The Myth of the Solitary Programmer

Programming is seen as one of the last solitary professions. The best programmers just sit in a room and crank out code. Every now and then someone slides them a pizza and some mountain dew and that’s all the human interaction they need.

ALL they need is a power jack and a box to do their black magic!

But as alluring as that myth sounds, it’s just not true. While it is true that programmers need blocks of solid time to do their work, to make truly great software they need other people. They need QA guys to test it; they need designers to make it pretty; they need sales guys to make money off it.

Every now and then you get one person who has all those talents, but that’s definitely the exception to the rule. Most of the best software in history was created by great partnerships of a programmer and design/sales guy.

Some books go so far as to so that you need to actively fear the “programmer in a dark room”. The one that totally disconnects from the rest of the team is the one the PMs begin to worry about.

Rule #31 in the classic Dynamics of Software Development is “Beware of a guy in a room”:

Regardless of whether the cause is bogus or healthy, the results of allowing a guy to stay in a room are uniformly fatal to the professional development organization. Beware. Extricating your project from this trap is nearly impossible.

Programmer’s that are plugged into a community often become better programmers. They challenge each other to learn new technologies and build more efficient software.

When I look back on programming career, I find that I did my best programming when I worked with other great programmers. Like many activities, iron sharpens iron.

Recently, I’ve started plugging back into programming communities by getting involved in places like stackoverflow and following the .NET blogs.

Every group needs its tribe and programmers are no different.