How to tell you’re a bad programmer:
1. You think you’re an awesome programmer.
2. But no one else has ever told you so.
3. You’ve never looked at old code you wrote and thought, “Ewwww! That is horrible code! What was I thinking???”
4. You’ve never looked at someone else’s code and thought, “Dang, whoever wrote this is a freaking genius.”
Note that this also works if you substitute <other profession> for “programmer,” and <output of other profession> for “code.”
If you don’t see growth, it probably ain’t happening. If you don’t see growth potential, it probably ain’t happening either.