[stcredzero]

You know you're a good programmer if the things you build "just work."

How do you quantify, "just works?" For a large enough project, perfection, or even just getting pretty close to it, ends up being pretty expensive.

It should be near impossible to find flaws in your solutions.

I had a boss who declared he could find a bug in any page of code, so long as you let him lawyer the specs in great enough detail. Granted, we were working in a pretty complex domain, but as far as I could see, he was always right about that.

As Matt Easton keeps saying: "Context!"

Maybe the company you're working for finds it much more valuable to do lots of iterations so they can tinker with the product and keep refining it. In that case, it might be even better than "perfection" if the things you build mostly work, but that you can respond to change and bugfix requests quickly. (Without introducing regressions.)