Computers and machines work for us without us even knowing “how” exactly. There are also those geniuses who can talk and manipulate them in such a way that it benefits us in our daily lives to an even greater extent than we could imagine.
For those that have worked with developers know that they come in all shapes, sizes and personalities. They have their unique skills, characteristics, quirks, and drives to do what they love most: programming.
We found ten different personalities. In this first part of two blog posts, we want to describe five of them.
Personality 1: The Paper Shredder
Probably the reason why this personality type has reached the top of this list is that most programmers don’t like paperwork and other forms of documentation related to their work. Who blames them?
There are plenty of perfectly good arguments why this personality trait makes an appearance. After all, good code is easier to read than sifting through all the comments, right?
Paper shredders are fully aware of the importance of proper documentation, but they prefer to rely on self-documenting software that innately keeps track of all the changes and adds comments given the context.
Disliked software documentation examples are:
- Marketing documentation
- User documentation
- Requirements documentation
You can find Paper shredders mostly in agile software development since the whole agile methodology is supposed to help with avoiding unnecessary activities that do not bring value directly, which to many developers means documenting their work.
The dislike of documentation does not imply they won’t do it. They will do it but more as a means to satisfy management.
There are always exceptions of course. I know a couple of developers who got creative and managed to create code that does the writing for them.
Personality 2: The Future Chief Information Officer
Some of the most brilliant programmers I’ve met are ready to become the CIO of tomorrow. They can write great code, express great people skills, and know how the job can get done by using their favourite programming pattern: delegating tasks.
The willingness to help and being up-to-date about the organisation and its issues characterise the future CIO.
They are great in coming up with arguments that pertain to the skills of others, processes, procurements, and requirements to get the job done and are always open to debate and discuss what is better for the company regarding IT.
Personality 3: The “Ghost-Writer”
Remember the good old times where you had to work in groups on a daunting assignment given by your least favourite teacher related to your least favourite subject.
The moment you get to know your team members things you might realise that the project won’t be so harsh since they all seem enthusiastic about it. However, then there’s this one person, the team member who takes advantage of the hard work of others. This personality type also makes a frequent appearance in the world of developers.
They made it out of college after years of flirting with open source code and bringing all kinds of indirect “peace offers” like cookies and drinks to cover themselves for the buggy and messy code they delivered, causing the delivery time of the project to be performed under a lot of stress and extra work.
When they finally leave college, they often find themselves working in teams with people who have a real job with real responsibilities and unfortunately Pretenders are smart enough to get away with similar quirks.
Pretenders are usually the first in line to take over the tasks that not many would like to do such as keeping the build tool running or merely talk about the right names for the methods and configuring them without actually writing the instructions inside said options.
This programmer type gets much negative press in this article, and to some extent, it’s justified. They are not bad performers per se. Instead, they opt for doing different kinds of tasks that others don’t like doing.
Personality 4: The Paranoid Coder
Paranoid coders are extremely helpful when you are under a cyber attack, but often they don’t fully recover from the shock. This behaviour usually results in them not being able to stand down most of the time.
They know you said that a layer of encryption is good, but they think it’s better to add ten more layers and a dozen extra digital signatures as well. Bear in mind; they can’t be keystrokes since keyloggers WILL compromise those passwords without too much effort.
It is good to have Paranoid Coders on your team. It’s better to have someone who is TOO careful than someone who is reluctant to double-check the discussed security measures.
Personality 5: The Does-It-All
They literally will. All the time.
This type of programmer is especially good at handling simple requests and does a pretty good job at it. It often depends on the magnitude of the tasks in question. Ask them out for a quick break away from the desk and they will answers with a “yes” or “no”.
Ask them about a more daunting task, and you will get the same response. However, this time you will not be able to pinpoint what the result will be.
In short, they are happy to take on multiple tasks at once. The biggest issue that arises is often they accept TOO many assignments with a diminished quality in their output as a return. They can act as a “buffer zone” and enable others to be more productive while not being as productive as they could be.
