Wednesday, April 07, 2021

The four kinds of developers

I'm probably going to go to hell (or worse yet, business school) for presenting it this way, but developers (or probably more accurately development tasks) fall along two axes:

One axis is gregarious/solitary

One axis is coding/non-coding

  • Gregarious+coding: pair programming, code review, group debugging, hackathons
  • Gregarious+non-coding: standing around a whiteboard figuring out an architecture, reviewing an incident together, hashing out requirements via discussions
  • Solitary+coding: put on those headphones and make the software work. Make it beautiful. Make it sing to me.
  • Solitary+non-coding: think hard about some really tricky algorithm. Gather a bunch of written input and write a design document.

Disclaimers:

  1. Unlike the classic 2×2 matrix, no quadrant is better than the others. Individual personalities, whether people happen to click, and other factors will push in various directions or towards a mix.
  2. This describes various activities on a technical track. I'm not trying to describe management track.

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