A Day In The Life of a Developer | Jeanine Jue

Anyway, so a day in the life of an engineer. I thought this was interesting. Stack Overflow, you should definitely check out the study there. They have developer, programmer, engineer, senior developer. Okay, I hate this, rock star. Never call anybody a rock star, I hate that. Rock star, ninja, leave that out in terms of— oh, there we go. Leave that out when you're looking for developers. So on a high level, developer, programmer, engineer. Programmer, they code exactly, if they're given a requirement, they code it. They don't do a class diagram. They don't design new components. They're just coders. And again, this is open to debate anyway. Developer, they can design some components. They can do a little bit of architecture, and they also code as well. Engineer, they categorize engineer as having some formal education, a bachelor's, master's degree, as well as being able to architect the whole system. But for the sake of this talk, I'm just going to refer to everyone as a developer. So now let's take a look at the evolution of the developer. So back in the '80s, that's when I started coding, but anyway, I didn't have a computer. I was taking a class at MIT while all my friends were going to these other cool camps. I was sneaking into MIT to learn programming and had to sign up for to access the computer lab and everything. So there weren't resources available. There was really nothing. I had a book and I was handwriting my code. And back in the days, of course, you had to use punch cards. And so getting into the '90s, okay, the technical resources advanced a little bit. There were more tools available. It was a lot easier. It was still somewhat easier to write code as opposed to having to deal with Fortran and all that other good stuff. stuff. So going to 2000, in the 2000s, now you're having an evolution of tools. It's all about simplifying the whole development experience for developers. Now look at— why does this shut down? Okay. Now look at Xcode. I mean, come on, drag and drop a button and then connect the action. It's like you don't have to write any code. It's the coolest thing. Back in the days, I was hand-coding everything. Writing printf statements, and look how simple it is. GitHub, open source, being able to share code with other people. Stack Overflow, they had 47 million visitors in one month, and you have all the answers in front of you. So there's a lot more pressure in terms of getting your product to market due to all the available tools. And ebooks, open source. I used to teach a class, a graduate course in iOS development. I had 50 students in the class. And this was like 4 or 5 years ago. And one thing I've noticed is that about 50% of the class actually copied their code line for line by taking projects from the ebooks, from some of the books and everything. So now it gets a little bit more challenging in terms of trying to make sure the code is clean, unique. and all that other good stuff. So I also looked at some other data. I wanted to know how many developers are in the world. So there's over 11 million developers. That was as of 2014. Now, 2014. Now there are 16 million, supposedly, who claim to be professional developers. Again, those aren't accurate numbers. Those are based on surveys and analytics. So just think about the pool of developers you have access to when building out your team. And then the types of developers, we have developers in the room. They're coming up with new forms of developers. Now you have Node.js, you have data science, the full stack, DevOps, all that other good stuff. But when you think about it for a startup, you wanna have an engineer who's well-rounded, who's flexible, who can go from one language to the next. And specialization of a developer kinda happens later on as your business grows and you have more funding. But the issue is, for now with all the online resources available, I mean, you don't need a master's degree for computer science. You certainly don't need a bachelor's. You can go online and learn. And so I'll also share with you some stories in terms of people hiring, and again, I'm not bashing these 3-month programs, but considering the stage that you're at in the hiring that you need to do, you really need to take a look at what type of developer you're bringing on board because you just don't have time in terms of training somebody, bringing them up to speed. I'm a huge advocate for hiring students in internships. I have a great internship at my company, but when it comes to a startup, it's just really, really too risky. So what is the developer personality type? Can't stand this stuff. So I'm an INTJ. You're introverted, Intuition. So is this true? Problem solvers do not take criticism personally. Yeah, right, I definitely do take criticism personally. Able to concentrate and focus. Oh, come on. We all have the developers, we all have the shiny toy syndrome. ADD, we go on to one bug, we can't fix it, we'll go on to something else. Then we'll look at Stack Overflow. Then we'll get curious about, wow, Node.js, how do you do that? Oh, come on, that's such a bunch of crap. Isn't it true? So when you're given a goal, they can generate all kinds of possibilities. Not really. I mean, if we go back to that slide, the top 20 reasons why startups fail is because they build a product that's not a market fit. And as a developer, I'll go into those phases where I'm building something over the weekend. Oh, this is so cool. It's like, what the hell am I going to use this for? And again, I don't follow the developer personality or anything like that because At the end of the day, I mean, you're just— we're all different.