NewsIs It OK to Be an 'Average' Developer?

Is It OK to Be an ‘Average’ Developer?

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Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the key developers of Django, gave a keynote address at the PyCon event during which he said that most programmers, including himself, are average, which is a good thing. He said that the industry has embraced the myth that developers are either great or terrible and that the best programmers are ten times as effective as the worst ones.

According to Kaplan-Moss, this myth is leading many good programmers to get out of the development business. “If the only options are to be amazing or terrible, it leads people to believe they must be passionate about their career, that they must think about programming every waking moment of their life,” he said. “If they take their eye off the ball even for a minute, they will slide right from amazing to terrible again. That leads people to be working crazy hours at work, to be constantly studying programming topics on their own time, and so on.”

A video of the keynote speech is available at the link below.

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