In my experience, even programmers are poor judges of good quality of code. Usually the criteria they are using to evaluate quality is: "Can I do what I want t

In my experience, even programmers are poor judges of good quality of code. Usually the criteria they are using to evaluate quality is: "Can I do what I want to do quickly?" This tends to boil down pretty quickly to "Is the code similar to code I've worked on recently?" Understanding the long term consequences of your actions is pretty tough and the ground keeps shifting under your feet. In that environment, having someone else evaluate your performance is really difficult. A manager who isn't actually working on the same code you are working on has absolutely no chance. Lately, however, I've been trying to shift my approach to design when doing paid work: I try to make things that seem like they should be easy, easy. This is quite challenging in itself, but it's subtly different than trying to write high quality code. My goal is not so much highest possible throughput, or even programming ease. It's to make the process of programming less surprising to the paying customer. Of course, most paying customers have expectations far above what I could possibly achieve, but I see this has allowing myself room to improve. I believe that if you are able to consistently achieve a result of "projects with this person tend to have fewer problems than projects without this person", it will translate into more $$$.