I think this is pretty cool. I'd actually pay good money to have even a two hour conversation with a lot of the luminaries around here, so two hours of coding with Kent Beck must be a pretty awesome idea to someone.
I feel really lucky. Back in 1999, I was working in Zurich and found out Kent was living there at the time, so I figured out a way to have lunch with him. He talked about XP with such passion; it's a great memory.
Back on topic, I think it's a fun idea, and the winner will certainly get his/her money's worth at any amount.
Kent is obviously not trying to pay the rent with this ebay auction listing. It's just a fun way for him to market himself. It seems like people haven't used ebay for cute stuff like this in a while.
It's really interesting. On the one hand, what a way to capitalize on your cred in the community. On the other hand, it's risky because it makes him appear desperate for money. In any case, I wonder if this could be a new sort of business model for the master developer.
Interesting point. I wouldn't call it desperation; I think it's more of an interesting experiment. If you read Kent's blog, it sounds like he's exploring different ways that programmers can monetize their work. This is certainly one way for a very capable programmer; I can't even imagine how much I'd learn spending two hours coding with, say, John Carmack (or even Kent Beck :^). I could easily see spending a few hundred dollars for that.
I could also see this being a good way for a programmer to make money who isn't necessarily a rock star, but has deep knowledge of a particular library or some such. I once had to write a GUI in C#, and after working on it for a couple months I would have paid a few hundred dollars to spend four hours with someone who could have answered all of my arcane questions in one fell swoop.
