[jakejake]

I've found that just about everybody, myself included, thinks they're at least a good, if not great programmer. Obviously a lot of us are wrong!

I tend to think that being great can be a relative term as well. There's different needs. A great programmer who is a genius at coming up with innovations can't always focus to actually get any real work done. A programmer who isn't very creative may plow through tasks like a steamroller. One may be great at intuitive designs, another is great at hard-core algorithms. Which one is the greatest? Depends on what job they're supposed to be doing. Of course a terrible programmer can wreck any of these scenarios.

[mightybyte]

You're spot on about different needs. I used to work for a guy who was a genius at managing programmers and providing an environment for them to thrive (at least he did that for me). He once told me that for an innovative multi-year software project, he needed a small team of really good programmers to spend several years building and refining the core system (on R&D dollars). Then, several years down the road when the contract dollars started coming in, he'd need a much bigger group of average programmers to handle all the humdrum tasks of moving the right bits to the right places, supporting the right formats and protocols, etc. He understood that the average programmers wouldn't be capable of the former, and the great programmers wouldn't enjoy the latter. It was a significant realization for me.