"Move jobs a few times, inherit some crappy application and look at the code that others write, that has done the opposite for me."

I remember when some of Microsoft's Windows code leaked I took a look and realized that these guys are just regular programmers like you and me. There was really no magic there.

I am sure there are brilliant programmers out there but often they work in a nicely defined environment they can actually control instead of having to deal for weeks with incompatibilities of several systems like many of us.