Developer Career Patterns: An Introduction
A new DZone original series focused on your career as a software developer.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.
Join For FreeWhen 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!
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
Comments