In my recent blog posting "The Secrets to Becoming a Great Programmer" I discuss a couple of characteristics of great programmers. You can read about those characteristics at
The Secrets to Becoming a Great Programmer
What other characteristics make a programmer great? Do you agree with my assessment?
jacobbeningo. Unfortunately, some companies don't understand the difference and outsource to places where wages are very low to the "code monkeys". For my own company, we found that though wages might seem lower, the overhead to recheck their work is very high. The code is often non-structured compared to the better trained engineers.
That is a problem that I have seen in the past. I think that sometimes I prefer to generalize or abstract certain concepts. This has been an interesting conversation.