Work with other great programmers. When you outgrow your current company, move to a better one. When you outgrow your current team, move to a better one.
(BTW, "beautiful, modular, maintainable code" is one skillset necessary to be a great programmer, and a relatively minor one at that. Much more important is knowing when to write beautiful, modular, maintainable code, and when to bang out a piece of shit that nobody will ever want to look at again, but will quickly prove or disprove a hypothesis and let you know whether an idea is worth pursuing.)
> When you outgrow your current company, move to a better one
Preferably one with a formal, rewarded mentoring system in place that is outside the management structure.
I'm sure they have this sort of thing at Google/Facebook/Apple, etc. as well, but at MSFT I spent a bunch of my time finding technical mentors --- mostly outside of my organization --- for my direct reports. Finding them is easy for people with < 7 years of experience, but once you have > 13 years of IC work (as more than five of my directs did!), it takes serious effort to both help you identify a direction that it would be worthwhile to grow in and then find somebody who can actually help with it.
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Work with other great programmers. When you outgrow your current company, move to a better one. When you outgrow your current team, move to a better one.
(BTW, "beautiful, modular, maintainable code" is one skillset necessary to be a great programmer, and a relatively minor one at that. Much more important is knowing when to write beautiful, modular, maintainable code, and when to bang out a piece of shit that nobody will ever want to look at again, but will quickly prove or disprove a hypothesis and let you know whether an idea is worth pursuing.)
> When you outgrow your current company, move to a better one
Preferably one with a formal, rewarded mentoring system in place that is outside the management structure.
I'm sure they have this sort of thing at Google/Facebook/Apple, etc. as well, but at MSFT I spent a bunch of my time finding technical mentors --- mostly outside of my organization --- for my direct reports. Finding them is easy for people with < 7 years of experience, but once you have > 13 years of IC work (as more than five of my directs did!), it takes serious effort to both help you identify a direction that it would be worthwhile to grow in and then find somebody who can actually help with it.