You mean getting used to other programmers' idiosyncrasies and deciphering them?

You will dissuade them from ever taking up this profession with that attitude.

I was attracted to this because of the opportunity to create things, not because other people wrote stuff and now I have to read it.

I disagree thats what the GP meant. Too often people just hack away without truly understanding what they are doing. Then you end up with trying a million things until finding something that works and not knowing why it works. If you take a few minutes to read the documentation and understanding why you are doing something rather than "I tried it and it worked" you will become a better programmer.

The Perl Cookbook was one of the best technical books I read in my early career, specifically because it said, "No, look, there are about four ways to do this right, and here are their tradeoffs" for multiple problems. Articulating that concept, and the ability to look at alternative implementations that each might be good, helped me a lot.