Types of Programmers: Interpersonal

As developers we are a rather unique bunch of individuals. Either development attracted us because of certain personality characteristics or we developed them based on the software development world. In either case we have a lot of interesting personalities within the community. These personality traits and styles come together to form certain archetypes. To the outside world these archetypes might seem quirky and strange. Some personality types are strange even within the development community. Rarely will you find someone who is completely a particular one but you’ll notice these traits, some stronger than others, in most of the developers you meet. While researching the different archetypes of developers we broke them down into three groupings: Coding Styles, Knowledge Expression, and General Personality. This is the second of three episodes talking about the types of programmers you’ll meet in your career. It focuses on the various interpersonal styles you’ll encounter. If you haven’t done so, go back and listen to our episode on coding styles. If you are familiar with Carl Jung’s 12 archetypes you might have noticed some similarities with a few of the ones mentioned. Take some time and reflect on which one you identify with and what your strengths and weaknesses are. This is not an exhaustive list of interpersonal archetypes. Instead it’s a group of the ones you are most likely to encounter within your career. While there are others out there you can use this list to better understand your coworkers, managers, and friends in the development community. Episode Breakdown The Bearded Wizard This wizard is the neck beard hidden away in the basement whom you only call on when you have a balrog to defeat. While verbose story tellers who have trouble staying on topic in meetings, these developers are the biggest hitter typically brought in on a project when something difficult or crazy needs to be built quickly. Also knows as magicians, their code is like magic, you don’t understand the technical aspects but just know that it works. When not having them solve the unsolvable problems have these developers working on some obscure area of the codebase, otherwise they will distract your workhorse developers with their stories of building their own Linux kernel. The Literalist The literalist is a person who likely knows a lot of details about the system and codebase, specifics so odd most others don’t even know them. However they have trouble when it comes to generalizing or focusing on the business use or how the users plan to interact with the system or app. They tend to get into the weeds and can’t see the forest for the blades of grass. Literalists do great with very detail oriented tasks that other developers find tedious but can’t be automated for whatever reasons. The Last In First Out The LIFO will give your task or project their full attention so long as you are the most recent person to ask for their assistance. Last person to ask anything of them gets their full attention regardless of priority. These people have trouble with larger or more time consuming tasks as they get easily distracted by the next thing coming along. The trick to successfully working with them is to isolate them while working together and act as a buffer for interruptions until they are finished. The Fanboy/girl Fanboys put way too much time into the things they do from anime to console gaming; obsession would be an understatement. The fanatic coder has their favorite language or framework and will never even think about changing, even asking them is an insult. The hipster only writes in VIM, even though they are given an Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio and work solely in .NET. It’s easy to fall into being a fanboy,