Top all-time · #2977
Sijin Joseph
Personal blog · sijinjoseph.comprogrammingcareer
Sijin Joseph's personal blog at sijinjoseph.com covers programming and career. Since 2013, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 15 of 33 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sijin Joseph's Programmer Competency Matrix, a general, non-language-specific checklist of programming skills, to self-assess, hire, and choose what to learn next.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 33 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sijin Joseph — engineer turned technology leader in Greater Boston. Writing on software, teams, and tools.
Most-linked posts?
- Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)21 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2013-06-19
- Programmer Competency Matrix5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-11-27
What Hacker News says?
The programmer competency matrix: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “What Makes a Senior Software Developer?”Submitted Programmer Competency Matrix (2016) as a story · 203 points
HN discussionThis perfectly puts an handle on what is happening: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “On Secretly Terrible Engineers”Submitted Programmer Competency Matrix as a story · 76 points
HN discussionOrthogonal content that inspired me to finally get serious about learning functional programming, and led me to Erlang: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ Sure, it's flawed, but isn't everything?
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on “Becoming a Better Software Developer: A Handbook on Personal Performance”Submitted Programmer Competency Matrix as a story · 36 points
HN discussionFor identifying strengths and weaknesses: "Programmer Competency Matrix": - http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ - https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/ - https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist ... from: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/software-development#compu... ) > How do I get good enough to consistently do work worth writing books about? - These are great reads: "The Ar…
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on “Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?”Submitted Programmer Competency Matrix as a story · 17 points
HN discussionK12 CS Framework (ACM, Code.org, [...]) https://k12cs.org/ Computing Curricula 2020 (ACM, IEEE,) http://www.cc2020.net/ Official SAT Practice (College Board, Khan Academy) https://www.khanacademy.org/sat http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development#... (TODO: add link to cc2020 draft) Programmer Competency Matrix: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ , https://competency-checklist.apps…
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on “Ask HN: Something like Khan Academy but full curriculum for grade schoolers?”Submitted Programmer Competency Matrix as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI can tell you something that has worked very well for me: 1. Grab a sub-set of the competencies that you NEED to have https://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ 2. From that subset, setup questions for the different levels For example, for the VCS competency we have: source code version control Lvl 1 questions: "- What is the difference between Git and Github? - What is a branch? - What is a pull or merg…
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on “Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs”Not only that, but they sometimes even yield False-Positives, like in my experience: I have been in charge of smallish engineering teams for around 5 years (as head of engineering for different startups). In the past, I used to actually do the 3-HackerRank-timed question as a 1st automated filter. The problem is that, by testing for "fundamentals" (algorithms and data structure really) I skewed my hiring pool to the…
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on “Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs”This is spot on. Obviously there is a lot to dislike about performance reviews, but big companies need some process to determine who gets a raise, who gets promoted, etc. Although flawed, performance reviews are the best process for that. I think the things that companies can do to make them better are: 1. Have well established career frameworks (aka career ladders) ahead of time. These should be as detailed as poss…
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on “Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)”Things seem aimed a bit more at designers than developers. If it was to be more developer-centric it would definitely need some references to things like GoF patterns, dependency injection, code reuse, testing/testability, loose coupling, etc. Someone could have a perfect score on this and potentially be terrible, even at web development specifically. If someone had a perfect score on the programmers competency matr…
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on “Dungeons and Developers”This appears to be a refresh of a 2008 post? He originally links to it from this post: http://sijinjoseph.com/2008/04/30/programmer-competency-matr... Also of note is that he explicitly says it is biased towards non-visual (I think he means non-GUI) developers.
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on “Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)”There are many ways to quantify how good of a programmer you are. - You can compare yourself to other developers (there are plenty of qualities to compare) - You can review your statistics (commit frequency, average file size, accuracy of time estimates) - You can compete in programming competitions - You can evaluate yourself using the Programmer Competency Matrix: https://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matr…
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on “Ask HN: As a programmer, how do you know if you're a good one or not?”> I think this is also because no one really teaches you how to interview. Giving multiple interviews doesn't, at least IMHO make you knowledgeable to be on the other side. This is something that I have ameliorated in my teams in the following way: When an Engineer is going to start interviewing people he goes through the following process: 0. Before starting, we provide some guidance on what we look in interviews a…
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on “Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013)”I use Sijin Joseph's Programmer Competency Matrix[0] as a guide. [0]: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Ask HN: How do I test that I'm improving as a software developer?”This is the best resource that I could find on this topic, very clear: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Ask HN: How do you define a junior developer?”The fact that this list has been around for a while doesn't make any less inaccurate and massively biased. That's basically a milder version of that "Indian Programmer Competency Matrix" - both are notable for how frequently they are plugged into conversations and not for their actual content. [0] http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Bjarne Stroustrup Discusses C++”I find the following matrix extremely useful for that purpose : http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ It is not specific to any language and it gives a grade on many many relevant aspects of everyday programming (IDE, automatic build, framework, data structure...)
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on “Ask HN: How do you recognize a great programmer to hire?”I'm not sure what "fit to be a developer" means. People (with very few exceptions) are not born with labels that say "able to write software professionally" or "not able to write software professionally". Try to understand what has prevented you from landing jobs so far. Go through http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ to determine what you lack, and then work on improving those. (Not saying that that…
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on “Ask HN: When is it time to give up on becoming a developer?”> For identifying strengths and weaknesses: "Programmer Competency Matrix": > - http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ > - https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/ > - https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
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on “Ask HN: Do you consider yourself to be a good programmer?”This one is much better: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ It provided me with practical, straight-forward and helpful advice on where to focus to improve my programming skills.
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on “How Good Are You At Programming”FYI - http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Ask HN: Which Skill's Make a Full-Stack Developer?”The Programmer Competency Matrix is a reasonable [and general] way of looking at the issue: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ On the other hand, one of the most influential essays I've read on Hacker News: https://sivers.org/below-average raises the question of why would anyone not want to be a beginner. Norvig puts it perhaps more palatably: http://norvig.com/21-days.html Good luck.
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on “Ask HN: How to know when you're intermediate level?”Can't say I learned much useful from getting (most of) a CS degree. I dropped out to get a programming job, which was much more useful :) So good news: you didn't necessarily miss very much. Get a basic algorithms/data structures book and skim it, and you're good to go. But like all programmers there's lots more to learn, and mostly you will learn it on the job from coworkers. Things like testing and API design and…
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on “Ask HN: What do I miss as a self-taught developer?”There is a nice competency matrix for that: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Am I still a Junior Developer?”I found this to be quite interesting - the Programmer Competency Matrix. It's hard to be honest with yourself with these things, but worth a look anyway: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Ask HN: how to gauge my skill as a programmer ”http://ask.metafilter.com/235568/How-do-you-know-if-you-are-... http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/41473/how-can... http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
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on “Ask HN: how to gauge my skill as a programmer ”
