Programmer Personality Test
June 14th, 2006 by JuusoPosted in Game Development
Couple of days ago, I took a programmer personality test. It takes you couple of minutes to do. Even though I disagree on S & B ratings (solo & liberal) I found the test quite interesting. Try it yourself.
Here are my results:
Your programmer personality type is: DHSB
You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.
High level coding, that’s true - but I also like writing on paper…
June 14th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Amazing how different we are :
Your programmer personality type is: PLTB
You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.
June 14th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Glad you liked the test. A little dissapointing that you didn’t agree with Solo and Liberal, care to elaborate on why? I’m looking to expand the test and fix a few of the problem questions people didn’t like so I’m looking for as much feedback as possible on where I went wrong. It was just a quick idea I had and decided to put together in an afternoon, had I known it would have been received so well I would have spent a little longer on it, I’ll just have to spend some more time on version 2.0. :D
June 14th, 2006 at 11:29 am
@Doolwind… well maybe it was just the liberal part being too “black & white”, because in reality I like to use white space & comments to simplify the task… but on the other hand: sometimes I’ll do it in more strict manner.
Maybe it was the “we are not writing on paper anymore” part that caught my eye ;) I’m writing on paper and that’s not the reason I can take up as much room as necessary. In this part it’s semantics…
I run the test again (and amazingly ;) got the same result again. Here are the 2 problematic parts in my opinion:
Question 10:
When you program you:
“Shut the door and the rest of the world out.”
=> I like to PLAN together, but work ALONE. If I need help, I can schedule or walk to other room to work in team, but I don’t like having 7 guys on same desktop.
Question 9:
You’ve been given a task to do that will take one man month, how big is the optimal team?
“1″
=> If 5 men would be put for task that takes only one man month, the overhead in controlling the team might get bigger thus making one month estimate hard for 5 guys (like… 5 guys would do it in 4½ days each, better chances with 1 man :). And I’m not saying that 1 man needs to be ME. It can be anyone. And 1 wouldn’t be optimal, I would have 2-3 guys doing it. :) If the job would take longer, then again I would pick 2-3 or perhaps 5 man to do it.
June 14th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
I got PHSL. Sounds like a new web language.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
DHSC
You’re a Doer.
You like coding at a High level.
You work best in a Solo situation.
You are a Conservative programmer.
Seems like I’m the only conservative here. ;)
I’m not anti-commenting or anything, but I think that excessive commenting does more harm than good. The Q12 (while an obvious exaggeration) is a very good example of this, I think, as the commented and verbose code took 5 to 6 times as long to decipher.
June 14th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I’m DLSB. I agree with most of it. Except perhaps the comments section. I know I need them sometimes. And I want to write more… But I usually put them in later to explain what the hell the code does. This is usually because I’m programming low-level code. Assembler is obscure sometimes, even when you get to use reasonable variable and subroutine names. The steps just don’t always make sense.
(PS - I only program ASM for hardware. I use C++, or whatever I can, on actual computers)
June 14th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
I got a PHSB rating, Planner, High Level, Solo and Liberal.
The first sentence of the Planner says: “You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution”. I realized I was really slow when I too a programmer test for a job at Cryptic Studios.
I spend so much time thinking and trying to come up with a good, solid solution!
Thanks for the link to this test!
June 15th, 2006 at 2:36 am
Interesting, I got DHSB as well. Doer, High Level, Solo and Liberal. I don’t believe that time is money, but I do believe that action is better than spending hours upon hours of planning.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:31 am
Hey I took the test and I got the same as you Jusso :) DHSB.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
I used to be the complete opposite. Into assembly, jumping in and coding, not enough comments etc. But after working for 10 years as a Delphi developer running a team, I pretty much had to change, and I must say it’s much better now.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I also got DHSB. But question 12 was really hard to answer, because it’s such an extreme example. Using comments is something I really had to learn in the industry :)
June 16th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
[...] Today, while reading some of my blog backlog, I found a programmer personality test linked to from Juuso at GameProducer.net. [...]
June 18th, 2006 at 3:24 am
Your programmer personality type is:
PHTC
You’re a Planner.
You like coding at a High level.
You work best in a Team.
You are a Conservative programmer.
I’m definately not anti-commenting. What I try to strive for is to heavily comment the interface, but sparsely comment the code. I find that commenting too much in the code makes it harder to see what’s being done. What I try to accomplish is smaller functions. If you can keep functions between 5 - 15 lines, it’s very easy to follow the logic- especially if variable names and function names are named in a self-documenting manner.
Comments in .cpp files should be used for especially ambiguous areas. But I tend to comment excessively in the header so that anyone who needs to use the interface will know exactly what the functions are intended for. After all, the interface is what most people are going to care about.
So, I think that adding a distinction between commenting in code blocks and commenting in header files would be an interesting addition to the programmer test. Really interesting though!
June 19th, 2006 at 10:36 am
I second that. I also try to use self-documenting variable/function/module names (helps understanding the code much, much better…)
These kind of tests are nice, now we just need to wait Doolwind to get V2 online ;)
June 19th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
There should be more than 12 questions. I had taken it four times and each had different results. I feel the most accurate of my results may be DHTC.
June 29th, 2006 at 5:48 am
PHSB
You’re a Planner.
You like coding at a High level.
You work best in a Solo situation.
You are a liBeral programmer.
I have to say though, that my results are strongly influenced by my lack of experience and knowledge in programming.