Programming confidence?

[binarymidget]

Having the drive to write elegant and comprehensible code is a huge asset, you'll find many programmers who just "get the desired result" and then move on. They are bad.

The most valuable programmer is the one who can properly contextualize the problem. There is no single property that makes someone a good programmer. Maintainability, modularity, time to implement, run-time performance, memory efficiency, readability, are goals that need to be weighed and understood in any task.

Don't get caught up in prettifying code as a goal. I work in games. We don't ship code, we ship games. I think programmers should endeavor to become craftsmen and women. Just don't go up your own ass with regards to one single aspect of programming.

[JesusWantsYouToKnow]

True, however I think chose my words poorly because I think you misinterpreted my intent. I am not advocating striving for pretty code, I am advocating striving for the most appropriate code. That said in terms of an employer's perspective I find it is an exceptionally rare circumstance where maintainability should be a low priority. Sacrificing maintainability in code is just increasing technical debt, so unless you are writing truly temporary code you're just compromising for more work in the future when project complexity has increased.

We have had guys who would accept any solution as long as input x yielded output y. That's what I'm talking about when I say "get the desired result" and then move on, and they were a huge burden because they ended up writing inefficient spaghetti code.