What I wanted to say even for the previous post is that this situation is not IT-specific. There are 20% of people who are kinda creative guys, who design sites, advertise, draw, sing and play in the movies. Bohema. Other 80% work in mines, drive buses, wash cars, build houses. They create most of the things.
In the same time, most of the jobs have the same segregation. 20% of cooks work in good restraints and visit culinary workshops. Others work in McDonalds.
I must confess that I found the part about the three personas inaccurate and rather uncomfortable to read; no man is one thing. On Monday youâre an Einstein, on Tuesday youâre a Mort⌠you cannot (entirely) reliably or accurately classify people and especially software developers. We are fickle creatures :P. Therefore I defiantly refuse to be labeled.
I donât buy into this â3 personaâ classification scheme, but I do agree that the vast majority of software developers out there are content with forgetting all about software development once they step out the office. That is just the way things work. You canât force people to take more interest in software development.
Perhaps the best approach in trying to help the â80%â is to offer people the chance to improve their skills, and let them decide if they want to take it.
Above all, we should all remember (by âallâ I mean software developers) that between the colors black and white there is an infinite number of shades of gray.
Really, it isnât about the personas - they are good for giving people a laugh, or scaring people into action for a little while when they discover they find they are a persona they donât want to be.
I think what it all really comes down to is advice that Bob Martin gave me and the company I work for when he was here giving us some training (of which I am grateful for and that the company I worked for payed for it)
Be a professional. This means take pride in your work and always be learning. Think of a doctor. We donât want our doctorâs to stop reading and leaning. There is always something new to know. It should be the same for programmers. The problem is that we have come to be perceived as simple cogs. So we need to change that: be a professional, and by being a professional others will emulate you, and slowly the field will become a respected profession, not just a field of employees.
And once that is done, the personas will fade away.
Iâve blogged about this; you can find it here: http://my.opera.com/alex_boly/blog/2007/12/04/ranting-types-of-software-developers.
To put it briefly:
- the Microsoft model is broken because it doesnât encourage every programmer to learn more about what is happening under the hood; it just gives the impression that programming is easy
- I have a hunch that if we analyze the way the 80% got so many, we will find out that they worked with tools promoting the idea that programming should be easy.
- There is only one situation I can think of where the 80% programmers are better for business: when the company is not selling software but man-hours. In this case, the profits scale with the numbers.
I had to stop, because I got really tired writing about it ;-). Itâs a difficult subject, but one that is important for us all.
Joel Spolsky held a speech at Yale about software development (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html).
I like what he says about one of the lectures he took on programming, and it is related to our discussion:
âThe best thing about CS323 is it teaches a lot of people that they just ainât never gonna be programmers. This is a good thing. People that donât have the benefit of Stan teaching them that they canât be programmers have miserable careers cutting and pasting a lot of Java.â
This completes my point above ;-).
Yup, I got Mortitis, I swear to the humble programmer gods that be that I want to produce the best code ever. I muck around in VBA, basically created my own job, converting to VSTO. And going to school full time for a BSIT. I read this religiously, and even pay attention to some of the comments, until a bunch of folks decide they want to be offened by an unoffensive post. It is well known that there is a 20% 80% split in almost any industry. I did 10 years military service and 20% were warriors, 80% just wanted a paycheck in a peacetime service enviroment. The 20% did 80% of the work, and fixed a nearly broken service from the inside out. So if you belong to the 80 you werenât here, if you were in the 20 you got awfully annoyed at nothing.
I didnât find the post offensive or controversial. On the contrary, I quite often find myself coming across people who, having not succeeded in some other field, jump into programming and do a bad job at it. In that respect, reading the previous post was more of a bitter experience.
However, I found the whole discussion and this follow-up quite stimulating and refreshing. It reminded me of the eternal duty we have to leave things better than you find them.
thanks, mate!
Good follow-up Jeff, though I personally think it wasnât needed. I knew what you were trying to say the first time around. 
I find that every morning I wake up and go to work believing what you mentioned in your closing statement, that ânot everyone can be reached. But some can.â However I only come home from work still carrying that attitude maybe 2 or 3 days out of the week. Perhaps thatâs why Iâm becoming more selfish and spending less time blogging/sharing/presenting and more time researching, building and playing. Perhaps if I tried to blog in the mornings, rather than the evenings I would find it easier to write and share.
Hey all of you⌠I am just a student bearly a 20percenter but i am improving day by day as you people coment so keep up the good work
Really good. And very true.
âThus, if you read the article, you are most assuredly in the twenty percent category.â
This is going up on my wall next to last yearâs Time cover where they named me man of the year.
Maybe Iâve just been extremely lucky, but I havenât met many developers that Iâd put into the 80% bracket. Could it be that there are less than 80%? Maybe the numbers are even reversed? Thing is, I think most people want to do a good job. They might only work 9 to 5, but while theyâre working they want to do the best they can, especially in this field. Hell, youâve got to be a geek to want to be a programmer, so youâre going to want to do a good job, right?
And Jeff, sorry about this, but if youâre serious about reaching out to the masses then you canât suddenly jump onto your high horse about VB and VB.NET. Yes, the C languages force case-sensitivity on you and you have to use curly braces (god forbid), but VB forces you to use bizarre words like Sub and End Sub (how do you tell where a block begins and ends at a glance?).
I normally enjoy reading your blog, hereâs hoping that this is the last of this rant.
hmm, so I am a 20% type. And as well, I am an Elvis type. hmm.
I donât quite see myself in that 20% group, but if the definition says I am then I guess I have to accept the fact and try to become an evangelist to the unconverted
Richard (who loves MS Access!!!)
Thanks for another great post Jeff, Iâve only recently stumbled upon your blog but Iâve devoured nearly 2 years of posts in the last few days. Iâm thoroughly in the same camp as far as developer personalities goes; the 80%-20% split seems pretty fair to me, perhaps even a little generous (towards the 80%). I think you did a pretty magnanimous job of explaining what the difference is, and why itâs not a bad thing.
I agree that software development, in my limited experience at least, has a larger percentage of genuinely-excited people than your average profession, and we need all types of personalities, not just the bit-breathing kernel hackers and compiler writers, to make the software economy run. The key to getting your point across on a delicate matter like this is to choose words carefully, and be very clear that the discussion is about diversity, and why itâs a good thing, and not elitism.
As my favorite spin on/use of the original Einstein/Elvis/Mort paradigm, Iâve linked to this post from my latest blog entry about making effective technical presentations at:
http://sparky.exofire.net/blog
The post is entitled âHow To Become the Illegitimate Lovechild of Don King and Steve Jobs (In 3 Easy Steps).â Keep up the good work!
-Matt
Great post Jeff, I agree with it.
I do agree that depending on the particular job at hand, an Eintein can switch into âElvisâ, or even âMortâ mode as needed.
And I also agree to the fact that a Mort will not switch into âElvisâ or âEinsteinâ regardless of the work at hand.
But the problem is not technological, is the attitude to better yourself. And that is what the 20% needs to address.
Cheers!
Jorge
With the most humble of opinions I offer this commentâŚ
I think this article is a perfect illustration of why IT is viewed as a cost center vs. a profit center in any company.
The purpose of IT is to facilitate business vs. tell the business to change the way you do things.
The problem with the 20%'ers is that they do not and continuously fail to understand this basic concept.
I think âŚI am an Elvis who is also a Mort with flashes of Einstein.
I guess what I am trying to say is that every type of a programmer has a virtue but most assuredly the Einsteinâs have no virtue in the real world. Letâs leave the Einsteinâs to Microsoftâs and Oracles of the world.
Just because it can be done does not mean it should be done.
I will give you a real life example: We were tasked to develop a system that creates a help desk ticket and that system should have the capability to go assign tickets to various inboxes and the manger can see all the tickets have to go through a work flow process.
Well, the dude / dudette ( thatâs what I will call the programmer ) decided to build everything from scratch i.e. a system which has classes called inboxes, classes call called inbox assigned and so onâŚand just to top it off the dude goes and pings the network to see if an inbox has received any new tickets etc.
Well, my question about hey what about MossâŚwas met with the strongest of objections simply because the dude wanted to implement Domain Driven design.
At least in the Mort / Elvis and most certainly not an Einsteinâs opinion a classic case of it should not be done simply because it can.
That being said the last line of this article was absolutely beautifulâŚleave the craft of software development better than we found it. Might I also add that if I have 1 more byte of knowledge about anything today then I did yesterday I consider it a successful day.
Jungian psychometrics is a lot better than these layman-conjured personas. Mort would likely coincide with ISTJ, Elvis with INTJ, and Einstein with INTP (Einstein was himself an INTP.)
You will find NTâs (especially INTâs) largely in the 20%. These are iNtuitive (abstract) and Thinking (thought-centric,) collectively called the Rationals. ISTJ and other types likely fall in the 80%. They are Sensing (concrete) and so programs are more likely to be lines of text on a screen to them than structures in their mind. They manage because they are aided by their Thinking, but again that thinking is more likely to be about whatâs on the screen than whatâs in their mind. You cannot exactly blame them for being who they are, and consider that they are no more deficient than you are superfluous. Could they have chosen a better vocation? Probably.
They are not beyond help, as long as we realize that what we mean by help is our own definition and not theirs. They probably are, as you say, unreachable. But there are things that are loud. Things like money, jobs, and bosses. And maybe coworkers.
(the four temperaments)
http://www.keirsey.com/handler.aspx?s=keirseyf=fourtempstab=1c=overview
Excellent article, Jeff⌠and one which I couldnât resist doing a rewrite of:
http://anima-engine.livejournal.com/73518.html
I only hope my fellow trans-brothers and sisters take it in good spirits⌠just having a little fun.
Oops. Never mind.
Essentially, the joke substituted the abbreviations CD, TG, and TS for Mort, Elvis, and Einstein, making the article mirror an unspoken elitist attitude at the fringes of our community. Itâs an amusing parallel if you happen to be a transgendered coder with a healthy self-deprecating wit. BUT, taken literally, it doesnât go over well.
Remind me not to tell religious jokes while Iâm in church. Some of these people are actually here to pray! Dâoh!
From the formatting of this post it looks like Phil Haackâs call to âreform Mortâ is a continuation of Paul Vickâs blog post on the subtlies of the issue.