The Authoritative Guide to Programmer Classification (Funny)

Posted by: Rea Maor In: Humor - Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

The title comes from this blog, which did such a terrible job of humor that I’m going to start over and do it right!

“The Barnacle” Born a jelly-like glob, it swam through life until it accidentally stuck to the first solid object it happened to land on, then clung to it for life. “COBOL will never die!” “Real programmers do too use Pascal!” “I don’t care what it is, if it doesn’t run on OS/2 Warp I’m not getting it.” “BASIC is the only language I need!” “AJAX, bah! HTML 4.01 transitional is the only real web design language!”

“The Degree” As strange as it seems, these people are only in programming for the money, which is like being a plumber for the glamor. So their whole programming outlook on life is shaped entirely by the shortest possible path they could take through college to get the least demanding development job they could find. Go ahead, take his stapler. What’s he going to do, leave and go find a new career?

“The Time Bandit” Just like the giddy midgets in the science fiction movie, this young munchkin has discovered his awesome powers for the first time and is now displaying way too much power for one so irresponsible. He will scramble through technology with shrieks of hysterical glee as he mows down firewalls, rigs eBay with a single one-liner Perl script, writes an exploit for every system, and surprises the directory of the NSA by calling him at home at his unlisted number - for free. Just remember, Einstein, too, was once an 8-year-old child having a sugar rush from too much candy.

“The Paradigm Shifter” This guy has discovered the sobering business-world reality that you don’t actually have to write programming code if you can just babble in marketdroid-code all day whenever a manager is within earshot. It doesn’t matter what the latest hot new method is, as long as it takes a long time to say it, he’s in. “So after our code management effectiveness meeting, we’re going to leverage proactive synergy with our enterprise process strategic initiative through our digital design pattern initialization framework system.” Change his password and see if he ever notices.

“The Cellmate” And then there are the people who go into programming just so they can zone out on it. The quintessential person who never leaves their cubicle except for fire drills, these people are actually dangerous to some projects. Has the widget library been checked out all week long? Are you in staggering shock as you behold a four-thousand-line object initialization? Does the program run so slow that you can beat it doing the calculations in your head? Looks like the work of the Cellmate.

“The Ninja” It’s hard to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys, but it’s also difficult to soar gracefully at all when you’re chained by the neck to a Lear jet doing mach 4. The Ninja does everything in one, undocumented line in the most obscure language known to man. Variable names are one letter, and in fact the Ninja disdains letters at all, wishing he only had to type in punctuation marks. The Ninja would be a brilliant entrepreneur on his own, but then he wouldn’t have the fun of scoffing at the rest of you on the team for being “too stupid” to understand his code.

“The Burnout” Oh, technology does eat the soul, does it not? No matter how bright you are today, everything will change next month and you’ll have to start learning all over again. that’s a given, but the human brain can only take so much. Now the Burnout shuffles about sighing like a Douglas Adams robot, doing the minimal effort to get through the day. If the Burnout survives long, he develops a sophisticated set of strategies to spread misery throughout the department and evade having to work. Pray you do not follow where he has been, for all there is wasteland.

There’s plenty more I could think of, but you know what? I’ll bet even my commenters can think of funny programmer types than the original post!


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