"Programming ability" is something very vague. There are many domains of expertise. Dealing with networking, graphics, sound, threads, filesystems, embedded pl

"Programming ability" is something very vague. There are many domains of expertise. Dealing with networking, graphics, sound, threads, filesystems, embedded platforms, compilers, cryptography, operating systems (which is in itself another world), distributed systems, databases, drivers, high performance computing, machine learning, etc. Ask a senior network programmer to write you a shader and ask a graphics programmer to write you a production-strength multithreaded socket server... Ask a senior web designer to write you a compiler from scratch, and ask a senior compiler engineer to write you a responsive website that renders correctly on all browsers. Then, some programming abilities are rarer. There are more web developers than compiler engineers, the amount of jobs and the requirements for them are different. What I am trying to get at is that software development comes on many flavors and it's really hard to touch all those surfaces in your career.