INTJ's, ENTJ's, and PITA's
Anyone that has worked in a corporate dev environment (of any size) knows there are usually lots of different personalities among development teams. Some burn incence in their cubicle while listening to Enya and buying a VW Bug online, Some come to work smelling of smoke and beer and claim that they carry visine around because they wear contacts. I'm sure you've run into your fair share of them, and I alluded to some in my last post on this. I guess you could say "I'm back" or that this is "Round Two" of these posts, whatever. Here are some more I've had the honor of working with in the past.
1. The Bill Brasky Developer
I apologize if you're reading this and you don't know about "Bill Brasky". If you don't, then I'd encourage you to go here, here, or here before continuing on. So, I would guess that we've all met a Bill Brasky at some point in our lives, whether he was a developer or not. The Bill Brasky Developer is really a special treat though. He's the guy that makes you think, "oh, crap, we HIRED that guy?" when he moves into the cubicle next to yours. So you try to make conversation with him just to be nice. You know, just to feel the guy out, find out what his interests are, etc. The first thing you find out though, is that he talks about himself as if he's BILL BRASKY!!.
He says things like, "Did I tell you about the time I was invited over to Bill Gates house for dinner? So there I was, eating dinner with Bill and I say to him, "I have this idea for using markup that's kinda like HTML, but I can name the tags whatever I want...I bet it would be pretty useful!"...and sure enough, a few months later Bill comes out talking about XML!"
The more people that are listening to him, the more elaborate his tales become, too. If you're able to gather at least 3 people around him, you might hear something like this: "Did I ever tell you about the time Michael Dell and Larry Ellison were out to get me? So, Larry was trying to sell me into slavery by chaining me to an old Oracle rackmount server and shipping it to Indonesia, and ol' Michael Dell had killed all my relatives and put out a bounty on my head of free lifetime Dell support - dead or alive! Luckily I was able to escape before I left the U.S. and went on to play 3rd base for the Yankees and win World Series MVP!"
He would pontificate about his philosophies on JavaScript too, if you ever let him.
2. The Arch-Enemy of Arch-itecture
This guy is really tough to work with because, he most likely holds a PhD in something like Vetrenarian Dentistry and thinks his intellectual prowess in one field of study entitles him to be held in the same regard for software development. I mean, after all he does know all about Soft.Dev. theory. Regardless of the fact that he doesn't have any practical experience, he was hired straight into the company above you and you now take orders from him. This guy isn't very good as disguising himself, either. He'll give away his identity by saying things like, "Why didn't you use the Memento patten for that object? It's such an obvious choice." or maybe "I think we could really increase performance if we used the text editor I built for my masters thesis on Data Warehousing".
He will not be satisfied until he has over-architected every aspect of the system. He uses words like the Architect in The Matrix, too. "Ergo", "Cataclismic", etc. He'll never answer an easy question with an easy answer. He'll try to speak in metaphors and parables like you are one of his students.
3. Nepotism Boy and his sidekick Passive-Agressive Man(ager)
These two are rarely found together in the same office (or maybe not so rare?) but, I've had the priviledge of working together with both at the same time. Ok, to start with, Nepotism Boy only got hired because his dad is a Director. On top of that, they picked you out as the guy to play mentor to this lazy frat boy. He also mistakenly thinks his ignorance and laziness are cute and endearing qualities that will win you over like they do his clueless "wimmens" (as he likes to refer to them). This of course, puts you betwen a rock and a hard place...or I guess that'd just be between two hard places. Anyway, you gotta be nice to the kid or chances are daddy will hear about it and you'll lose your job yet again. You can't play too nice though or this kid will bring your job down with him into developer purgatory. "Dad said I should try to become a DBA. Can you help me with that?" you'll hear him say.
Passive-Agressive Man(ager) is the manager that, for some reason, hates your guts but doesn't have what it takes to tell you straight up. So instead, you'll hear things from him/her like, "Hey, we were running some performance tests on the app that you wrote...and well...the results weren't so great....if you're not too busy would you be able to come in maybe...Saturday or Sunday and fix that for us?".
This person may or may not have the last name of Lumbergh.
