> Imagine Linus was employed by such employers; Your hero-worship is cute, but Linux succeeded precisely because a whole lot of people could read and understan

> Imagine Linus was employed by such employers; Your hero-worship is cute, but Linux succeeded precisely because a whole lot of people could read and understand and extend Linus's code. Furthermore, it was based on Minix, which was explicitly written with understandability in mind. That is great programming. > Show me also which new hire is able to maintain production-grade Perl/Scala/C++/JEE code easily? While it's true that not every programmer can read and maintain every other programmer's code, that's a bit of a strawman. The question is whether some easily hired programmer can maintain the code. If it requires someone with buckets more ability and experience than average, then it's too esoteric. I'll bet I can write more advanced code than you in a more difficult problem area, but I know a lot of my code needs to be maintainable by mid-level programmers (or below) so I write it in an appropriate style and try to explain it well. The OP was obviously incapable of doing that. If 11 is his only setting then - again - he's a poor programmer. It's possible to be passionate about programming without making it one big ego contest. If you want to write "clever" code, stick to TopCoder or HackerRank. If you want to write code that actually stands the test of time and benefits real people in real production, that's a whole different thing.