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?

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. :)

[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 → byoung2]

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 → jarsj]

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 → byoung2]

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 → jarsj]

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.

[byoung2 → jarsj]

The average wage for a good software developer is close to 1000$

From your link;

A good computer specialist or programmer who still has to stay in the country will do the job for $250 - 300 per month

At $8/hr, in a month he would make $1408 (22 business days/month)

[lachyg → byoung2]

100% agree with this. It's all relative. It's completely based on cost of living. In my opinion.

[lachyg → byoung2]

Does Alex have a contact address :-)?

[grep → byoung2]

Where do you find good developers in Philippines? They are 10x cheaper but they are 10x worse and take 10x more time. I'd like to know your opinion on that.

[byoung2 → grep]

I've mentioned it several times on HN...I happened to get lucky on my first try with the Philippines. I worked with Alex in Belarus, but it was just too expensive to send money there. I've had varying degrees of success with developers in India (so-so work, terrible communication) and Pakistan (so-so communication, terrible work) before I tried the Philippines.

The consensus on the Philippines seems to be that they aren't as good as developers in Eastern Europe or India. I don't know how anyone could paint a whole country with such a broad brush. In reality, it's because Filipinos have such strong English skills compared to Eastern Europe or India that outsourcing companies swoop them up first and pay high salaries, leaving few competent developers for small businesses. This is especially true in Manila/Makati.

I found my team by posting in the job section on http://www.philweavers.net/forums/. I lucked out and found one guy based in Cebu who is flat-out amazing. He gets paid a percentage of the projects we do, and it's on par with American wages. He found 10 more guys (designers, developers, data entry, content writers), and he manages them. The guys that work under him get paid $2.50-$4/hour, and they do great work. Right now we do transparent outsourcing for web design companies. They put in the face time with clients, pass us the specs, the guys in the Philippines do the work, and the companies pass off the work as their own.

[rada → byoung2]

Do you still have contact info for Alex?

[byoung2 → rada]

I haven't worked with him since 2007, but I do have his email address. Shoot me an email at [my HN username] at gmail and I'll send it to you.

[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/.

[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.

[jonshea]

http://spinning-yarns.org/michael/