Any article stating one trait as being most important for anything is probably being hyperbolically reductive, but in this case it's particularly painful becaus

Any article stating one trait as being most important for anything is probably being hyperbolically reductive, but in this case it's particularly painful because "judgement" is absolutely meaningless. Every single thing every person does requires judgement, and if you don't have it you'll probably get hit by a bus before you have a chance to get a job. What this article is really arguing against are early-adopter developers who chase every new fad for its own sake and prioritize their own amusement over the best solution at hand. But this says about how good the developer is, only how good their actual contribution to your company will be relative to their potential. A shit developer can do their best but it still won't measure up to a great developer's trend-chasing effort. Now even assuming some base level of competence, there are many different mindsets and personalities that lend themselves to different types of programming. I could go on and on about specific skills but we're mostly programmers here so I'll just hint at it: debugging skills, low-level skills, architecture skills, analyst (business requirements) skills, hci skills, modeling skills, clairvoyance, luck. All of these things have varying degrees of importance depending on the job and team at hand, and some combination of them will make someone the best developer for some specific job. But if you find my answer too wishy-washy and you want specifics about what makes a great developer I'll boil it down to two things. First, to achieve competence as a developer, one needs have the tenacity and logical thinking to debug any issue no matter how arcane. Second, to achieve greatness one needs to be able to comprehend the entire problem space in such a way as to account for many more factors than an average developer let alone a non-technical person could ever hold in their head at once, and have the ability to translate those constraints into a system which is at once easier to understand and more elegant than the vast majority of competing solutions.