Depends upon what is programming? I think it's more like painting. Are you good at painting? How can we define it? If you know to hold a brush you are probably

Depends upon what is programming? I think it's more like painting. Are you good at painting? How can we define it? If you know to hold a brush you are probably a painter. Are the best artists that get paid more? Or is the ones that are at the right place at the right time? Back to programming, I feel that web development gets more credit, and as a web developer I can say that most of the development is just boilerplate configuration, made complicated by layers upon layers of unwanted but unavoidable complexity. On the other hand system programmers and game developers do more hardcore programming stuff, but may not be as much recognised outside their closed community. So in other words depending upon the domain, a good programmer might mean a person who can figure out the configuration better and keep things nice and tidy (read 'standard') while at some other domains it might mean hardcore analytical capability and number crunching..