The best analogy for programming is construction.

A house can meet your basic specifications of keeping you warm and dry, and you may not care about the size of the nails the carpenter used--until the house blows down in a strong wind.

Likewise, a software application can meet your basic specifications, yet be poorly written, un-maintainable code that is prone to bugs. That an application works says nothing about the quality of the underlying code. Trust me on this one.

I have high standards of code construction. Code should be readable, maintainable and expandable. It shouldn't be any more complicated than it needs to be. It should use standard modules and reusable components wherever possible.

You may not care about all of these details, but you should probably hire someone who does.