Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development
This is incredibly true.  I once turned 60kLoC of classic ASP in VBScript into about 20kLoC of python/django including templates.  And added a bunch of features that would have been impossible on the old code-base.<p>It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore).  So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and once that got rolling the job got even more boring.  Because it was a small company with a very long learning curve the owner didn't let people go, but instead kept them on so that he didn't have to hire and train new people as growth accelerated.<p>But with all the automation some slack found its way into the system and problems that had normally required me to stop working on my normal job and help put out fires now got handled by people who weren't stretched a little too thin.<p>Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability so we're stuck with the standard "write some algorithm on a whiteboard" type problems that are in no way indicative of real world capabilities.