9 Types of Programmers You Will Encounter in the Workplace

This classification is not an analysis made by psychologists but was created due to many years of observation. Therefore, I do not claim the right to a thorough, scientific study of characters and personalities. Rather, I collected a handful of reflections — which sometimes with a pinch of salt — allowed me to make the typology below.

1. Paramedic

Usually pulled into the team when the deadline is approaching, and the project falls apart. He doesn't like sharing his skills and gives the impression that he knows some secret techniques that will allow him to solve any problem and save the project miraculously. He is impatient and nervous. Instead, he quickly learns new technologies, frameworks, and languages. Thanks to this, it can very quickly implement any project. Usually, it evokes envy. It isn't easy to make friends.

2. Introverted Perfectionist

A programmer is obsessed with perfection. Instead of magic, she prefers to write code honestly. She refines every detail, returns many times to the seemingly finished project, constantly finding something to improve in it. Writing the code takes her three times as long as the Code Wizard, but the quality is incomparably better. Projects written by others drive her crazy. She would prefer to rewrite them. She despises all deadlines. Only high quality counts for her. She needs a boss to temper his mania for excellence.

3. Theorist

A walking encyclopedia, he probably knows everything about programming. He absorbs huge amounts of books and spends his free time studying documentation. Woken up in the middle of the night, he can recite learned formulas and definitions. He constantly instructs others. Once he starts coding, he often pauses to check this or that. At times, it resembles a Perfectionist, refining the code.

4. Code Wizard

At first glance, it appears to be a coding master. He conjures up something out of nothing with ease. He doesn't need comprehensive guidance — he needs an idea or a succinct slogan of what he should do. Eloquent, outspoken, but not necessarily liked by his teammates. He programs lightning-fast, but he doesn't care about code quality as, for example, Perfectionist. He works best as a freelancer but often suffocates in a corporate corset.

5. The boss's favorite

He works in a team not because he has high programming skills. He can make appearances perfectly. He always knows what to say and how to behave to win the sympathy of the superior. He likes long tirades, but there is little sense or substantive information in them. It's everywhere. This makes it easy to build the image of "the one who knows."

6. Lord: You can't

He is known mainly for finding problems that generate new problems — and so on. A pessimist by nature, his favorite saying is No! However, he is not lazy, he looks for solutions, but his effectiveness is not very high. He can well implement a solution that someone else will show him. More a craftsman than a journeyman, he needs a master to guide him. He can bring anyone down. After a few minutes of conversation, a man wants to jump out of the window — even if it's the ground floor.

7. Precursor

He usually looks like a stereotypical programmer from an American movie — long, often thinning hair, sloppy clothes, constantly thoughtful. It does not descend to down-to-earth nonsense like a loan in Swiss francs or a new car.

Always one step ahead of the others. He lives to program around the clock. Finds technological innovations. When his peers played football in his childhood, he was among the few who installed Linux on a home PC in the last decade of the last century. A freak, but with a good heart, he willingly participates in open source projects.

8. The acronym

A man who can meet any, even the most unrealistic, deadline. He is not afraid of any deadlines. Wizard? No, trickster. He doesn't care about the quality of the code or the documentation. Does everything shortcuts, sketchy. Just so that it works, usually, however, it doesn't work properly. As a result, colleagues have to spend time correcting his "works."

9. Copy

His favorite keyboard shortcuts are Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V. Master of copying and imitating others. He doesn't know what he is doing. A programmer more by chance than love, although calling him a programmer is probably a major abuse. Usually, he is lucky enough to hide somewhere in the comfort of his office and has been working in one company for a long time. Sometimes he is unlucky and gets a job from a supervisor, and then without Stack Overflow, you can't move.

It will not be an exaggeration to say that there are, in fact, as many types of programmers as people are working in this profession. But maybe you will recognize yourself among the nine characters above?