Practice

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers, and one of the great points he makes is the huge impact practice makes in an individual's ability to become a master of his specialty. While I don't necessarily agree that The Rule of 10,000 Hours applies to all fields, it is definitely on the right track. It doesn't matter if it is skiing, painting, playing hockey or coding; the human brain and nervous system require some amount of continuous repetition to really master a technique. I haven't figured out what the magic number of hours to become a master is for programming (I'm not sure there is one), but there is no question the best programmers I have come across are not math geniuses or naturally gifted in understanding some esoteric computer technology. They are talented because of the intriguing and diverse projects they have had the opportunity to work on.

They are masters because they continuously practice.

Now, Joel might argue a great programmer also needs to be able to think at multiple levels of abstraction, and they can't have gone to a Javaschool, and they need to understand the nuts and bolts of C and low level programming. Let's assume you have all this and are on your way to greatness at the next new challenging startup. Is the project you are working on forcing you to break out of your comfort zone with C (remember you didn't go to Javaschool)? Are you learning something new? When other people in your department mention the work they are doing do you think, "Wow that sounds really interesting too?"

A lot of companies are not interested in solving something in a new way. They need a program written to take data from location A and move it to location B, and they need it done in a month. It doesn't matter if the program is particularly fast or if you developed some new design pattern to generate an elegant solution. What matters is that your boss can tick off your program's completion on his Gantt chart, and he can report the project is on schedule! If you are on this type of project, you are not practicing. You are buying your time until the next mundane program is needed. Except this time they need it to take that data you so carefully moved to location B and move it back to A. (Why did we move it to B to begin with?!)

Find a project that is challenging. Diversify. Practice. Computer science is too fast an evolving field to spend even 6 months of your life not learning. Yes, there is a lot of white noise, but there are also a lot of gems being discovered. There are also plenty of other companies that are looking for people that can write faster programs and do so with elegant solutions.