Developers work with a lot of different people, but they know the personalities when they meet them. Web development, and programming in general, attracts people from all backgrounds but you still seem to meet the “same people”.
There are some kindred spirits in the developer realm and you’ll run into them almost everywhere you go. These are some of the interesting personalities I’ve run into across the teams I’ve worked with. Feel free to add on to the list in the comments!
The Cutting Edge One
Every developer stays up to date with what’s happening in their tech stack to some degree. Then there are those who are so far ahead that it’s like they’re making predictions. There’s at least one of these people on most teams. They always tell you about a new library they played with or an interesting piece of software they’ve started using. Remember when they were talking about Docker before you even heard of it?
The Cutting Edge is great to be around if for no other reason than how much you can learn from them. They always have some kind of side project they are working on and they typically know about the newest things in the tech stack or in web development in general.
The Friendliest One
You never mind working with this person. They have a great relationship with just about everyone in the office and a majority of the clients. Most of the time you’ll see them trying to help someone figure out a problem or just talking to somebody. They have the technical prowess of any silent developer and they have the talents of a social butterfly.
When you don’t know where to go with questions, you usually start here. They’re the developer on the team that makes people feel comfortable. They make you feel like you can have fun even though you’re with your co-workers at work. Even when it’s time to dig into some serious work you can count on them to make one last quip.
The Eccentric One
They are just different. They’re brilliant, but there are some real quirks in there. This person is typically one of the smarter people on the team and they just have a their own way of doing things. You might go to their cube and find three empty cans of cream soda, a rock, and the monitor brightness turned to 10, but that’s really all.
Most of the time the stuff they come up with fixes problems the team has been facing. They’re able to take a user story and pull tasks out like no other. They also come up with incredibly useful ways to work with a tech stack. They’re the person on the team that knows how expressions trees work and they can implement it in a way that doesn’t destroy a project.
The Non-Jargon One
They know what they’re doing when it comes to code, but don’t ask them any questions using jargon. For example, you can ask them to make a class where the type is defined later but don’t tell them to use generics. You’ll hear lots of descriptions from this person until they pick up on the jargon. In the meantime, using technical terms with them is like speaking a different language. Be patient and be prepared to explain a lot.
This person doesn’t even have to be a junior developer. There is so much jargon that some developers have given up on keeping up with the changing terms and they just describe what they’re doing. It can make both helping them and getting help from them more informative because they get really detailed in their explanations. Over time though, they typically pick up the programming lingo. Plus you become a better developer in the process because you have to really know what you’re talking about to understand what they are talking about.
BONUS
The Senior Dev
They always seem to know the answer no matter what. Even if they have to Google something, they still seem to search for it differently. There are different kinds of senior developers, but I’m going to focus on the master level ones. These are the people that not only know more about code than you’ve heard of, they’re really happy to help others learn.
They come through with the one line code changes that fix the disatrous deploy. They’re able to jump on just about any project and help where they’re needed. The senior dev is full of advice from tech stacks to career paths to life in general. Sometimes nothing else beats experience and they have plenty of it and are willing to share.
Hopefully you got a little chuckle out of this. These are some of the personalities I’ve run into during my wanderings. Thankfully the majority of the web development community is incredibly friendly, but there are still some butt nuggets hidden in there. What about you? Are there any distinct personality types you seem to run into no matter where you go?
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