you&apos; pissing match.&lt;p&gt;That kind of things ruins the collaborative &apos;learning for the joy of learning&apos; side of things and has a tendency to make the whole thing into a sort of nasty elitist thing. I really wish they hadn&apos;t done that (N.B. I did fine on the course - 98.7% - so this isn&apos;t sour grapes).&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem with anything like this is the idea that &apos;here is some test of inherent intelligence - I am far better than you so you are inherently unable to do this thing&apos; which is just the biggest barrier to actually trying to do something - if you think you inherently suck or at least are simply mediocre, your motivation to do that thing is severely reduced.&lt;p&gt;or perhaps I&apos;m just ranting/projecting here :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Being a &quot;Great Coder&quot; and 10000 Hours</title><url>http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/d52aff66b951b460</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>josephmosby</author><text>It&apos;s important to also continue striving for self-improvement. If you hit a level where you&apos;ve stopped wanting to learn more and started wanting to simply compare yourself to others, of course you&apos;ll look good by comparison - but you&apos;re not getting any better.&lt;p&gt;I started programming using Python. When I started, I wanted to understand the &quot;feel&quot; of Python programming, and that was all my mind could comprehend. Now that I have a decent smattering of Python knowledge, I now realize I don&apos;t have a total grasp of transfer protocols and I should probably learn a lower-level C language as well. I started off not knowing one thing, now I have added two more.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m still a better programmer, but now I realize I&apos;m clueless about even more stuff than I was before.</text></comment>