[reduxredacted]

they are often good programmers but not very good software engineers

Agreed. There was a gentleman I had the pleasure of working with years ago who wrote an application in Perl that literally performed an inventory of every switch, router and attached device and did so faster than anything I've seen commercially available.

He quit on negative terms (I can't remember the specifics) and upon examining his code, it was FORTRAN in Perl (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/04/you-can-write-fortr...).

He was a brilliant individual. Myself and a few of his coworkers enjoyed bouncing ideas off of him, often is areas outside of his expertise. When he didn't have an outright "try this instead", he knew what questions to ask to get us mere mortals to think about the solution differently.

If I didn't know the man better, I would say that he intentionally obfuscated his own code. But I get the impression after reviewing several of his projects that he simply thought differently and that expression was displayed in his work. Unfortunately, it made him an island and all of his projects a one-man effort. His manager didn't know good code from bad and didn't require documentation or review. Nobody could support this guy's code except this guy.