As I have pointed out before I have seen on first hand the difference between someone who is great and someone who is filling out the blanks. This is from a few

As I have pointed out before I have seen on first hand the difference between someone who is great and someone who is filling out the blanks. This is from a few years ago: The "10x" consultant would delete hundreds of lines of code and keep the functionality. He would rewrite things and make them simpler. And in between he was helping the rest of us, explain architecture and generally make sure we were able to follow. On the other hand I have seen other consultants, who were definitely smart[1], who would still do things like: Use tiles (a templating framework for java/struts) to implement authorization. (Cleaning up this fell on me. : ) Add style tags to the body of the page (once the designer found and fixed this it solved all the perceived performance problems we had.) [1]: If you had seen that code you would have agreed. It was some kind of weird artwork :-/ It worked perfect but every little change took full concentration, a significant amount of time and added to templates spanning hundreds of loc.