In sports, for most people, staistics are meaningless. I climb 5.10 okay... am I good climber? I'm not world class, but I do stuff that I like.
I've been an academic. I know I was a bad one, because in retrospect I had to step away from a lot of my ideas and research... at the end, I didn't see value in the projects I was doing.
As a programmer... who knows. I don't usually have a lot of problems coming back to old projects and building new stuff. I don't have a lot of systems I put together breaking down and requiring work. I know that there are at least 10-20 other folks think I am good, because I've solved things for them and they have told me I am good.
But I just build CRUD apps, admin some linux servers, and put together custom code for WordPress. Some folks would look at that pile of day-to-day tech cruft and say that I am not even a "real" programmer (even if I do know how to implement a buffer with TTL and I've written toy mouse drivers and serial implementations).
All that comes down to this: it really comes down to you and your goals, and what you want to get out of your life. You are the only measure of what you consider to be a good person. Most of us are sane enough to peg that estimation to feedback we get from other people. But fundamentally the metrics are still our own.
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This is a general problem.
In sports, for most people, staistics are meaningless. I climb 5.10 okay... am I good climber? I'm not world class, but I do stuff that I like.
I've been an academic. I know I was a bad one, because in retrospect I had to step away from a lot of my ideas and research... at the end, I didn't see value in the projects I was doing.
As a programmer... who knows. I don't usually have a lot of problems coming back to old projects and building new stuff. I don't have a lot of systems I put together breaking down and requiring work. I know that there are at least 10-20 other folks think I am good, because I've solved things for them and they have told me I am good.
But I just build CRUD apps, admin some linux servers, and put together custom code for WordPress. Some folks would look at that pile of day-to-day tech cruft and say that I am not even a "real" programmer (even if I do know how to implement a buffer with TTL and I've written toy mouse drivers and serial implementations).
All that comes down to this: it really comes down to you and your goals, and what you want to get out of your life. You are the only measure of what you consider to be a good person. Most of us are sane enough to peg that estimation to feedback we get from other people. But fundamentally the metrics are still our own.