Mature Programmer
Management's definition of MatureProgrammer:
- Knows when to say "I don't know", but follows it up with "I can figure it out".
Developer's definition of MatureProgrammer
All right, I'll start it off here:
- Secure enough in his/her talents to be able to give reasonable estimates of the time it will take to finish a task.
- Secure enough in experience to be able to say when he/she is too busy to take on any more tasks without sacrificing quality.
- Skilled in being able to quickly resolve what he/she does *NOT* know in order to solve the problem at hand. (Ex. knows where the RFCs are found in order to know what "421 connection dropped by remote host" means.)
- Knowledgeable of the fact that management and customers rely on his/her particular expertise and decent enough to not rape them for those answers.
(More could, of course, be written along these lines, but I'll stop for now.) -- BillZimmerly
- Knows that ANY solution he/she implements alone is not the perfect solution and can be improved through communication with others.
- Maintains a ProgrammersNotebook. (Mine extends back to November, 1986.) -- BillZimmerly
- Is a grandmaster at Googling and has links to Experts Exchange, Dev Guru, etc.
- When encountering an unknown programming domain, googles to find relevant sample code, assimilates the information and incorporatees and adapts it to the task at hand.