In my experience, even programmers are poor judges of good quality of code. Usually the criteria they are using to evaluate quality is: "Can I do what I want to do quickly?" This tends to boil down pretty quickly to "Is the code similar to code I've worked on recently?" Understanding the long term consequences of your actions is pretty tough and the ground keeps shifting under your feet. In that environment, having someone else evaluate your performance is really difficult. A manager who isn't actually working on the same code you are working on has absolutely no chance.

Lately, however, I've been trying to shift my approach to design when doing paid work: I try to make things that seem like they should be easy, easy. This is quite challenging in itself, but it's subtly different than trying to write high quality code. My goal is not so much highest possible throughput, or even programming ease. It's to make the process of programming less surprising to the paying customer. Of course, most paying customers have expectations far above what I could possibly achieve, but I see this has allowing myself room to improve.

I believe that if you are able to consistently achieve a result of "projects with this person tend to have fewer problems than projects without this person", it will translate into more $$$.

Yes, I'm always extremely wary of programmers who claim they advance so fast in the art that code they wrote in the last year or two is "garbage". It's more likely that they are just no longer familiar with that old code.

Still when I look at my old code and I see the better approaches I could have taken, it makes me think about the fact that my skills have grown

Yeah, being able to recognise the garbage I wrote yesterday is an increase in learning. It doesn't necessarily imply that I won't write different garbage today ;-)

> I believe that if you are able to consistently achieve a result of "projects with this person tend to have fewer problems than projects without this person", it will translate into more $$$.

Bingo.

It's not much about relationship with $$$.

It's about how we could improve our life as a developer in general.

I guess we are motivated by different things.

What nonregular job do you do? What kind of code do you deal with, for what kinds of customers? If you're a freelancer or consultant, how often do you end up revisiting code that you write a year or more later?

I sell my own software.

Does your software have a website?