

Ask HN: Who's the best programmer you ever worked with? - limist

To become better programmers, it's really helpful to have a sense of what's possible at higher levels of skill.  I'm curious to hear from HN'ers about master programmers you've personally met/worked with.  What impressed you?  What were they capable of?<p>Edit/update: At this point in my learning, people in software I consider $DEMI_DEITY-like (but have not met/worked with) include Peter Norvig (I have PAIP in front of me and think, He wrote this in his mid-thirties?  Gah!), Abelson and Sussman (authors of SICP), and some of the people who created the tools I use (Stallman for Emacs, GvR for Python, Hickey for Clojure).  As for personally-encountered greatness, there was one fellow at my last firm who later went on to be in the top 5 in the TopCoder competition, whose speed and ability to build the right abstractions were really impressive - that's vague, but at the time, I wasn't good enough to appreciate his skill in-depth either. :)
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byoung2
The best developer I've ever worked with was a freelancer named Alex in
Belarus who worked for $8/hour. I hired him back in 2007 to write a CMS for a
heavy data-driven site in PHP. The client needed to be able to upload multi-
sheet Excel spreadsheets with formulas, and have the results of the formulas
be written into the appropriate tables in the database. Alex did it in about 3
business days, and the code he wrote was hands down the cleanest object-
oriented PHP I have ever seen. The only bad part about working with someone in
Belarus is payment. It costs about $40 for a wire transfer, and you can't send
it directly to Belarus without the recipient having to fill out government
paperwork detailing where the money came from. We ended up sending wire
transfers in Euros to a bank in Latvia.

~~~
jarsj
Sad you would exploit someone like this. You could be a good mentor and advice
him on what his real asking rate should be and also pay him better, if he
really performed at a much higher level.

~~~
byoung2
I didn't come up with that rate...that's what he charges all of his clients.
It is double what I pay my team in the Philippines, and considering that the
average monthly wage in Belarus is under $150/month, it is quite generous (I
paid him a month's wage for 3 days' work).

Would you react the same way if a Silicon Valley company hired a developer in
rural Mississippi (the state with the lowest median salary) for $35,000 (the
median salary there) instead of hiring locally for $150,000? Is that
exploitation? Remember that the cost of living there is much lower, so he will
enjoy a much better standard of living on a lower salary.

~~~
jarsj
Please read this <http://aci.byelarus.com/index.php?p=6#wag-fig>. The average
wage for a good software developer is close to 1000$ (note that minimum wage
is $2.5 per month). You say he is awesome, that ways I will put his to 2000$.
He is consulting for you, so he should make 3X the money as his salary, that
comes to 30$ an hour.

The living cost thing is BS. You are confusing between "living cost" and "cost
for a good standard of living which everyone in US takes for granted". The
former is less, just because more people are very poor, eat once a day and
live like hell. I can bet cost for a comparable standard of living to US would
be super high.

Just because your developer is OK with living poorly doesn't mean he has to.
You can be fair and guide him to a better life.

~~~
sireat
This is veering dangerously off-topic, but if your contractor charges a set
rate, there is no moral obligation on your part to pay him more, especially
not 3x more.

If the wages were poor for the country that would be one thing, BUT $8/hour in
Belarus is a good salary. That is $1080 per 160hours worked a month. It
actually would let him have a good standard of living.

Of course one could argue that the developer should be charging $12 or $16 an
hour but that is his business.

What one could do next time, is do a fixed price project. If he is very good
AND fast, he would increase his earnings.

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AmberShah
Actually worked with would be <http://benrady.com/>, <http://grack.com/blog/>,
and a few other people who don't have online presences.

Seen in person but not worked with would be <http://twitter.com/venkat_s> and
<http://www.nealford.com/>.

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karanbhangui
Jason Mirra from <http://addepar.com> \- knows Java like no other. I think he
was teaching at CMU when he was still in highschool.

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jonshea
<http://spinning-yarns.org/michael/>

