Developer Career Patterns: An Introduction

When it comes to creating software, every good developer is aware of design patterns. In fact, for most aspects of the development lifecycle we have patterns and anti-patterns. However, there's a gap when it comes to a developer's career progression. So to address this, we're kicking off a new series on developer career patterns.

When I started as a developer, fresh from university, I thought that I'd always be just that a developer. Beyond that life a as a developer,  I could see only two routes available to me - management and architecture. 18 years later, and a little wiser, it's clear that there's a multitude of options available, all depending on your developer type. I want to explore these Career Patterns. 

The first half of the series will cover the definition of some developer personality types. For each of the personality types we'll list things such as the skills required, some (warning!) signs that this is you and much more. Here's the current shortlist: 

• The Top Gun Coder

• The 10X

• The UI/UX

• Full Stack

• The Helper

• The Problem Solver

• The Growth Hacker

• The Maintainer

• The Polygot

• The Squirrel  

• The Professor

• The Teacher

• The Salesman 

• The Has-Been

• The Maniac

With all of these defined, we can then move into career patterns which will show which personalities may be suited to each end-goal,  along with some advice on how to reach that goal. With more to add, that list currently looks like this:

• The Architect Pattern

• The Analyst Pattern

• The Director Patter

• The CEO Pattern

• The CIO Pattern

• The CTO Pattern

• The CMO Pattern

• The CPO Pattern  

At the end, we'll have a quiz so that you can find out what your developer personality type is, and what trajectory your career is currently taking. We plan to publish at least one of these articles a week, so make sure to keep checking back!