I worked with someone once who had a really sloppy/inconsistent code style, but the code he wrote was rock solid.
His subsequent (and current) job is now as a very well-known expert as as developer advocate for one of the big four tech companies.
You'd be surprised at what you find developers out there doing, the only good metric on a person being a good developer is writing fundamentally sound code. Literally nothing else matters.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the author puts forward two types of welders. One is the type that excels at really complex and difficult welds, but isn't very good at making simple welds in repetition. The other might get tunnel vision when trying to figure out an unusual weld, but has the discipline to produce consistent, flawless welds in great quantity.
It might be explained by what is know as Yerkes–Dodson law[1], which describes how performance increases with mental arousal up to a certain point then decreases. If different types of tasks correspond with different arousal for different people, then the type of welder or developer one is is orthogonal to their fundamental skill. Instead it would mean that the first type needs to cast the problem as something novel in order to gin up the necessary level of concentration to get the problem done, hence the rock solid code that has sloppy/inconsistent style.
It makes sense that a good advocate would be highly skilled, but the type who has difficulty with necessary work that seems mundane. In other workplaces this might be the person who seems to have low output, but gets their coworkers past their roadblocks.
The term Big Four originates in accounting where there actually are a specific set of four large, established companies.
For tech, I usually remember it as AmaGooBookSoft - Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Apple is sort of a hardware company so sometimes it is included and sometimes it is not.
I've always heard it as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Microsoft isn't very sexy to the typical developers that participate in the startup/Silicon Valley "scene" and its accompanying communities (HNews included).
Big four almost always includes google and facebook but the other two slots seem to vary a bit based on who is saying it. I've even seen companies like yahoo and twitter thrown in there.
His subsequent (and current) job is now as a very well-known expert as as developer advocate for one of the big four tech companies.
You'd be surprised at what you find developers out there doing, the only good metric on a person being a good developer is writing fundamentally sound code. Literally nothing else matters.