You're looking at the top of the bottom -- at the people who excel at programming tasks so undemanding that they can be solved largely by copying code from the

You're looking at the top of the bottom -- at the people who excel at programming tasks so undemanding that they can be solved largely by copying code from the internet and modifying it slightly. Now imagine one of these "top programmers" trying to write something like -- and I'm pulling this out of a hat -- Redis. It's a database that stores the entire dataset in memory, has a handful of useful data structures (e.g. lists, sets), and lets you do a bunch of operations on them via a network. It supports master-slave replication. It can persist to disk either by periodically flushing the current state or by writing a log of all commands. It can handle very large numbers of open connections. It's extremely fast, and widely used. Can you imagine the looks of frustration on your colleagues' faces when they try to google how to make something like that, and their searches fail to produce usable code? Not all problems are like this, but many are. Real top programmers tend to wind up with tasks that they can't just google. Don't lose hope!