Are you a cathedral builder or a bazaar browser?

Have you ever heard of this classical joke?

There are 10 types of people: Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Today, I want to talk about yet another separation into two groups of people.

In the past week, I’ve come across a theory to distinguish between developers that a) like to deep-dive into a given topic and dedicate themselves to the absolute technically best and eternally valid solution and b) those that are happily trying to surround themselves with new stuff and try things out a lot, even not worrying about building stuff and then to have it to throw away eventually. [1]

The previous ones are called cathedral builders, while the latter are dubbed bazaar browsers.

The observation was originally made for open source software projects, which were either developed by a small number of tech wizards, closely guarding every change made to the project. On the contrary, a different style evolved, with open, massive scale development in the public. [2]

So which type are you? Are you motivated by change or crave stability?

Cathedral builder

As a constructor of a building of this magnitude, you yearn for focus, stability, purism and craftsmanship.

You want to be a subject-matter expert, being able to contribute to core areas of the technology stack and taking ownership to be the most knowledgable person within the company for a certain topic.

You are a cornerstone of the team, being the individual that everyone seeks advice from when they encounter something new.

You go deep, not wide. To obtain thorough knowledge, you might choose to practice deep mastery over newness and contribute to open source projects to contribute back to the community.

You show others their own ways. Being an expert makes you a good teacher, transferring the knowledge and being able to mentor others.

You revel in the details. Staying away from company politics and incomplete knowledge so you can focus on the small details that others might not see.

Bazaar browsers

As someone seeking excitement, variety, chaos and change to grow, you wish to sample as many sights and new experiences as possible.

You want as much newness as possible. Oh, is there a new project coming up? To have new challenges, domains and products, you’ll try to get in front of whatever new thing there is in the engineering department.

You build and throw away if necessary. So you are rapid-prototyping and it didn’t work out? Well, better luck next time, so let’s do it again. And maybe try some other new technology while being at it.

You avoid stagnation. The idea of working in the same area for a long time is rather a sign of stagnation for you than true mastery.

You might even like to switch teams. Maybe your team is a bit different than yourself, so you can totally imagine to stay with another one for a while to check out what they got up their sleeves, try something new and fun and take in the knowledge to then return with newly injected energy for your old team.

There’s a good chance that you probably talked with someone about your career perspectives, for instance whether to change into management at some point or not, but never touched on this topic before.

So take this as a food for thought and where you see yourself, not just leading to a better understanding of your needs but also how it shapes the interactions with others, be it in your team or department.

Thanks for reading!