Coming up with a characterization for a developer is often handy for figuring out how to talk with them – both about technology and in marketing. As with all characteristics, you end up with something a little more useful than a paper mache mask, but it at least gives you the baseline to start thinking about how to deal with them. When I still “did something,” as I like to say of my years being a software developer, I’d come across all sorts of folks in person and through the “Internets” and made a fun game of slotting these developers into types. Very few people every fit perfectly into one slot, of course. Below are some of the types I’ve kept coming across, patterns of being, if you will.
There are many things that push a developer to one type or another. This can largely be determined by what they read, and don’t read. To some extent, demographics (age, nationality, gender, income bracket, geography, ethnicity) can be used – but I don’t know the specifics enough to generalize. Though, I do take a certain “becoming an old guy” pleasure in trying to track based on age, rather, family status. While we’d like to think that developers are motivated by being more productive, writing bug free code, and otherwise driven by “pure” engineering principals, that motivation is nuanced. Knowing their archtype(s) helps throw up guides to bump along. Some sample archtypes:
Developers Types
- Snarky – believes most people are stupid and need to be ignored or coded around. You may have optimistic snarky people who simply deal with the drudgery of programming by being crass. Sarcasm is soma.
- Optimistic – often smiley, works longer hours, willing to help other people. This is extremely rare, and can be confused with an arrogant-ignorant developer who thinks everything is happy-go-lucky just to get off-shored next week.
- Lots of talk, little code – spends much time on the labor and process around coding, hoping that the smaller amount of time coding is done effectively by the measure twice cut once ideas. An anecdote: a NASA software developer walks into a his managers office, saying it’s great that they finally committed so much code this week. The manager has a dark look on his face, no, he says, think of all the bugs we’re about to discover.
- Craftsman – interested in being better at what they do, but often lacks the tools to measure the betterment, or even get a baseline for how bad or good things are. Instead, they try new developer self-help programs (like Agile, etc.) and are always looking for the new thing that will help them be better.
- Coders – spend most of their time simply coding in, mostly isolation, generating a lot of code. Managers love these types, other developers tend to bad mouth Coders behind their back as (a.) the Coders output amount “ruins the curve,” and, (b.) their code is not always liked by the group.
- I just work here – just there for a good paying job, rarely works on becoming better but is often very dependable in getting work done, if only by using out of date methods…
