Anatomy of a Corporate Developer

It's funny to watch these species wander around mazes of endless and monotonic cubicles of the corporate world. But don't be decieved by the crisp suit and tie and clean looks, the neater they are the dumber they get. So let's take a look from the uncanny consultant's view of what is a corporate developer.

First, let's determine where they are in the food chain. A corporate developer looks up at only two kinds of superior in the workplace, a clerk and a glorified clerk. His/her favorite term for open source tools are "freebies", freeware, shareware etc. A corporate developer is not really a programmer by heart, he/she only took the programming course because of its job market demand and is willing to get out of programming as soon as better opportunities pop up like taking up a Nursing course and eventually become a caregiver or better he/she wishes to become a glorified clerk ticking up timelines, gantts and some UML diagrams awefully, wrongly drawn.

At work, he's usually the nicest, sweetest smelling guy you can walk past at complete with designer ties and shoes, he thought he looks genius by putting a "The Geek shall inherit the Earth" wallpaper with Bill Gates' face on it. He/she thinks the meaning of JAVA is "Just Another Vague Acronym". He/she believes that the best solutions are the ones you can always buy. At the start of the day a corporate developer usually checks emails first instead of synchronizing his/her codes against the CVS repository. After updating his code, he will proceed back to checking and answering emails for the rest of the day. Corporate developer worships every author of books that's in his seatmate's bookshelf and every blogs that he shares his personal view regarding corporate development, that he/she even quoutes when arguing some important technical issues.

A corporate developer eats buzzwords for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He/she thinks that wearing a shirt with an IT vendor's logo embroidered in the left chest is awesome and geeky. He/she never touched a linux/unix box in his entire development career and never heard of Gnome. And normally, his/her language of choice is Visual Basic or anything high-level until Java became so hot, he/she jumped the bandwagon. He/she believes that good practices aren't necessary as long as the system is currently working. A corporate developer loves BEA even if he/she has been bitten by it, he/she will insist on using it on the next project rather than be "bitten by an unfamiliar snake". And they think learning while working is a waste of time.

This is sometimes sickening, if the corporate developer especially the male variety has some new cool gadget, he knows very well the intricacies and internal workings of that thing rather than the work he is supposed to do.

Comments

Anonymous said…
So sad but true. Some "real programmers" end up in the corporate world sometimes. It's frustrating to work with those who are not really IN to what they're doing. But ... this is the real world and one has to earn a living to pay the bills.
Anonymous said…
LOL. Indeed! I get a funny feeling that all of my developer-colleagues (not having the same citizenship as mine) are of exactly the same breed.

Damn! You really hit the spot! LOL
Anonymous said…
That's odd because the systems I develop as "corporate" developer are responsible for processing billions of USD seven days a week - 365 days a year.
Anonymous said…
Interesting post. Could you do a profile of the Real Developer?
Anonymous said…
You could consider this a gross generalization of the "corporate developer".

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