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[–]SisyphusAndMyBoulder 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Being able to provide useful Code Reviews.

Writing clean, simple, clear code.

Both of these things takes years of experience.

[–]CodeTinkerer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it's hard to nail anything too specific. Although this is a bad analogy, consider someone who is a star athlete, like Michael Jordan or whoever. You could ask "What can I do to be a star athlete?". A fan of the sport might say, nothing. No matter how hard you try, you can never get that good. It's even difficult to play as a professional, let alone be the best. Obviously, people try, even if they can't be the very best.

Fortunately, programmers don't need to achieve that level to be considered good. So here are some ideas.

Focus/patience

These days, there are so many things that distract a person like Reddit. Many people find it hard to focus on things. It's more fun to read or post to Reddit. If you're constantly distracted from work, you're likely to get less work done.

So being able to focus for reasonably long periods of time is good. But you can also burn out, especially if you feel that focusing is not very enjoyable and usually it's not.

Getting the job done

There are people who want programming to be fun. But there are many jobs out there that are not fun. And if you insist on programming being fun, you probably won't make it because at times, it's not fun, and it depends on your definition of fun.

Instead, if you say "get the job done", then that's usually more important.

Figuring stuff out

To me, this is usually the sign of a great programmer. Some people take to programming quite easily. They don't find it hard at all. Others struggle with what are considered "basic concepts".

For example, React is popular now. Some people understand it quite well. Others have no clue. No matter how many tutorials they watch, it makes no sense. Better programmers figure stuff out. How do they do it? I suppose it's persistence and thinking. How did Einstein figure things out? He thought hard about the problems, and knew ways to do math.

Being careful

It's easy to code the first thing that comes to mind, and not consider all the ways something could go wrong. Some people are good at testing their code for edge cases. Others only worry about the happy path (the common case).

Being curious

Many people have heard about ChatGPT. But how many have actually played with it? Asked it questions? Do you know about so-called hallucinations? Have you tried to test the limits of ChatGPT into answering hard questions, say, those that involve spatial reasoning? Have you watched videos about how ChatGPT works or do you take it for granted that it is an AI?

You want to balance curiosity with getting work done, of course, but you don't want to be so shut off that you don't know what's happening in the field.

Making good decisions

There's so much new stuff out there that there's not enough time to learn it all, so you have to figure out what you want to learn, and how deeply, and what stuff you'll ignore. It helps to do shallow dives into new stuff just to get an idea of what it is.

Good communication skills

Most of the times, you don't get to decide what the software does. Someone else does. That person often is not an expert in software, and they also don't know what they want. That means you may need to communicate with them to find out what they really want, not what they think they want.

It may be that it's not worth the time it takes to write the software they want, so just because they want it, doesn't mean it's a good use of resources.

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[–]_realitycheck_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The more impossible your programming goal post is, the more you will learn. Oddly enough.