IT Archetypes: What Type of Programmer Are You?

This is a presentation of my book, “IT Archetypes”, initially published in http://pythonforengineers.com . Since it is not there available there any more, decided to revive it for codementor in a shorter version. Please get in touch to get a PDF copy of the book or purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1727118936. For GoodReads visit: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40968151-it-archetypes.

The main thesis of the book is that people in the IT industry belong to one of three distinct archetypes/segments: Commando, Infantry, and Police.

Commando: For Commandos their occupation is their passion and also prefer it when their work serves a purpose. They can wear different hats and work in many disciplines, say for example development/systems administration/architecture. They are also self motivated. While following a scientific approach they tend to want to do what is “right” in each given situation. They could also do what they do as a hobby. From my experience and anecdotal evidence they consist approximately 5% to at most 10% of the workforce. This percentage is even lower in other occupations.

A Commando would be the kid in the 90s that would experiment with a Linux distribution or in the late 00s would try to create a mobile application only to get an insight on how this new Android or iPhone thing works. At work it would be the person that checks Hacker News at lunch time and asks if some of the things they read there could be applied on the existing codebase.

Infantry: For an Infantry person occupation equals Career. They follow a more formal approach with their expertise being concentrated around specific technologies and methodologies: This is where your Oracle DB administrator and the certified SC(R)UMM master fit in. They are both self motivated and responding to external motivation. They are characterised by realism and would chose, in contrast with Commandos, not what is “right” at all the times but rather what is more feasible and possibly advance their career. Infantry consists approximately 10% to 15% of the IT workforce.

Police: For Police type employees work is only a “job”, a means to an end. They prefer to follow orders and do as they are told. This gives them some capabilities to specific technologies and methodologies always within limits with their motivation being only external. They want to be told what to do, when in question their favourite question is “How do we do this here?“. They consist the vast majority of the workforce in each occupation and also in IT (around 80%).

Having established the narrative with these three archetypes in the rest chapters of the book, following an approach similar to the individuals, these archetypes are discussed on a macroscopic level.

There is a similar alignment with stages and life cycles of companies. Some archetypes are more suited to different stages of a company’s life. For example a Police person when the company is new and the infrastructure is not there, would probably have negative impact as they would wait for someone to tell them what to do while at that stage they would need to decide what is the correct course of action and then implement it. Similarly a career oriented Infantry would feel sad in a place where nothing seems to evolve with technologies obsolete where he can get no skill to put in the CV for the next professional appointment.

Some other concepts are also discussed:

• How would for example a Commando or a Police guy feel and react to a typical workday or which are challenges in a company where most people have a Police mentality?
• How would they see and interact with an individual from another archetype?
• When do we have a hiring mismatch?
• When a company decides that it does not longer need its Commandos and how are they usually taken out of the picture? Can this happen to Police as well, and how? (spoiler: “yes“)

Similarly some companies boast that they hire and keep “the best” talented/employees around? How do they do it? Can it happen in your organisation? If not why? Why some organisations chose to change their approach and keep up with the current developments (say Cloud, Big Data, Lean) while others slip slowly into stagnation and irrelevance?

Target Audience

Book’s target audience consists of two overlapping categories. The first one is people that are working within the IT industry: developers, administrators, various designers, line managers, CTOs, QA engineers, and so forth. For them the content aims to assist in the “Know thyself” processes that happen internally and are expressed externally many times in a way that seems random to a potential third observer. An example would be a person who believes his skills are becoming rusty, he wants to advance his career and suddenly asks to write the next application the company wants to implement using go-lang or micro-services (whether it should or should not happen).

Other audience category are people whose professional life evolves around interacting with the IT industry people more or less within the first category. Those would like to “know thy friends” better: people in HR, sales, domain experts embedded within a technical team working on digitizing their knowledge or creating applications. Last but not least are poor managers without technical background assigned to manage technical teams.

Origins

IT Archetypes started many years before when I was an employee of a company which for the needs of this article I will call MegaCorp.

MegaCorp had a technology stack essentially pinned down to a specific design and approach that had fully matured at some point in the late 90s. How and why I ended up there is a story for another post, but my initial reaction was to be frustrated if not angry with my colleagues and management: “What is wrong with them?” was the initial thought, how can these people live in today while at work pretend we all are still in the 90s? After six months my emotional pendulum had shifted into believing there was something wrong with me: “Why I cannot enjoy life and am attracted so much to modern technologies?”, do I have a “Hacker News addiction”? Some months afterwards, frustrated again handling my resignation, had reached my final conclusion: I should not had joined MegaCorp in the first place.

Having an aptitude for theory and research as well as wanting to investigate why there was some job hopping before joining MegaCorp, started looking for answers and documenting them. Main product of this research is “IT Archetypes”.