He wasn't a programmer, but a big beard UNIX admin. Of everyone I've worked with in my career he has had the most influential. He taught me 2 core things.
1. Information is meant to shared.
2. Never do manually what can you write shell script to do.
I started at $MEGACORP on the help desk. One day I noticed one of our AIX servers had a volume filling up. So I send him an IM that says "Hey I noticed that the log partition on server BLAH is filling up". He immediately called me and told me that the server does partitions, but instead used logical volumes. He then spent the next two hours explain in detail how logical volume manger worked, how to manage volumes and the implications it had with our SAN. At the end of the call I made a comment that I was surprised he was sharing all this information with me. He responded that he didn't want the type of job security you get by hoarding information. He instead wanted by job security by enabling the team to preform at its best, and he believed you achieved that by sharing knowledge. That phone call was only the first of many such calls.
The second thing is that he believed in automating everything you could. Using knowledge he shared with me, I quickly automated most of my help desk duties. Because of this I started working more with the system administration team and was moved onto it after just a few months. In my 20 year career every job I've had has revolved around automation. I really enjoy it and without his influence I would have never gone down this path.
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.
There was a book written a few years back that I haven't read but might answer some of these questions. "We Were Yahoo!: From Internet Pioneer to the Trillion Dollar Loss of Google and Facebook" https://a.co/d/9SuUXIn
I'll throw out Mr. Hedger Wang from Yahoo! as my nominee, he basically had the IE6 browser renderer in his head, and even though I never worked with him directly, just being able to ping on Y!M was an incredible help.
What made it special (2010-timeframe) was that we would do without thought what other companies struggled to do at that time (hot-hot failover, multi-region, "3 machine minimum" deployments), processing traffic for ~500M monthly users when spinning rust and 32gb of ram was considered "a lot".
My perspective on what happened is reeeally smart people solved really tough problems, then would either bail to Google (and later FB) to write the "v2.0" and solve those same problems but "better" or they'd go and start a full-blown company to sell that solution.
The tide rose around Yahoo! and both business-wise (and tech-wise), they didn't keep pace once their competitive advantage of "we can scale" dissipated.
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.
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.
The opposite of the overman [Übermensch] is the last man: I created him at the same time with that. Everything superhuman appears to man as illness and madness. You have to be a sea to absorb a dirty stream without getting dirty.
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.
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.
The best (algorithm) programmer I know routinely puts stuff in code that could be published in top engineering journals. He doesn't care much about publishing, except for some of his work that went into patents. I like him a lot but he is not an easy person to work with, especially if you are an engineering manager without some level of technical depth.
Worked with many great ones but the one who really stands out seemed levels above everyone in terms of just raw intelligence.
When you explain a concept to another human you have to provide context and a certain level of detail. It can be hard to calibrate based on who you talk to. What always blew me away about this guy was he needed like almost 0 context, even for non-programming subjects. He understood within seconds what you were doing, even for complex problems. I had to recalibrate my entire approach to explanation with him because he got things instantly.
I have worked with several excellent, standout programmers at video game studios that had similar qualities. I'm talking in this case about ICs, not managers or leads.
- Whimsical, child like attitude. "Sure, I can do that" was almost always the answer.
- Would come in on the weekend when nobody was there and you'd see them cooking. Then on Monday, they'd reveal their work and it'd be something that seemed impossible last week.
- Had deep understanding of the hardware so that diving in and writing some specific assembly-like (or literal assembly) code was part of their toolkit.
- Were treated as a Goose That Laid The Golden Egg by management. Could do whatever they wanted, but they loved to work and code so it wasn't ever out of balance.
- After a few years of working at the studio they started to have mental health issues because there was a never ending stream of needs and problems, many of which were solved with them. Planning projects started to include several technical miracles they would pull off. It started to be expected.
Nowadays writing straight to the metal in video games is less common, so I think these types of guys have largely migrated to other fields. We used to write our own engines and there was more need for them. Now there's a lot more use of third party engines so there's less opportunity (and need).
When I first started programming as an employee at Travelocity I discovered a senior Java developer who was really good at CSS and JavaScript. At that time, around the beginning of 2008, there was a very clear division of labor between Java people and front end web people. Java people had absolutely no idea how to write JavaScript. It was so bad that Google wrote a tool called Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that automatically generated JavaScript from Java logic and it was beyond horrible, but there were some Java developers that really needed it.
What I found most interesting about this excellent developer, and of course she was absolutely excellent at her job writing Java as well, was her secrecy. She did not mean to reveal her ability to masterly address CSS and JavaScript concerns to me. She did so because she knew I was super new and it didn't matter. She did not reveal this to anybody else, because she didn't want to compensate for the repeated failures of people around her. In hindsight I can absolutely see why she went out of her way to suppress her capabilities while at the office.
I was there at her interview. I've done several interviews before - you ask questions to find out how much the candidate knows. She was different. Halfway through the interview, we, the interviewers started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
Her name is Jalaja Ramanadham. She became my manager.
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.
Brandon. He was a traditionally trained SWE (CS) but didn't have crazy FAANG names on his resume. Very humble, soft spoken guy. Could write code twice as fast as you, that was 2x easier to understand/grok, and would run 5x more effecciently than yours. Knew the stack all the way from the web layer to the CPU cache level. To this day I think about how he was thee definition of a "10x engineer".
The best programmer I worked with was the tech lead for my second job, at a startup consultancy firm.
He was brilliant. Could understand a very deep and complex business system and remember all the hundreds of table and convuluted logic built into the system, but it was a bit overwhelming listening to him talk since he would overload so much information in such a short time frame
Maybe the better word is clever or brilliant. I have also worked with other programmers who build such systems, I think the best programmer just builds simple things
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.
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.
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 best person I ever worked with, understood that their soft skills were infinitely more important then their technical skills. They brought brilliant coding, architectural, and system design skills to the table. They were an amazing mentor - none of that was important.
This individual, inherently understood that the method with which they communicate, could be different for different individuals. As a result they changed their messaging, their body language, their wording, depending on with whom they communicated. They still said the same thing(s), but it was how.
He wasn't a programmer, but a big beard UNIX admin. Of everyone I've worked with in my career he has had the most influential. He taught me 2 core things.
1. Information is meant to shared. 2. Never do manually what can you write shell script to do.
I started at $MEGACORP on the help desk. One day I noticed one of our AIX servers had a volume filling up. So I send him an IM that says "Hey I noticed that the log partition on server BLAH is filling up". He immediately called me and told me that the server does partitions, but instead used logical volumes. He then spent the next two hours explain in detail how logical volume manger worked, how to manage volumes and the implications it had with our SAN. At the end of the call I made a comment that I was surprised he was sharing all this information with me. He responded that he didn't want the type of job security you get by hoarding information. He instead wanted by job security by enabling the team to preform at its best, and he believed you achieved that by sharing knowledge. That phone call was only the first of many such calls.
The second thing is that he believed in automating everything you could. Using knowledge he shared with me, I quickly automated most of my help desk duties. Because of this I started working more with the system administration team and was moved onto it after just a few months. In my 20 year career every job I've had has revolved around automation. I really enjoy it and without his influence I would have never gone down this path.
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.
"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?
There was a book written a few years back that I haven't read but might answer some of these questions. "We Were Yahoo!: From Internet Pioneer to the Trillion Dollar Loss of Google and Facebook" https://a.co/d/9SuUXIn
I'll throw out Mr. Hedger Wang from Yahoo! as my nominee, he basically had the IE6 browser renderer in his head, and even though I never worked with him directly, just being able to ping on Y!M was an incredible help.
What made it special (2010-timeframe) was that we would do without thought what other companies struggled to do at that time (hot-hot failover, multi-region, "3 machine minimum" deployments), processing traffic for ~500M monthly users when spinning rust and 32gb of ram was considered "a lot".
My perspective on what happened is reeeally smart people solved really tough problems, then would either bail to Google (and later FB) to write the "v2.0" and solve those same problems but "better" or they'd go and start a full-blown company to sell that solution.
The tide rose around Yahoo! and both business-wise (and tech-wise), they didn't keep pace once their competitive advantage of "we can scale" dissipated.
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.
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.
Unfortunately highly relatable.
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.
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.
The best (algorithm) programmer I know routinely puts stuff in code that could be published in top engineering journals. He doesn't care much about publishing, except for some of his work that went into patents. I like him a lot but he is not an easy person to work with, especially if you are an engineering manager without some level of technical depth.
Worked with many great ones but the one who really stands out seemed levels above everyone in terms of just raw intelligence.
When you explain a concept to another human you have to provide context and a certain level of detail. It can be hard to calibrate based on who you talk to. What always blew me away about this guy was he needed like almost 0 context, even for non-programming subjects. He understood within seconds what you were doing, even for complex problems. I had to recalibrate my entire approach to explanation with him because he got things instantly.
I have worked with several excellent, standout programmers at video game studios that had similar qualities. I'm talking in this case about ICs, not managers or leads.
- Whimsical, child like attitude. "Sure, I can do that" was almost always the answer.
- Would come in on the weekend when nobody was there and you'd see them cooking. Then on Monday, they'd reveal their work and it'd be something that seemed impossible last week.
- Had deep understanding of the hardware so that diving in and writing some specific assembly-like (or literal assembly) code was part of their toolkit.
- Were treated as a Goose That Laid The Golden Egg by management. Could do whatever they wanted, but they loved to work and code so it wasn't ever out of balance.
- After a few years of working at the studio they started to have mental health issues because there was a never ending stream of needs and problems, many of which were solved with them. Planning projects started to include several technical miracles they would pull off. It started to be expected.
Nowadays writing straight to the metal in video games is less common, so I think these types of guys have largely migrated to other fields. We used to write our own engines and there was more need for them. Now there's a lot more use of third party engines so there's less opportunity (and need).
When I first started programming as an employee at Travelocity I discovered a senior Java developer who was really good at CSS and JavaScript. At that time, around the beginning of 2008, there was a very clear division of labor between Java people and front end web people. Java people had absolutely no idea how to write JavaScript. It was so bad that Google wrote a tool called Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that automatically generated JavaScript from Java logic and it was beyond horrible, but there were some Java developers that really needed it.
What I found most interesting about this excellent developer, and of course she was absolutely excellent at her job writing Java as well, was her secrecy. She did not mean to reveal her ability to masterly address CSS and JavaScript concerns to me. She did so because she knew I was super new and it didn't matter. She did not reveal this to anybody else, because she didn't want to compensate for the repeated failures of people around her. In hindsight I can absolutely see why she went out of her way to suppress her capabilities while at the office.
I was there at her interview. I've done several interviews before - you ask questions to find out how much the candidate knows. She was different. Halfway through the interview, we, the interviewers started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
Her name is Jalaja Ramanadham. She became my manager.
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.
Brandon. He was a traditionally trained SWE (CS) but didn't have crazy FAANG names on his resume. Very humble, soft spoken guy. Could write code twice as fast as you, that was 2x easier to understand/grok, and would run 5x more effecciently than yours. Knew the stack all the way from the web layer to the CPU cache level. To this day I think about how he was thee definition of a "10x engineer".
The best programmer I worked with was the tech lead for my second job, at a startup consultancy firm.
He was brilliant. Could understand a very deep and complex business system and remember all the hundreds of table and convuluted logic built into the system, but it was a bit overwhelming listening to him talk since he would overload so much information in such a short time frame
Maybe the better word is clever or brilliant. I have also worked with other programmers who build such systems, I think the best programmer just builds simple things
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.
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.
The piece of software that played nothing and forced us to download VLC or MPC??
To be fair that’s a codec thing.
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 best person I ever worked with, understood that their soft skills were infinitely more important then their technical skills. They brought brilliant coding, architectural, and system design skills to the table. They were an amazing mentor - none of that was important.
This individual, inherently understood that the method with which they communicate, could be different for different individuals. As a result they changed their messaging, their body language, their wording, depending on with whom they communicated. They still said the same thing(s), but it was how.
I'm not an idiot. But I know when I've worked with better people. I'll shout two; Jeff Vroom and Alexei Zverovitch.
Claude Code. He always tells me I'm right.
You're absolutely right.
Probably a guy I worked with at Verizon who is now a Distinguished Engineer at nvidia. I assume he's done well for himself...