[grosjona]

I would argue that there is very little correlation between a programmer's perceived skill level and their actual skill level. I know some programmers who used to be considered rock stars because they created a lot of popular libraries and modules at an opportune moment in history but years layer it turns out that their code was full of security vulnerabilities.

Also some programmers are highly optimized for certain things to the point that they're terrible at everything else - I know programmers who are really great when it comes to writing performant code, but they are unwilling to make compromises to make that code more readable.