Comments on: Where do you find the best developers?

By: Slashene

Slashene — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:40:22 +0000

The best developper is the one who creates the most useful and simple piece of software. If there was a ratio Utility/Line of Code, the higher the better you are.

By: bartek

bartek — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:27:15 +0000

oh, damn. There is a computer science (math, algorithms) and IT (language, design patterns, programming paradigmates, …). Most of developers from IT are not able to make complex algorithims. On the other hand, algorithm people are not able to create complex software. Form me it’s easy :)

By: Vladimir

Vladimir — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:26:36 +0000

Programming language / compiler developers?

By: Laser Milkman

Laser Milkman — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:15:02 +0000

I’m quite sure that those working for governmental departments have to be the brightest. To be able to deliver under the kind of pressure that is on really requires something like super programmers.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:01:24 +0000

To me, the best programmers are those that influence their whole field with new ideas and a new direction. They are blog-posters who make you see a programming paradigm in a new light, they are researchers who can present alternatives to the von neuman architecture, it’s the guys that make GPUs do other things than render games and who’s making grid computing a reality. It’s the programmers that spawned P2P which went from obscurity to a movement challenging the norms of society.

I think you find these guys and gals everywhere from universities to companies selling CRM programs, though they may not be equally distributed.

By: Erez

Erez — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:09:54 +0000

For me programming really has two schools.
In the first, the best programmers are (professional) hackers.
In the second, the best programmers do AI.

By: Neil Graham

Neil Graham — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:34:31 +0000

>I feel like some soon to go extinct cave man when I think about how those things work.

I know that feeling, yet it’s amazing when you push yourself and end up on the other side. For me this happened with Physics engines. There was a time where I’d see all these games doing physics and it was like magical coder wisdom. Then I tried doing one myself. I made some test demos, tweaked some code. Then I wrote a game ‘Darwin the Monkey’ that used my own physics routines. Then I played around with other ideas in http://screamingduck.com/doodle.html

Now, physics engines don’t seem all that special, they are just in my brain as one of those things I know how to do. I did the last Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition and made a game using a written from scratch 3d physics model (in flash no less).

I think that lends to Mats’s comment.
>Behind the keyboard.
Doing stuff makes you good.

By: Andreas Håkansson

Andreas Håkansson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:36:54 +0000

You cannot, as a software developer, have anything but respect for other programmers who write software which holds the live of another human in their hands.

For example software which is used in medical devices. Raise your hand if you feel confident enough of the quality of the code you write that you would trust it to operate an important piece of medical equipment! :-)

Thought so… ;))

By: Mats Helander

Mats Helander — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:13:34 +0000

>Where do you find the best developers?

Behind the keyboard.

/Mats

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:45:49 +0000

As an intermittant programmer/software engineer (call it what you will) over the past 29 years of my life I’ve encountered most development environments. Early life was in Z80A assembly (often coded directly into the decimal codes ready for the good old ‘poke’ statement) through ASICs and onto .NET these days so I’ve been around the block. To me the best and brightest weren’t always the most prolific or the most successful in their fields but when you talked to them or looked at their code the elegance and the ingenuity shone! I agree with the others, it’s not a particular field or area of coding that generates the best. In a way I really don’t think the field is important, it’s just a different mindset to adopt and a new set of processes and procedures. These are learnt abilities, really really great programmers are born programmers. They don’t know why they are good, often they don’t know how they are good but when you’ve got a problem that you can’t find that ‘loose thread’ on they take one look, and before you’ve seen where they are looking they’ve unravelled the whole ball and rewound it neatly :)

Truly great programmers solve problems efficiently, elegantly and creatively. All the other requirements for maintainable code, etc, fall out of that naturally. Wish I was one of them! :) I have to work at it.