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The World's Best Living Programmers
itwbennett (1594911) writes "How do you measure success? If it's by Stack Overflow reputation, Google engineer Jon Skeet is the world's best programmer. If it's winning programming competitions, Gennady Korotkevich or Petr Mitrechev might be your pick. But what about Linus Torvalds? Or Richard Stallman? Or Donald Knuth? ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today."
.. since I'm not in it.
Too narrow focus.
Where the masses need a real job to support their passion for programming and few make it big. Coming to a workplace near you.
I think I have to contest that. Last semester I got straight As in both "Principles of programming languages" as well as "Algorithm Engineering".
They're politicians that deal with code.
Bill Gates
His code is bulletproof.
Who's the best game programmer? It would be easy to say John Carmack, but there might be even tougher guys lurking somewhere inside Ubisoft, Rockstar, Midway, Dice, Sega, etc..?
Every programmer should believe they qualify, given some angle...
You only know if you get to see their code, and/or if they are a public figure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The nimrods who coded the itworld.com site.
Five minutes, and I'm still waiting for crap to download.
If you go by Github followers, Linus is pretty up-there. Linus and Stallman aren't great just for their programming abilities; their capability to manage their projects so effectively is a huge factor in their success.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Anonymous Coward!!!
How about Terje Mathisen? I'd rank him higher than most in that listing. There are a lot of others more deserving to be in a top 10 list.
What !? I believe antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo) creator of redis should be on the list. disappoined.
(pad for /. filter)
While I can entirely appreciate that such lists will always exclude someone, the absence of people like Bjarne Stroustrup and Dave Cutler seem like big omissions to me.
I am obviously the world's best programmer. Just ask me to do something and wait for the awesome and novel solutions I come up with.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
There is also a lot of apples and oranges comparisons. Linux as a project is a completely different beast than Abuse, Quake, or Doom.
I would say that as of now, we are suffering from a lack of even -decent- programmers. A few years ago, the smart people would get their names on some product in a Linux distro. Now, it seems that everyone and their brother with any coding experience wants to write another iOS fleshlight app with tons of in-app purchases. Apps mean nothing for the industry as a whole, while even a small, but relevant fix on a kernel driver can be critical for millions on a day to day basis.
Silly humans, always ranking themselves according to some arbitrary metric.
"I have the absolute confidence not to be number two, but then I have enough sense also to realize that there can be no number one." - Bruce Lee
Lol! Damn why'd you have to copy and paste from Word and ruin the formatting? Very well written, though.
This is like saying "Who are the Best Automotive Engineers in the world today?" Can you quantify that? Popularity? Bug free code? Fame?
Just like with auto engineering, nobody outside the immediate domain cares.
Stack Overflow reputation indicates that you're a 1337 documentation writer, not necessarily that you know how to program.
BSD Unix, vi editor, Sun Microsystems....
I'm just impressed that neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg were included. Most people who don't understand programming include one - or both - of them when building a list of "top programmers" even though neither are particularly outstanding programmers.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Jon Skeet Main claim to fame: Legendary Stack Overflow contributor
Gennady Korotkevich Main claim to fame: Competitive programming prodigy
Linus Torvalds Main claim to fame: Creator of Linux
Jeff Dean Main claim to fame: The brains behind Google search indexing
John Carmack Main claim to fame: Creator of Doom
Richard Stallman Main claim to fame: Creator of Emacs, GCC
Petr Mitrechev Main claim to fame: One of the top competitive programmers of all time
Fabrice Bellard Main claim to fame: Creator of QEMU
Doug Cutting Main claim to fame: Creator of Lucene
Donald Knuth Main claim to fame: Author of The Art of Computer Programming
Anders Hejlsberg Main claim to fame: Creator of Turbo Pascal
Ken Thompson Main claim to fame: Creator of Unix
Adam D'Angelo Main claim to fame: Co-founder of Quora
Sanjay Ghemawat Main claim to fame: Key Google architect
Does the list even change? I'm thinking you basically just add Alan Turing.
Designed & wrote VMX and Windows NT 3.1.
I guess lists like this are always a matter of opinion.
I thought I'd get that in before too many other people do. I have better justification than most, as I *am* Jon Skeet. I saw the list yesterday, and we've been gently laughing about it at work.
Somewhere, the difference between fame and accomplishments has been lost. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bad coder. I'm pretty knowledgeable about C# as a language, although details of writing *applications* in C# is a different matter. I'm pretty good at expressing technical concepts, and that's really useful in various contexts (Stack Overflow, books, screencasts, and of course work). But none of these are a patch on what some of the others on the list have accomplished.
As a Googler, I know a *bit* about what Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have done - and it's obvious I'm not in the same league. The code I'm probably proudest of is Noda Time (my .NET date/time library) which has a few thousand users, if that. I hope I've had an impact everywhere I've worked, but it just isn't on the same scale as many of the other members of the list (let alone the many thousands of other notable programmers).
It's pretty clear I'm not actually on the list because of my coding skills - it's just due to Stack Overflow reputation. That indicates *something*, but it's definitely not the kind of measure you'd sensibly use to compare two programmers. Just as I'm proud of Noda Time, I'm proud of being able to help a lot of people on Stack Overflow - but I'm not under the delusion that even that's on the same level of impact as an awful lot of other coders.
For what it's worth, if I could substitute one other name for mine, it would be Eric Lippert. I'm not sure he's really be in the "top 14" or even whether that's meaningful - but I'd say he's at least *more* worthy of being there than I am.
Therefore all of us anti-social basement-dwellers never had a chance.
What about Mel? Or better yet, the guy who partially figured out how he was hacking the magnetic drum and decided not to try any further modifications on Mel's code?
Obviously, if they are intelligent programmers, they deal in rationality, not morality. Morality is for people who are too stupid to grok rationality.
...but I would argue that software engineering is a far more important a skill than programming.
Which thing is ultimately more valuable, the ability to write JavaScript (or C++, or Objective-C, or whatever) better than anyone else, or, the ability to architecturally scale a big data solution along swim lanes or using an AKF cube (or properly design a secure inter-process communication system, or whatever)?
I'm not trying to demean raw programming ability, because that's always a valuable skill, the problem is that people seem to venerate it above what I believe it more important to the creation of good software.
Anywho...
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Marissa Mayer former innovator at Google and now CEO of Yahoo. She is well known for making Google Maps useful.
Brian Kernighan co-inventor of C.
Bjarne Stroustrup inventor of C++.
I would put a few of my picks above some of the names on that list.
Wow this made me laugh harder than it should've, i guess. Posting as AC because you well deserved my Funny mod, even despite the gross encoding failure
Regardless, you've assisted a lot of us, myself included.
Back in the early 90's we received a resume at my then employer in which this person stated they where the '#3 Clipper programmer in Rochester, NY'. Well, we HAD to interview him. He wouldn't tell us how he came about this ranking but it was correct! After the interview I told my co-worker that 'if he's the #3 Clipper programmer, then we are #1 & #2 and I'm pretty sure we weren't #1 and #2.' Always wondered were he came up with #3.
Just FYI, that's quite false. Einstein passed his Matura (high school graduation exam), then attended Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich, where he got top grades in math and physics and earned his teaching degree. He did his PhD at University of Zürich. Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, was his adviser for his thesis "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions" Kleiner didn't need to advise Einstein much - his previous paper, "Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena" had already been published in the prestigious "Annalen der Physik" (Annals of Physics).
Its also missing the criteria for being a best programmer.
Seriously this guy isn't anywhere near most of the rest of the list.
Maybe he bought the third copy of Clipper sold in Rochester.
I noticed that the guy who wrote their slideshow code wasn't on the list.
Nice, but you forgot to increment the year in your last journal entry. IBS?
The problem is that you were interviewing him for a job working with "Clipper", which he had almost no experience in.
If you had asked about adjusting the settings on his "#3 Clipper", which allowed him to produce anything from centimetre long shag to a 1 mm buzz cut, then you would have been amazed at how much he knew.
ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today.
In the unpublished final volume of The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth describes an algorithm that can provide a complete emulation of any of the other 13.
I predict impotent twitter rage from twitter feminists lamenting the patriarchal misogyny that lied and made all of the list members men, and most of them evil white cishet men.
Too stupid to have smoked a lot of dope while reading RAH's books?
Even then, I don't think I rank anywhere special. Oh well.
where on this list is Andy Hertzfeld?
He single-handedly ported Wolfenstein 3D to iOS after the development team said it would take them two months and go over budget. He did it in four days. https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
"The world record for continuous application availability may be held by the Irish National Railway, which is said to have logged an unbroken 17 years running on OpenVMS version 3.2." I'd say the guys that wrote such a stable system must be pretty good programmers.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
>> religious belief is utterly incompatible with a true understanding of logic
Prove it.
I would bet that some the absolutely best technical coders around are completely unknown because all they know how to do is write code. This list I think isn't that, but it also isn't fame per se. I think it could be more called "high impact programmers" - and that you deserve to be on.
:)
Also, comments like yours are why I still read slashdot
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Even nerd top 10 lists are still a popularity contest. These are the best celebrity programmers, but chances are there are thousands of better programmers that just have their heads down in code at some obscure company somewhere. Probably many of them have solved complex algorithmic issues in clever ways that other programmers like the ones in the list are still struggling with.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
No hans reiser? We have such short memories.
Einstein and Edison were school dropouts.
I have no clue which alternate reality you have come from but in this one Einstein was most definitely NOT a school dropout, for details see Wikipedia. The worst that can be said about his education is that he initially failed to meet the required standard in the general entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic (although he excelled in the physics and maths portion) and had to go to a secondary school elsewhere for a few years before being admitted (at the age of 17) to the Polytechnic where he graduated with a maths and physics teaching diploma.
John Carmack. That is all.
What! no Ken Silverman! Pioneer of voxels and the build engine?
Forget the arguments about who should or should not be on the list. I can't take seriously a list of the best programmers when they picked 14 and not a power of 2.
Who's the best game programmer?
Easy: Braben and Bell who wrote 'Elite'. This game was so far ahead of its time it was simply unbelievable. It was one of (if not the) first true 3D game and contained 8 galaxies of 255 stars on a machine with 32kB of memory. It also introduced true "sandbox" gameplay. It might not stand up to today's standards and the sequels, while great games, were nowhere near as revolutionary, although it remains to be seen how Elite: Dangerous turns out - I have my fingers crossed!
;-)
So, no matter how you spin it, there is no way that you can deny that they were true Elite programmers!
The submission sort of gets at this, but what should be some criteria for judging "the best" programmers?
Having discovered an algorithm? (Bonus points if it's named after you).
Created a programming language?
Written a book (on programming)?
Created a program that was somehow valuable or meaningful?
Educated other programmers?
Jeff Stephenson - creator of Sierra On-Line's AGI and SCI scripting languages.
I've read about malware/virii that can run on multiple operating systems, have their own smtp engine, can perform all sorts of miracles, and yet, are all contained in about 16k of code.
Failing that, anyone remember the Amiga Demo scene? Those Norwegian programmers were doing things back then then that mainstream software would take 20 years to work up to. And they were all coding in assembly.
How about the dudes that wrote GEOS? Seriously, they got a Macintosh-like OS to fit on a floppy and run on a Commodore 64.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Given his major influence on:
C
Java
Common Lisp
Scheme
And, as a throwaway on his Oracle bio page:
He designed the original EMACS command set and was the first person to port TeX.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
BS! Why was Woz not in that list, and why was he not #1? I mean, his credits "only" include things like creating Apple Computer with Steve Jobs. Horrible article.
Pah. Any competent programmer can change fourteen to a power of two.
Simple pragma (compiler directive.)
Syntax is left to the reader as an exercise.
ironic captcha: powering
I don't know names, but just as an example:
The guy who came up with and implemented the Blizzard always-on DRM for Starcraft II and Diablo
The lead designer for Sim City (2013)
The man behind Active Desktop for Windows 98
The innovator behind the wondrous idea of multi-page web ranking articles
The team behind stuxnet (debatable, pretty snazzy piece of work, could use Zeus or some other example)
Key PRISM database team
etc
Famous programmer != Best programmer
Also why there is no Microsoft engineer? Oracle engineer? Sony? Ebay? Nintendo? Apple? TI? I bet my head there are many as good or better than some in the list. But no MS and the rest of closed source will never be good engineers in the eyes of fanbois.
And really.. a contest? A contest is nothing compared to real life. Just synthetic measure like benchmarks. Fast development is not the same as good development.
The stackoverflow answerer maybe helped a lot in software development but that doesn't precisely makes it IMHO among the best.
The article is nothing but pure garbage to tease fanbois and glorify their idols. But then there are so many open source developers that could be far better than some in the list therefore the article is not even fair.
Where is Jeff Minter?
Charles H Moore is not on that list, and it is a travesty that he isn't. Forth doesn't get a lot of press, but it is still extensively used despite being over 40 years old.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
You can't rank 'em if you can't see 'em.
The work of most programmers is private, and many of those lack the time to do much public writing or build massive reputations.
Bet the NSA has some of the "actual" best programmers (that you've never heard of).
While we are at it, let's throw the Vim author Bram Moolenaar in the mix.
Or for people smart enough to know that ignoring your morals in favor of a limited rationality that only includes the world as you see it is a bad and unfulfilling way to live your life.
Anyone? Hello???
Yes, but a relevant fix on a kernel driver doesn't make you any money at all, whereas some shitty iOS fleshlight app can make you rich and famous. Just ask the guys at Rovio. This is one of the fundamental problems. Programmers have to make ends meet too, and there's apparently no shortage of fools willing to spend money on some stupid iOS/Android app.
I wonder if, "a few years ago" as you put it, the smart people working on some product in Linux distros were still young, in college, and didn't have many bills to worry about. Nowadays, they've gotten older, are married, have more expenses, etc., so they've had to concentrate on jobs which earn them money. Also, it does seem to me that the cost of living has risen greatly in the US in the last 15 years, largely thanks to the housing bubble. Back when I was in college in the 90s, it was easy to find a nice apartment for $400, or share an apartment for $200, and gas was $1/gallon. Now gas is $4/gallon and you're looking at a minimum of $1200/month to rent anything decent; you might get something for $600 if you rent a room in someone's basement and get a PO box because your landlord refuses to let you have your name associated with the address and receive mail there.
In no particular order
Steven Bourne
Larry Wall
Guido van Rossum
Yukihiro Matsumoto
John Chambers
I believe it
While each of those are significant milestones in implementation achievements, I'm not aware of a single individual who can claim credit for enabling the completion of those projects.
To put those projects in proper scale to what the programmers on this IT World Hall of Fame have done, the above examples were all built with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. The needs of those systems were readily apparent by everyone involved. It was a matter of assigning an army of workers to put all the pieces together.
The accomplishments of these hall of fame programmers revolve around smart people identifying a vacuum of need that others hadn't recognized even existed. Then these people set about filling those needs by building essential tools themselves from scratch.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Thomas Aquinas' ghost would like a word with you.
...and one Asian. Whodda thunk it? Waiting for liberal whining over The Injustice Of It All in 5....4....3....2...1....
those are the real greats. not these attention whore niggers who beg for upvotes on websites
How is Dennis Ritchie never mentioned? It's a travesty.
This truly is the crappiest list I've seen, and I have seen crappy lists. Creating a 'cool' site like Quora somehow gets you on that list, so does answering StackOverflow questions. I guess you either have to create websites or have Google on your resume to be on that list.
How about creating 2 of the most successful and important operating systems the world has ever seen ? Namely, VMS and Windows NT.
Oh yeah, David Cutler for example isn't on that list, I guess he should have stuck to creating websites in PHP...
Leslie Lamport anyone ? Oh no, he didn't work on some crappy website either, doesn't count !
If GP had graduated high school, he might have known that.
This is one of those times that Slashdot nerds drive me nuts. There could be a lot of interesting discussion about the great things Knuth has done or some of the funny methods Carmack has written. But no, it's lame comment, after lame comment, "Oh my God, this can't really be the 14 best because X isn't on the List!" "I don't think Y is on of the 14 best programmer!"
So Slashdot nerds, do me a huge fucking favor. Just imagine the headline said, "Here is a list of 14 notable and arguably very talented programmers." I know these are not literally the 14 best programmers. No can actually compile such a list. You are supposed to understand that and not whine about it not literally being true.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
u'r right, as ggp might say.
Everyone knows the best programmer alive is Bill Brasky!.
Proverbs 21:19
Icer Addis and Neal Tew should be on the list.
I am the same age as Gosling (and even went to the same university as a kid.) I have worked with and observed many world-class programmers in my career, and have never seen the likes of James. He is the Wayne Gretzky of programmers.
If you have ever actually read any of the code the man himself wrote, then he would never be included in a list of competent programmers alive or dead. The gnu hackers have consistently worked at removing his code and his efforts at coding from their products. Which says a lot.
As "the greatest" anything: Just harder workers that are very focused with great knowledge of the area being coded on along with the data and process.
APK
P.S.=> Put it THIS way: Name me the "greatest" (insert 'X' here), e.g. -> Musician, Athlete, whatever (which is also going to vary by personal taste preferences) - In other words, there's a LOT of each & the SAME goes for coders as well, or any other scientific or engineering discipline, period (& to obtain a PROPER rigorously tested sampleset of such a determination as well? I'll say it - NIGH impossible)... apk
How about Matthias Ettric? He wrote the original KDE, was the core developer of Qt for years?
Lars Knoll, more or less single handedly wrote the Konquerer Web Browser which later became WebKit and then move to Trolltech where he became a core tech developer on Qt.
Warwick (can't remember his last name) at Trolltech who more or less wrote all the cool stuff for Trolltech like the Qt Embedded windowing system as a replacement for Qt.
Karl Anders Øygard who optimized the AMP code base making PC MP3 playback possible as well as being the core or WinAmp. He also wrote major portions of the Opera Web Browser like the original full EcmaScript implementation, he also architected the layout engine of the browser which supported reflow making it one of the fastest web browsers (often fastest) for a decade
Lars Thomas Hansen who wrote the optimized EcmaScript engine for Opera. Implemented some of the earliest byte code compilers in browsers. Damn near reinvented garbage collection. Wrote his own Scheme compiler. Later worked at Adobe boosting performance and features of ActionScript like crazy. Now works at mozilla foundation making yummy stuff there.
Ugh... Can't remember his name was it Christian-Jacq, codeveloper and maintainer of VLC.
Wim Taymens, the core developer of GStreamer... He wrote most of the cool stuff in there. Excellent sense of humor and generally good person as well as amazing programmer.
That annoying/obnoxious guy from x264 who basically has been the project maintainer for years. Personally I want to choke him, but he's among the best programmers I know.
Kieran Kunaya (sp.) developer of the Open Broadcast Project. Basically made it possible for TV stations and broadcasters all over the world to use Open Source.
Ole Andre Vadnes (sp.) wrote endless numbers of tools for reverse engineering core components of programs to be able to use libraries from defunc programs companies needed to run.
Lars Petter (something or other) spent years counting clock cycles for Tandberg developing faster H.264 codecs.
Mark Russonovich (sp.) who single handedly reverse engineered and reimplement the NTFS file system and documented, wrote books about it and more or less is responsible for many of us not losing all our stuff.
The guy who wrote IDA Pro, the most advance disassembler/compiler ever.
I have had the pleasure of meeting and often working together with many of these guys for weeks or years. While I don't discount the names on the list... I would say that it's terribly naive. I can probably name another 100 developers that should be in the top 10
what about the guys who wrote slashdot beta?
Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson
The rest are not even in the same league (don't forget Dennis Ritchie).
Let's see, Knuth pretty much codified most of the C.S. algs you;ll ever need. The majority of algs. in software libraries designed today can be traced back to his writings.
Thompson & Ritchie were responsible for Unix/C - pretty much the ancestor of most of the O/S's and programming languages today.
The writer of the article is obviously clueless about who the great programmers are, I bet he doesn't even have a CS degree or is not even a programmer. Oh wait it seems like he does according to his biography - well shame on him, if this is his list. I have a feeling that most of the guys on this list are probably his friends or people who he wants to write an article on.
As for the rest:
Jeff Dean - come on, google searching index creator?
John Carmack - a game creator?
Richard Stallman - maybe
Doug Cutting : Creator of a text search engine?
Adam D'Angelo - Co-founder of Quora, really the creator of a question and answer site?
Sanjay Ghemawat - a google architect? - was he the writer's friend perhaps?
Jon Skeet - some guy who has waaay too much time on his hands.
Gennady Korotkevich - a programming contest winner - what has he actually produced?
Linus Torvalds - what, he read the pointy devil book and decided to code an OS using the algs. in the book.
Petr Mitrechev : a programming contest winner - what has he actually produced?
Fabrice Bellard : really? A writer of a couple of pieces of software. Don'r get me wrong they're good software.
Anders Hejlsberg : Creator of Turbo Pascal - really? He created all by himself?
Knuth has never tried to impose his beliefs on anyone. In fact, he's pretty much the most rational Christian ever: he manages to avoid religion where it has no bearing.
Imperative programmers, thou shalt not forget:
Edsger W. Dijkstra : first ALGOL 60 compiler (with Jaap Zonneveld), the THE operating system, correctness proofs, saving us from unstructured code, ...
Peter Naur: ALGOL 60 language definition
"Program testing can be used very effectively to show the _presence_ of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their _absence_."
(an overhead slide by Dijkstra, quoted in The Dawn of Software Engineering, 2012)
While I'd agree with Knuth, it isn't for TAOCP. He didn't have to be a good programmer to write that, although he had to be a superb computer scientist. Instead, I think Knuth should be in there for TeX, which is a tremendous achievement in programming.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
CTO of Spotify seems to be a real brutal hacker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus
He wrote ScummVM, microtorrent (uses 64KB RAM and very tiny), etc
OTOH, Linus Torvalds is not that good. If you read about Ken Thompson and the other old Unix gurus, they talked about the Linux code and said it was quite bad. Also, lot of other hackers says the Linux code is quite bad, including Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, etc.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Linux-Linus-Torvalds-kernel-too-complex-code,14495.html#comments
"Torvalds recently stated that Linux has become "too complex" and he was concerned that developers would not be able to find their way through the software anymore. He complained that even subsystems have become very complex and he told the publication that he is "afraid of the day" when there will be an error that "cannot be evaluated anymore."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/linus_torvalds_linux_bloated_huge/
There are many other links if you google a bit.
Several of us were talking recently about the SDS/XDS Fortran IV compiler. If my memory is correct, Steve Hartman (not sure of the spelling) and Buzz O'Gard (not sure of this spelling either) were the authors. I would definitely nominate them as the best programmers, along with whoever wrote the MetaSymbol assembler.
In addition to a number of amazing features, Fortran IV had the first Easter egg I ever saw, a funny compiler message that came out if you used a GO TO JAIL statement.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
> Edsger W. Dijkstra
Wound up as you run from challenges to validly disprove his points on hosts http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
The team behind Excel. Q.E.D.
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
...wait - what about all those teenagers at those "Code Academies" and code for America and hackathons? You know, the 20-somethings who have the only good ides anymore according to Obama, congress, venture capitalists, Google...
It is irrelevant to write "Google engineer Jon Skeet".
He currently is listed as working for google as an engineer, but before he joined Google he already had the highest stack overflow reputation already. Listing him as Google Engineer makes it sound as though Google had something to do with it. What if you photograph him licking an ice cream? Are you going to write "Ice Cream Licker Jon Skeet"?
The guy at Microsoft who wrote the fantastic Charms Bar and Start Tile Screen that pops up whenever you are in the middle of something, forcing you to stop and press the "Windows Key" to get back to the desktop where you were doing something useful. He should remain anonymous for his own protection!