To be clear, I was referring to programming ability when I was referring to identity, not AI. It's sometimes hard for me to forget that you are not your code.
Yes I mean that too. I have no idea how you can "measure" programming ability. The whole concept confuses me. I've been coding since I was a kid and have contributed to FOSS and closed codebases. There's certainly programmers out there that I consider bad, but beyond that there's no way to measure how "good" someone is at coding. The fact that people can identify around their perception of programming skill is deeply confusing to me and makes these sorts of reactions even harder to understand.
Programmers are just as emotional as the next human, no matter how much they want to believe otherwise, so almost all of them (myself included) think they're better than average, which can't actually be true.
Skill is linked to prestige and loosely linked to pay, which gets linked back to prestige. Thus even without an actual measure of programming ability, if someone says "you couldn't program your way out of a paper bag", it's hard for most people not to feel insulted, linking back to prestige. Not everyone buys into that, or is impulsive enough to respond emotionally, of course, but it should at least make sense on a conceptual level.
