Ask HN: Tell me about the best programmer you worked with

35 jvanderbot 13 8/17/2025, 12:59:19 AM

I'll start. A colleague would be politely suggesting designs or changes, but rolling with the punches when people disagreed. They were always proven right eventually, and it was usually because someone wandered into a module they had written and loved it.

They changed a lot about how I worked, and by far their main characteristics were patience with us and a sort of completeness to whatever they wrote. It just arrived, maybe with one small adjustment or bugfix, bug never with a rearchitecture or major refactor required.

Comments (13)

lwo32k · 6h ago

The "best" programmer you work with can be fired on any day of the week if corporate wonderland doesn't hit its quarterly numbers. They know this and the ones who survive get quite good at getting others fired, especially people better than them.

I stopped caring too much about who the best in the room was after 7-8 rounds of this. As Nietszche would say these are not Ubermensches but the last men in a nihilistic swamp. Creatures who have attacked and destroyed older moral frameworks without replacing them with anything new. For their own comfort and survival.

The kind of people who pretend they have mastered complexity, but in reality its just survival theater and political/power games. Ubermensches haven't emerged yet.

user453 · 59m ago

You misunderstand the übermensch. It's not a kind of person, not some state you can achieve. Rather, it's the future potential of humanity, Nietzsche's suggestion for a new guiding star to give purpose and meaning. You can also view it as an inversion of the christian god; god is our father, created us, lives above us, while we create the übermensch through our actions. God exists in some seperate dimension/layer and christianity tells you to look up, away from the material world, while the übermensch, as the result of your and everyone elses actions, focuses you on your actual, physical life.

rootsudo · 5h ago

Unfortunately highly relatable.

jmathai · 9h ago

I’m going to say Isaac Wasileski. While at Yahoo! In the late 2000s (when Yahoo! was still hot) - code reviews with Isaac were some of the more educational experiences I’ve had. He had such attention to detail and a very pragmatic perspective on coding. I always learned something from them. Hope he finds this because I never asked myself the question to be able to thank him.

It’s been a decade or so since I worked with Isaac and I looked him up to find he is at OpenAI. Fitting.

gus_tpm · 4h ago

"Old" Yahoo! sounds so interesting, if you don't mind me asking, is there anything you would recommend to someone who wants to read more about it?

commandersaki · 3h ago

He was my manager/mentor when I interned at Cisco. Very smart and humble guy and was always helpful. I tried though to stay mostly self directed and self reliant when solving the problem or task the group had given me. I eventually got stuck trying to figure out how to reassemble IP fragments into a whole packet. I probably spent a week or so, laying my concerns in group meetings, and trying to find the right data structure to do it.

Then one day, he gives me freestanding C code that was superbly written, with some macros for benchmarking, etc. For the most part it worked but needed some massaging for edge cases and such, but it was so beautiful and solved my immediate needs. I was unblocked but the whole ordeal has since been imprinted in my mind. He didn't give any context when handing the code, but I later figured out he implemented the algorithm as described in RFC 815. Deep in the annals of history and literature in networking that isn't really covered by any contemporary networking text books or sources.

Anyways now that I'm a mentor/tech lead these days, I'm always looking for my opportunity to help unblock someone by writing some very specific hard to implement code.

mxm4398 · 6h ago

There’s a type of programmer I’ve encountered only once in my 10 year career that I truly admire. They only way to describe this person is: professional but lacking professionalism.

They knew when to write code or when to stitch existing software together. The code they wrote wasn't easy to understand nor did it follow any good "software engineering" practice. But they could get an MVP out the door faster and better than a 5-7 developer team. This person was never arrogant and everyone from developers, customers and managers loved them.

democracy · 1h ago

I knew a guy who wrote assembler for an 8bit pc without line breaks - he'd just keep typing to the end of the editor line and then continue. And he wasn't producing junk either, he made some really impressive games for the time. That's probably as close as I've seen to "genius."

That said, I wouldn't have wanted to work with him in a commercial environment. It was a way of thinking/programming I could never wrap my head around.

mikewarot · 8h ago

Michael Smosna asked what I wanted, when I needed by, and any clarifying questions, if the need arose. It was always good code, well crafted and documented, done by the agreed time.

drflak · 9h ago

The greatest programmer I ever worked with was both a Linux admin and a developer.

He taught me that developers are difficult/impossible to control and to not be possessive or emotional about code. He also taught me tools and tricks in Linux that I still use today.

osullivj · 11h ago

I'm not an idiot. But I know when I've worked with better people. I'll shout two; Jeff Vroom and Alexei Zverovitch.

amir734jj · 5h ago

My manager at Microsoft, Dwayne Need. He is a principal engineer worthy of the title. I thought I knew C# very well before joining Microsoft ... turned out he was the person behind Windows Media Player.

wordofx · 2h ago

The piece of software that played nothing and forced us to download VLC or MPC??