4 signs help you spot out a developer or an IT
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The Confidence (crave??) to remake everything
Developers need to work on people’s code in most projects; due to lots of reasons — a rewrite of the codebase could be easier to maintain (assume the developer would be working in the company for a year or 2). Hence remaking the code pieces are a primary “task” everyday (let’s use a better word — “refactoring”)
As days and experience accuumulates so would the confidence. Confidence would drive us to feel “nothing is impossible” and hence… “let’s remake something”.
:) Alright the confidence to remake something does not mean it always work though.
if-then-else for decision making
Developers kind of … talk in a style covering “if-then-else” quite often. Take an example:
Sam: do you think we need to take an umbrella today?
Josh: If no rain then no need to have an umbrella, or else… we better take one.
Sam: um… that means take or not?
Josh: Alright, if the weather forecast from Google said that no rain for today, then no need.
(Josh starts to Google)
:) this kind of conversation happened quite a lot when my development team was brain-storming. We even started drawing flowcharts on the whiteboard based on the if-then-else points. Then if your friend is using quite a lot of if-else conditional arguments in a conversation, that might be a developer~ (see… I am using the “if” condition just now as well)
Let’s talk in Messengers (even I am next to you)
Even for me… I would use messengers to communicate with others in nearly all conditions. Some of my friends actually asked “why ya text me? I am just next to you”.
My experience is… developers work long hours in front of the computer PLUS recent years REMOTE working (i.e. work from home) is a norm, there is no real person for you to talk with, hence it is normal to use messengers to communicate. Also after a year or 2 working from home, when you have to chance to meet a real person, that would be quite awkward mentally… hence let’s dive back into the messengers :DDDDD
Another reason why messengers are a default for developers — able to send a lot of information and multimedia files involved in the conversation. This is very essential for developers’ day to day workflow, messengers are the next most important communication tools comparing with emails.
Heavy usage of Jargons
People in the IT field talk in a style where lots of technical terms and jargons are flowing through the conversation. Take an example, the following is Macbook Pro’s specifications on the display unit:
16‑inch (diagonal) LED‑backlit display with IPS technology; 3072x1920 native resolution at 226 pixels per inch with support for millions of colours
within the sentence, it ended up with 4 technical terms / jargons — LED (light emitting diode), IPS (in-plane switching), native-resolution (the number of pixels supported) and pixels (a dot on the screen that makes up the whole image). But a simple description could be just … a very powerful and vivid monitor :) see what I mean?
Somehow developers should not to be blamed all the time; since the IT industry indeed is introducing lots of technical terms, abbreviations and jargons to the documentations, when non-IT people are trying to read them… it could be quite frustating sometimes due to the huge amount of new vocabularies.
Side-Story: around a decdade ago, the market introduced a product named OC4J (Oracle Container for Java) and at the same time there were also a few J2EE (named as JEE nowadays) Application Servers. To be honest… a “Container” is equivalent to an “Application Server”, however since the companies behind the technology are different, significant terms used by CompanyA might not be available for CompanyB (some terms represent a patented technology); a new term had to be invented to describe the same term. Of course, companies might also want to use a brand new term to outstand its’ product as well (distinguishable)~
These 4 signs are just some “opinions” given from my non-IT friends. Of course I am sure there are lots more special behaviours to discover.
:P
