Earlier this year Verizon discovered that one of their best programmers had outsourced his own job to China. So he basically hired ghostwriters, or maybe more precice: ghostcoders. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. But do well-known programmers hire 'ghostcoders'?
More likely, you're going to find that "star" or "celebrity" programmers usually end up starting consulting shops - where they're busy doing business development, speaking at conferences, juggling issues on GitHub, writing OSS code, blogging, etc, and other developers are actually doing the coding for the clients.<p>It's completely on the up-and-up, but it's basically the same thing.