Interesting traits of software developers

In my near 8 years of experience in IT industry, I have come across different types of programmers. Saw some interesting traits in these geeks, which sometimes make me smile. This is a light hearted post not to offend anyone. I might myself have been one of these stereotypes at different points in time.

1. The geek who believes he owns the product. The software is his fiefdom and he would not share his knowledge or let anyone near 1000 lines of the business logic.

2. The geek who always thinks the last book of technology/design pattern he has read is applicable to the current problem.

3. The geek who believes that the way a problem was solved in his last project is the best way to solve the problem.

3. The geek who never seems to get it right, patch after patch introduces newer problems in his code.

4. The geek who wants to tell about every little issue to the management, to let them know how hard his job is.

5. The geek who believes he is a genius and keeps testing himself on online IQ tests, lest his IQ might erode.

6. The geek who believes coding is sorcery, there is something mysterious about code and the computer can at times do strange things which it was not intended to do. There are issues which can not be solved by mortal programmers.

7. The geek who suspects the libraries and frameworks every time his program crashes.

8. The geek who believes, the more complex a piece of code is - the better it is.

9. The geek who always misses timelines and looks forward to the next release to deliver features.

10. The geek who always believes the requirements and design were in-adequate and there is never sufficient time to complete development.

14 interesting trends identified by the Startup Genome Report

Interesting stuff lifted from Techcrunch, only because I want to go back to it when I get a chance.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.