Reg Braithwaite post about How to make programming hard for yourself. He makes several interesting comments that ring true with me. I've worked with several people who meet the "people that consider my hard problems to be recreational diversions" comment, and though they are phenomenally smart and can indeed tackle the hardest of the hard problems, (I feel that) they find it hard to produce code that is of a high quality consistently. Then, there are those people, who are naturally smart enough to tackle the hard problems yet are also able to produce good quality code on a day-to-day basis. There would only be about 5-10% of developers who fall into this bucket, and getting the chance to work with them is mind blowing. There is nothing better for your career development than to be thrown in the deep end with a bunch of people that know more about everything than you do. Indeed Dave Hoover's Be The Worst apprenticeship pattern embodies this idea. I'm currently working on a project with several people that fall into this category. There's nothing like a dose of reality to keep an ego in check!
On a similar note, Damien Katz shows us the Signs You're a Crappy Programmer (and don't know it). I don't agree with all of these, the 20 lines of code one especially. We spoke about this at work today, and while they're all "magic" numbers, they really force you to think hard about your design. I heard a podcast by David Heinemeier Hansson once that talked about how being under constraints you may not like forces you to be creative (he was referring to Rails). I think length is one of those occasions.
