The red flag was this line in the blog that led to the questions: "If you can't answer the majority of the questions on these four papers, and you're working or intend to work as a software developer, you should ask yourself why".

This assumes an air of authority that the poster clearly cannot posses; that is, he does not have the right to judge whether someone is a valid software developer or not. Someone claiming this level of superiority seems to fit the personality type I described. Of course - I could well be wrong but that's what it sounded like to me.

Okay, so I agree that Colin's exam might be a bit too specific and that he might have phrased certain things poorly, i.e. "lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter". I think either his experiment will help him discover that "luck" (i.e. statistical distribution) doesn't lean the way he assumed or -- and this is more likely -- he'll obtain biased results because a lot of people will refrain from sending bad results.

That being said, I honestly prefer being judged by someone as accomplished as Colin Percival than hiding behind the attitude that we should not judge other people's abilities.

Let's face it, there's an abundance of downright bad and mediocre programmers. There aren't that many top-notch programmers, although each of us would love to think we're among that small group. This is what motivates us to speak out against any attempt to measure and assess abilities, especially if such an attempt is likely to rank us low.

I'm not ashamed to admit that, so far, I haven't been able to formulate an answer to more than 5 questions out of 10 he posted so far. While I freely admit that I don't consider myself to be a programmer in Colin's league, I think that's really beside the point here.

My knowledge is cached: what I work with all the time is easier to recall; what I've worked with or read about, but I'm not using all the time is not as easy; and, of course, there's a ton of things I don't know, have never worked with or read about. This means that I don't feel confident talking about B-trees without consulting Internet, but since I read about them previously, I do remember that they're a form of search trees and that databases use them (or their variations) a lot.

What's the point of this whole rant? Let's bottom-line it. I'm probably not as good as Colin overall and I'm definitely not as good as he is at what he, specifically, does. That doesn't mean I should feel threatened by his exam. Nor does it mean it has no validity whatsoever. Nor does it mean that Colin is "difficult to work with" or fits any specific personality type.

Those two claims about Colin's personality and intentions are what really bothered me about your reaction. I'm not a fan of straightforward ad-hominems, but I detest veiled ones even more.

Well said, but I'm still not inclined to send him my non-answers so that I can deliberately enjoy the feeling of inadequacy.

The author never judges whether someone is a valid software developer or not. He ASKS why people who work as software developers don't know the answer to (in his opinion) basic questions. Obviously, you would have to read the whole sentence and not just a part of it to understand the question asked here. For your convenience:

"If you can't answer the majority of the questions on these four papers, and you're working or intend to work as a software developer, you should ask yourself why — most likely you're either you're missing something you really should know, or you're lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter."

Not judging? "... most likely you're either missing something you really should know, or you're lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter."

Talk about reading just part of the sentence.

"not judging whether someone is a valid software developer or not" :) I didn't write that he wasn't judging.

"The author never judges"

yes you did...

Note that this refers to all four parts, not just the second. In this case one might lack detailed low-level knowledge of threading and a particular library used to do so on POSIX systems which may have no relation to performance in the other parts.

I liked the part of your comment where you cropped the rest of his sentence: "— most likely you're either you're missing something you really should know, or you're lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter."

I didn't crop that so as to take it out of context, I cropped it to keep the quote short. I don't agree with the bit you added either.