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Discussion on: Kinds of programmer

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kwstannard profile image
Kelly Stannard

In addition to what you have outlined, I find there is a set of focuses:

Business - Engineers that focus on the business they are working at.

Novelty - Engineers who keep their eyes on the next big framework or language.

Fundamentals - Engineers who focus on best practices. This corresponds to people who want to be level 3 I think.

Tickets - Engineers that don't really care about any of that and just get tickets done.

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conw_y profile image
Jonathan • Edited

Thanks for your insights!

Business - I would consider this to be the same category as 'tool appliers' or application developers. Basically a developer who applies tools built by 'tool-makers' to a business domain with help from business domain experts / 'tool-users'.

Novelty - I would consider this to be the same category as 'tool-makers', as essentially, they are creating a new kind of tool, whether that's a new framework, new language, new architectural style, etc.

Fundamentals - Yeah I consider this to be level 2 or 3. People whose problems require (or at least, appear to require) a deeper level of expertise than just 'make it work somehow'.

Tickets - I think this is also huge, both in number of people and depth of the skill. From the outside, it can look like simpler or more mundane or repetitive work, but from the inside, there can be a lot of depth and nuance in dealing with a large quantity of work. One skill is being able to switch quickly from one focus to another. A different skill is the 'intuition' that you develop, that enables increasingly accurate estimates of how long work will take. This might look like something that machine learning will eventually automate, but I think machine learning may struggle with work that is high volume and also constantly changing. Machines may get too focussed on the past data they've been given and fail to adapt to a changing context in the same way that a human mind could. This is all just conjecture, of course, as I'm no machine learning expert!

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Kelly Stannard

Ticket focus isn't so much about repetition or anything. This is all fluid and no one fits nicely into any categorization, but ticket focused people are the ones who always have end-of-year review in mind and know that knocking out tickets is the best way to look good to their boss. They don't necessarily care about the latest tech, or best practices, or even what is good for the business. They can be very smart people and that may even be why they are focused on knocking out tickets.