[no_wave]

I don't think this is difficult, but I agree that it is rare. There is very little pressure encouraging people to become one of these programmers. I'm one of them, but it's difficult to actually leverage this into a higher salary unless you got involved with a larger company straight out of college. The interview process doesn't expose this, and unless you write a hit open-source application there isn't any way to prove it.

Instead, employers - even technical people who interview you - play buzzword bingo, indicating that you would have been better off spewing new frameworks into your codebase unnecessarily. The personal incentives for a programmer are completely misaligned with the actual interests of the business.

The approach that would incentivize this behavior would involve giving raises to people who write the sort of code you want to see, but instead raises often come from dazzling strangers who don't know the long-term consequences of your code (ie, getting a higher offer and asking for a raise).

[pm90]

There doesn't seem to be a way for a company to evaluate the "goodness" of your code in a meaningful way. And even if they did, you will NOT get a raise without asking for it. OTOH, there are those, like you mention, who will leverage other job offers to get a raise and such...so the only solution seems to be for those who write the good code to engage in similar tactics, regardless of the disdain they might have for them.