The 9 Types of Programmers and Why Some are Better than Others

Written by dominik.t | Published 2017/01/24
Tech Story Tags: programming | software-development | tech | javascript | types-of-programmers

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

Why don’t you learn a different language you JavaScript fanboy? 😀

The young genius

I didn’t choose programming, Programming chose me.

The person that is the most excited about 'the next new thing' out of the whole team. Almost always a young male that knows way more about programming than he should, spending 90% of his spare coding, ALWAYS SELF TAUGHT.

He always follows the trends and 'the next big things’ so feel free to talk to them about machine learning, web components, progressive web apps or server side rendering. This type is also referred to as a computer, as they can just look at a code, understand and process it like a computer with a rare natural ability to do so, often really good at maths.

The slow typer

The type that we all just can’t look at while coding. Reaching 30 words per minute is a rare occasion for them.

The hipster

Uses JavaScript, python, go lang, rust or swift. Codes with best programming conventions, keeps the code nice and clean. Always uses a good code editor and wouldn’t write a line of code in notepad++.

The data scientist

  • Knows python and nothing else
  • took maths and is pretty good at it
  • likes statistics and likes to mess with images.

Ninja

Called ninjas, but not because of the skills they possess, but because nobody knows they are in the team as they simply can’t code. They keep hiding in the darkest corners until they get fired.

The proof that a degree doesn’t mean anything

  • Doesn’t care about password safety
  • has no idea what clean code looks like because this type never wrote it.
  • shows that a degree means basically nothing

The security expert

Knows everything about security. Often uses Kali Linux and doesn’t care about ethics. MITM, aircrack-ng and curl are his everyday friends, as he basically hacks for fun.

The sage

Although has a lot of theoretical knowledge and experience, does less work than the young and skilled while getting overpaid. Has no idea about the newest trends and only uses C, C++, Fortran and Pascal.

The fanatic

This type will use their favourite language or framework for everything all the time. They will never consider switching believing their tooling is better. They pretty much always know one language and never even attempt to learn another. They are often more focused on syntax and libraries than building actual apps, games, websites or whatever they do.

bonus — the money waster

This is the person that spends THOUSANDS on boot camps and tutorials and never even manages to put a single app in production.

conclusion (updated)

Although today we don’t have enough programmers, there is just way too many of those unqualified programmers that’ll help either don’t do any work, have poor communication skills or are just toxic. I know that working with a team with one of them in it might slow down the whole project or even destroy the team itself. If you think you are classified one of the toxic or useless programmers, why don’t you find a different job?

No matter what you enjoy, keep doing it, unless you are very bad at it.

Remember to leave a like 💙 so more people will see this. Also, why don’t you comment what type of a programmer you are? I’m curious to see what’s the most common one.


Published by HackerNoon on 2017/01/24