The Doer, Planner, and other Programming Personalities

Your personality says a lot about you and how you react to the world. Several months back I found a programmer personality test that will describe how you like to program. Today, I decided to take it again to see how I’ve changed.

Originally I took it along with all the other programmers where I worked, and the results were valid. The guy who loved writing tight data structures in C was a “Low Level” programmer and the one who stringed 10 function calls on a single line to save space ended up being “Conservative”.

Both times, I came up as DHSB. Not a bad type for a freelance programmer:

  • Doer – I would rather get the general idea of a feature and then dig into the code. Most plans change as you start implementing.
  • High level – I love Ruby and she loves me. I’ve been flirting with Common Lisp just to learn how it’s macros work.
  • Solo situation – I prefer to work on a solution by myself or with a few people. I’ve seen too many bad ideas result from large meetings.
  • Liberal – To help support my High level, I try to build up abstractions in my code to make it easier on myself and my team. Since these are usually used by many people, I try to be extra clear so to prevent misunderstandings later.

I had my friend Peter Chester take it and he said this would be a good way to help decide who should work on a specific project. Got a prototype? You will want a Doer. Need an embedded driver for a cell phone? Low level is for you. Need a n-tier system? You will want a Team.

What personality type are you? Does it fit you?

Eric

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About Eric Davis

I founded Little Stream Software where I provide Redmine and ChiliProject services to help projects teams. I also created an ebook, Redmine Tips, were I show you how to become more productive using Redmine. I am also the author of Refactoring Redmine, where I go about refactoring Rails using Redmine as an example.

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