Developer Personas

Successful Developers

• View challenges as an opportunity to succeed.
• Seek responsibility and ownership over their projects.
• Have a high degree of “figure it out”, and know when to ask for help, and when to figure things out on their own.
• Are capable of working hard on a consistent, day-in and day-out basis.
• Like working as a member of a team, and being accountable to fellow team members.
• Seek accountability and enjoy the challenges of hitting deadlines.
• Are capable of focusing and single tasking. Aren’t easily distracted.
• Have strong time management skills.
• Are ambitious, and take their career seriously. Seek career advancement.
• Enjoy working during normal business hours as part of a team.
• They expect their employer to invest in their career success, and inturn, they invest their time, effort, and dedication into the companies they work for. They intend to spend at least two years at each company they work for, and ideally would stay much longer than that, assuming career advancement and increased compensation are available. Job hopping isn’t attractive to them and they understand that it can hurt their career in the long run.
• They enjoy working on new projects on a regular basis and embrace the challenges that come with learning new technologies and overcoming new problems.
• They have an extremely high level of ownership over their work, and take responsibility for the success and failures of their project. They are open to giving and receiving feedback in order to improve, and help others improve.
• The idea of becoming a cog in a wheel scares them...they’d much rather work with a small team of developers to build and launch new applications, than be one of hundreds of developers on a massive team working on a legacy system.
• They really enjoy working remotely as it allows them to focus without the distractions of an office. They aren’t easily distracted when working from their home office, and they aren’t tempted to engage in non-work related activities during the day, just because they are working remotely. They understand that their employer has placed a lot of trust in them, and they respect that trust.

Unsuccessful Developers

• Lone wolf developers that don’t like working as part of team.
• Have lots of personal obligations outside of work that they must attend to during normal business hours, and on a regular basis.
• Are easily distracted and can’t focus on a single task at a time. Work a little bit on lots of things, but can’t seem to get anything across the line.
• Like to take their time and work at a relaxed pace, even when they (or their project) is behind. If they are honest with themselves, they really only work hard about 25% of the time. The rest of the time they are kind of just going through the motions.
• They don’t like to be overly managed, but as soon as they encounter a problem they contact their manager and expect their manager to figure out a solution. They think their managers primary job is to solve problems for them, and then leave them alone the rest of the time. But, they also aren’t capable of managing their own time or figuring things out on their own.
• They don't understand the concept of pixel perfection. As long as a feature works, who cares if the user interface is pixel perfect? UI bugs are a normal part of software development so why bother fixing them?
• Software development is an art and a hobby, not a profession. Working for a business and coding in exchange for money is a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. They’d much rather spend their time on their own projects and open-source work...their job is really just an inconvenience that interferes with their true passion.
• In their view, software developers are in really high demand and it’s easy for them to get another job, so they might as well take it easy and ride out each job for a few months or maybe a year max, and basically do just enough to not get fired. Then once things get to challenging, find another job. 6-12 months is an acceptable duration of time to work for a company.
• Being a cog in wheel sounds pretty good to them...working within a team of hundreds of developers, where no single developer has too much responsibility, sounds about right. That way there’s no real responsibility or accountability.
• They really like working from home as it allows them time to do non-work related things throughout the day...things you couldn’t ordinarily do in the office.