You don't necessarily get them at high pay grades, either. I know people making fat salaries who truly can't manage to write anything decent, it's all a big JS monstrosity with 500 MB of broken dependencies and six build tools that all jump major versions every eight weeks.

Salary has long since been disconnected from skill, ever since cheap money flooded the industry, and easier abstractions made it seem like "everyone can code". Perhaps "fog a mirror" shouldn't be the only programmer criterion.