“Developers can’t communicate,” “They prefer to be told what to do,” “they don’t like to deal with people.” We get it, they are typically unattractive, white males who are covered with acne and occasionally get up from their oil-drenched seats to get another Mountain Dew or ask their mom for more meatloaf.
Stereotyping developers can be damaging to the tech industry, completely inaccurate, and hurtful to individual developers.
Today I was sitting in a Scrum training class watching someone describe generic “Team” characteristics (referring to the development team’s personality traits). Some of the characteristics were “bad at communicating” and “needed to be told what to do.” These are just two of thousands of blanket statements I have heard about “all” developers and it pisses me off.
Why it is damaging to the tech industry?
Women in tech has been an extremely hot topic lately. I haven’t been on a team yet that wouldn’t benefit from increased racial or gender diversity. Development teams composed of a diverse group can often leverage their varied backgrounds to tackle problems differently than a group of like-minded developers. The stereotypes we have applied to developers have increased social barriers to women and other minority groups considering joining the tech workforce at a time when developers are in high demand and would benefit from diversity.
Below is an image from the blog article “2 out of 3 developers are self-taught, and other insights from Stack Overflow’s 2016 survey of 50,000 developers.” It shows the extreme shortage of women in the software development workforce.
I’m not a woman but if I were one, I would be repelled by the sausage-fest of nerds with no social skills that society defines as coders. The way we refer to developers is reinforcing the barriers around working in technology. In fact, this is the exact group that society claims repels women–just watch any of the four “Revenge Of The Nerds” movies.
I have been writing code professionally for more than seven years and have had the pleasure of working with all types of different developers. Some that would be better titled as “product owner”, “designer”, or “account manager” but preferred to write code for whatever reason. Some that didn’t conform to genders, and some developers I have seen could hack even the most secure of applications but still be the center of attention at a party. My point is that these stereotypes are inaccurate.
To be empathetic here, I can see why some people think developers suffer from social disorders. To become a developer takes an exorbitant amount of screen-time writing code, debugging issues, and diving deep into logical problems that take your brain’s full attention for days at a time. It’s not that developers love to sit in front of a computer 24 hours a day, it’s what the job demands of them to be successful.
Stereotyping developers can be completely inaccurate, damaging to the tech industry, and hurtful to individual developers. Developers are normal people just like individuals in accounting, HR, legal, sales, and so on.
#ILookLikeAnEngineer is a great hashtag that I encourage everyone to take a look at. It’s meant break down social stereotypes of what an engineer should look like.
If we want to create a diverse work force we need to start referring to developers as individuals and not just units of work. And fellow developers, please speak up when people mention that all developers are “socially awkward ” or “aren’t good with people”. It’s reinforcing the inequality gap.
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