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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.