Personality theories help understand why people behave the way they do. In the latest edition of our Developer Nation survey, we incorporated a measure of the widely accepted ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions in order to better understand the personality traits of software developers.
Let's dig into some of our findings and discuss how this kind of information can better be used.
Personality measures are a powerful tool for understanding people's preferences and behaviours.
Software teams need diversity not only in terms of skills, experience, and knowledge, but also require a variety of personalities to collaborate effectively on complex and challenging projects.
We used the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) methodology in order to measure the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions. These dimensions are: emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The TIPI method is well-suited for situations where short measures are required, and the results have been shown to have good alignment with other widely used Big Five measures. Although more comprehensive and accurate personality measures than TIPI exist, they typically require an entire survey to themselves.
Below, we show responses to these items for over 12,000 developers. We find that developers, in general, see themselves as complex and open to new experiences (86% agree or strongly agree that this applies to them), dependable and self-disciplined (79%), calm and emotionally stable (76%), and sympathetic and warm (74%).
Diving deeper into the TIPI data allows us to identify more specific personality types within the general developer population. We collapsed these ten items into five distinct measures, one for each of the Big Five personality dimensions. For example, statements about being ‘sympathetic, warm’ and ‘critical, quarrelsome’ combine to give an overall measure of agreeableness. We then derived a score for each developer on each of the five dimensions and identified the developers at the polar ends of each dimension, e.g. labeling those who are at the top end of the agreeableness scale as ‘agreeable’ and those at the bottom end as ‘disagreeable’. Finally, we segmented all developers into a set of distinct personality types, using the personality labels that they had been assigned as inputs to our segmentation algorithms.
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Τhe following charts show the characteristics of five example personality profiles revealed within our data. A well-rounded, ‘balanced’ personality type accounts for 52% of the developer population. These are developers who sit firmly at the centre of each dimension; neither introverted nor extroverted, highly agreeable nor disagreeable, emotionally unstable nor lacking emotion, etc.
Approximately 8% of all developers differ from the aforementioned group, with a higher level of openness to experiences – often related to intellectual curiosity. These software developers have personality traits that suggest they are likely to investigate new tools and technologies and stay up to date with the cutting edge of technology.
5% of developers fit a ‘responsible and cooperative’ personality type. These developers score highly in conscientiousness, openness to experiences, and agreeableness in comparison to the majority of developers. Increased conscientiousness often relates to setting long-term goals and planning routes to achieve them – e.g. being career-driven – while higher scores for openness to experiences reflects a preference for creativity and flexibility rather than repetition and routine. Our data backs this up – these developers are more receptive to personal development-related vendor resources, e.g. 35% engage with seminars, training courses, and workshops compared to 25% of ‘balanced’ developers. Their high scores for agreeableness also correlate with greater engagement with community offerings, e.g. 23% attend meetup events compared with 17% of ‘balanced’ developers.
5% of developers conform to an ‘achievement-driven and emotionally stable’ profile. As with the previous personality type, they are conscientious and open to experiences, however, they score much higher in terms of emotional stability but slightly lower in terms of agreeableness. Developers who score high in emotional stability react less emotionally – e.g. favouring data over opinions – while lower agreeableness can be a useful trait for making objective decisions, free from the obligation of pleasing others.
We also find a segment of developers with an ‘introverted and unreliable’ profile. They indicate that they are less involved in social activities, disorganised, closed to new experiences, and less agreeable than other developers. Fortunately, these developers, who are likely hard to reach and engage in new activities and communities, are a very small minority, at 2% of all developers.
When it comes to where developers go to find information and stay up to date, perhaps unsurprisingly, the ‘introverted and unreliable’ personality type uses the fewest information sources overall, affirming that they are a difficult group to engage via community-focused events and groups. However, their use of social media is in line with other personality types, suggesting that this may be a suitable channel for catching the attention of this hard-to-reach group.
Both of the high-conscientiousness and high-openness personality types use the widest range of information sources overall, however, those who are more cooperative are considerably more likely to turn to social media for information about software development (53% of the ‘responsible and cooperative’ type vs. 44% of the ‘achievement-driven and emotionally stable’ type). ‘Intellectually curious’ developers are the most likely to make use of official vendor resources and open source communities. Hence, the audience that vendors reach via these resources may be slightly more keen to experience new products and offerings, than the typical ‘balanced’ developer.
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