software engineer

Submit captions for this cartoon of “The Hotshot” in this post’s comments. And don’t forget to submit captions for the other Software Engineer Types as well…

The Hotshot

Smart and knows it, often quite young. Has great ideas and hacks crap together at midnight, then… is done.

Distinguishing Characteristics:

• Unfortunately has little appreciation for what it takes to actually ship software and thus never really finishes his features and his stuff is often fragile or just broken.
• Can’t be bothered with making sure his stuff is internationalized, thread-safe or designed to scale.
• Can’t be troubled to fix what he built because he’s on to the next thing.
• Detests “process” and all the process hangers-ons like QA, PM, Training, and Project/Program Managers.
• Doesn’t read the documentation OR reads the documentation and codes something “better.”
• Says things that annoy his fellow engineers and managers like, “If it takes Ed more than 2 days to do this feature, then he is seriously stupid.” But of course, Young Hot Shot never actually finished a real feature in just 2 days either. That is, if “finished” means working in more than just an obscure corner case scenario.
• Rarely seen without headphones or earbuds. Plays World of Warcraft and Halo.
• Drinks Red Bull and stacks empty cans up in his cube as some sort of offering to the God of Unmaintainable Software.
• All shirts purchased from threadless.com. Appears to either skate or snowboard. Green IM status 24/7.
• Natural habitat is start up environments.

Do you need this engineer?
Depends on whether you’re building something that a person will eventually need to use.

Project Pitfalls:
None, really, because you are not even on his radar.

Achilles Heel:
Cannot build evolvable, sustainable software.

Best Bet:
Convince him he’s a genius who really belongs in your company’s “Innovation” or R&D group.

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