I hear you, and would add that, in addition to solving a problem, I (personally) like code to be elegant -- neat, clear, and intuitive. What I run into a good bit is code where the coder went to great effort to do something in one confusing line that could have been done in three non-confusing lines. To me, that's wrong and makes future work tough and time consuming. Then again, I work on web sites. I'm not trying to launch the space shuttle or something where every millionth of a second might be super important. :-)