🦄 Unicorn IT developers

I guess you have heard of the unicorn. It is a mythological animal resembling a horse or a goat with a single horn on its forehead. But have you heard of the unicorn developer? Who are they and how do you recognize them? She or he is a highly experienced IT specialist with a rare or broad skill set. Physically you can’t recognize her/him. You can’t notice anything special, like one horn. Nothing obvious allows you to see her/him, so it is a secret. It is even a myth.

The unicorn appeared in ancient myths of Mesopotamia, India and China. The earliest description of a single-horned animal was in the old Greek literature. It was the size of a horse with a white body, purple head and blue eyes and on its forehead was a cubit-longhorn coloured red at the pointed tip, black in the middle and white at the base. Those who drank from its horn were thought to be protected from stomach trouble and epilepsy. It was very fleet of foot and difficult to capture.

Now let’s go back to the present time. Who are unicorn developers? What skills do they have? First, they do exist, unicorn developers do exist. There are few of those in every IT company, they might be hiding because of company culture push them away or company management is rigid or non-competent.

Usually unicorns are full stack developers. But not every full stack developer is automatically a unicorn guy. Technical skills of unicorn developers calculate up to 20% of her/his overall skill set. If the developer thinks that technical excellence rules the world, be kind and give 22%. Yes, please do make a nice joke out of it. Technical skills count as little as mentioned, not more not less.

Rest of the 80% of the developer skill set is spreaded over various areas, like being a clean coder and a tool master. Unicorn developers rule over their tools that they work with, and promote their tools. Unicorns fear of the accidental complexity and talk about complexities oftenly. Just listen carefully!

Very important skill of unicorn developers is ability, mindset, a goal to do pair programming with another developer. To have a mindset of a teacher or a mentor is essential for the unicorn developer. Unicorns learn together, progress together. Learning different kinds of things usually goes together with willingness to teach one another. Hopefully unicorns will start to teach junior developers same skills they have. You are one step closer to start “breeding” your own unicorns.

Code quality increases when two developers are working in a pair programming mode. Unfortunately IT companies usually are not able to provide projects where two developers can work in pair programming mode. This is a bit of a code quality drawback cos investors usually decide to cut expenses. But on the other side, each of them can work on his own project. Yes, nice thing is that developers oftenly do like to “own” a project, to work alone on the project.

Unicorn developers have an eye for pixel size imperfections, eye for a UX bug and they know all the latest features in major market applications. Talking about unicorn developers and not to mention UX, UI, product design is not possible. There are a lot of “designers”, UX “experts” on the IT market. Actually, everybody working in IT has an opinion on this topic, or thinks he/she knows a thing or two about it. Your own unicorns, in my opinion, are the best designers you will most likely meet this year. Trust your unicorns, because they have years of experience, best coding practices and UX patterns in their heads. Don’t be afraid to use your unicorns as designers!

Testing and debugging is part of the developer’s daily routine. Testing, testing and some more testing of the code. Yes, it is done every day, with every development task done. I still giggle when I remember my unicorn developer excused himslef and his development work for being bug free to the client side QA team. QA testers live on finding and reporting bug reports, but unicorn developers don’t leave much development bugs behind them. Unicorn warned client QA team in advance! 😂

So, like mythological unicorns these developers bring only positive things to your life and business. Maybe you are an Enterprise size IT company starting your agile transformation. Maybe you are a startup owner and burning cache is your biggest issue. Maybe you are a Unicorn IT company (yes, unicorn companies also exist) trying to make your way to Enterprise IT world. Whoever you are in the IT ZOO ecosystem, join my pleasure working with unicorn developers.

Stay safe!

Kristijan Pušić, Engineering Manager, Setronica team