The two kinds of Developers

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Hi…

have you ever thought about the two fundamental types of developers?? OK, let me introduce my model to you:

Product Group versus Laboratory

Let us start with Lab guys first:

The laboratory developer:

* Short winded, things need to show quick results

* No care about architecture

* No care about security or performance

* Lots of ideas, very creative, thinks out of the box

* Willing to take risks

* Fails often but quick

* Typical work cycle: Idea – Prototype – Evangelize Prototype for broad usage

* Work cycle breaks on any position regularly because product fails

* Language of choice: Ruby, Python, Visual Basic, Expression SketchFlow was made for them

 

The product group developer:

* Stamina

* Cares a lot about architecture, security, quality, documentation

* Lots of ideas but within the box

* Failure is no option

* Risk avoidance

* Typical Workcycle is defined by a software development process

* If the workcycle breaks something severe has happened

* Language of choice: C#, C++, Java, UML

 

To bring it down to one word: Product Developers are all about engineering, Laboratory Developers are all about design. I went through my team and found good examples for both groups.

The better developer – product or lab? Both.

The answer is: You need both!! The lab guy helps you to be really creative and innovative but will hardly be able to deliver a profound quality product. While the product guy will struggle down any idea reaching to far beyond what we have today, those guys are able to build, deliver and maintain a quality product. Funny enough the lab guys normally take well build (product group) stuff and build on top. A shaky tower needs a strong basement.

More innovation – product or lab? Both.

Here again the answer is that both are innovative but on different types. While a product group does innovation in baby steps (start from the good that we have and extend a bit – not too risky – in a certain direction), the lab makes huge jumps but does not care on steady increase (I mean over several product releases).

Product and Lab – never mix!

Interestingly enough I heard a guy from a lab within Microsoft telling me that he normally tries not to hire somebody from product teams. In his opinion those guys are poisoned in their thinking (hey, he is a lab guy, ok?). He also told me that lab guys normally cannot switch to product groups because they tend to kill the process.

It is all about the handover. A company that is able to hand over ideas from the labs into the product groups is a killer…

CU

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