Types of Developers You'll Meet in Every Team
Every software team, anywhere in the world, contains a familiar cast of characters. I've worked in several countries and companies of very different sizes, and these people were always there. Sometimes I was one of them. Usually several.
The Rewriter
Looks at any code older than six months and declares, "We should rewrite this from scratch." Has rewritten the authentication system three times. Each version introduced new and exciting bugs. Genuinely talented, mildly dangerous.
Superpower: clean architecture. Weakness: believes old code is ugly rather than battle-tested.
The Archaeologist
Knows why every strange line of code exists. "That if statement handles a customer in Belgium from 2017 whose dates were in a different format." Will save production with a single sentence of historical context.
Superpower: institutional memory. Weakness: the knowledge lives only in their head. Please, write it down.
The "Quick Fix" Hero
Fixes production at 2 AM with a three-line patch and a commit message that says "fix." Everyone is grateful. Nobody can explain the patch three months later.
Superpower: speed under pressure. Weakness: the word "temporary" in their commits has a half-life of several years.
The Documentation Saint
Writes READMEs. Updates them. Adds diagrams. Answers questions with links to the docs they wrote. Rarely gets thanked enough.
Superpower: makes everyone else faster. Weakness: none. Promote this person.
The Meeting Philosopher
Turns a 15-minute standup into a 45-minute discussion of whether we should use microservices. Raises genuinely good points at genuinely bad times.
Superpower: big-picture thinking. Weakness: time.
The Silent Genius
Says nothing in meetings. Submits a pull request at 6 PM that quietly solves the problem everyone argued about for a week.
Superpower: results. Weakness: nobody knows what they're working on until it's done.
Honourable mentions
- The Tab Hoarder: 147 browser tabs, each "important."
- The Keyboard Enthusiast: owns four mechanical keyboards, can describe each switch's sound.
- The Dependency Collector: adds a new library to format one date.
- The Linter Enforcer: will block your PR over a missing trailing comma, and is technically correct.
- The Vim Evangelist: (I'm told this one is me.)
The serious bit
A great team needs most of these people. The Rewriter improves architecture, the Archaeologist prevents disasters, the Hero keeps things running, the Saint keeps knowledge flowing, the Philosopher spots strategic problems and the Silent Genius delivers. The trick is recognising each person's strengths, and gently helping the Quick Fix Hero write a commit message longer than three letters.