The point of a lot of tef's writing and speaking isn't that he's a bad programmer, but that he is tearing a large hole in people who claim to be great programmers. tef is actually a pretty good programmer; good enough Heroku employ him.

It's dry British humour: "I'm a terrible programmer, but that's okay, because programming is terrible, the whole industry is terrible, and pretty much everyone is terrible at programming, especially if they are lecturing you about how to do it because they are probably full of quite a large amount of shit; now let's try and do better".

If you are used to chest-thumping evangelical "rah rah, everything is awesome" sermons, the British cynical attitude of "no, this is all shit, and I'm awful too, but maybe, if we make a nice big cup of tea, and thought about it a bit more, we might be able to be a bit less rubbish" sounds grating. The opposite certainly is true.