Go to Personality Test

Take the exam and use your results to find the technical career that may fit your current strengths and traits. Research completed by Evans Data Corporation. (n.d.). Retrieved July 18, 2018, from Evans Data and presented by Stephanie Conley.

Software Developer Personas, a guide to understand and finding the right software development career path for you.

Full Stack Developers

Description:

Persona:

ENTJ, ESTJ, INTP. Let's see if we can make this work! Likes to be able to do more than one function or part of the job. Enjoys being hyper-productive and competes with self and others to be the go-to source for information in multiple areas.

A full stack developer is an engineer who can handle all the work of databases, servers, systems engineering, and clients. Needs to be proficient in a server-side language such as JAVA, PHP, C #, Python, Ruby. Also needs to know Javascript thoroughly and understand API’s and how they connect to the front end. Needs to be proficient in frontend web languages and libraries like Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, SASS.

Front-End Developers

Persona:

ESTJs, ESTPs, ENFP’s and ENTPs These are the Magicians of web development. These individuals are fascinated by human interaction and the driving force behind what we as humans do. Imagination is a key trait, they can take a product design concept or idea scribbled poorly on the back of a napkin or broken down in complete requirements and create an elegant app solution.

Description: Front end developers use JavaScript, HTML, CSS and

other tools and libraries such as Bootstrap and SASS to bring the design concept to life.

They also work with other teams to understand how humans interact with technology and how to build software that we as people enjoy using. Example what you see when you look at Apple's homepage.

Back-End Developer

Persona:

Most common personalities are INTP, INTJ, ISTJ. These developers live for logic and love the chance to exercise their conceptual power, analytical thinking, and ability to solve difficult problems.

Think of a master chess player. They love strategy, give them a challenge and they won’t disappoint. Loves the more difficult technology, such as manipulating databases, creating REST API’s, and working with the business logic portion of the application.

Description:

Very similar to the skills needed for full stack development. Back-end developers are responsible for building out the “client side” which is the internal workings or the “logic in web applications by using a server-side scripting language like Ruby. This is everything that you don't see before the data reaches your browser.

Quality Assurance

Persona:

QA- the INTP, ENTP, ISTJ. This

personality type loves to test limits, how far can I push before the software breaks. Loves to deconstruct projects to understand the internal workings and make improvements. They dive deep into research to solve problems. They can also see possible errors in software before the errors even occur. May even try to create problems to solve if they get bored they have an innate drive to solve problems. An Automated QA Engineer can develop, they simply choose to challenge other developers by breaking their code.

Description:

They test limits of software or web apps, debug and suggest improvements. They are responsible for assuring quality in the final product and for finding all the flaws before it goes public. This can be with manual testing where the user manually uses the program to find flaws. It can also be automated testing where the engineer writes code to do the work for them. Automation is much faster and more thorough. Automated Engineers also need to know how to code in various languages from server-side languages to front-end languages.

Technical Project Manager

Persona:

Project Manager- INFP, ENTPs, ENFJ’s These leaders work for max cooperation and is willing to stick their neck out on a chopping block on another's behalf. These people are organizational problem solvers and prefer to interact with people instead of code. Think of a coach.

Description:

Much like a coach the Technical Project Manager or Agile project manager manages the design and build of IT products and services. They are the proactive management that pushes the team to complete tasks on schedule. They may also be trained in SCRUM and hold PMP and scrum certificates.

IT Business Analyst

Persona: Business Analyst-

INFP’s, INFJ’s, ISTP’s.

Can easily spot the root of a problem and seem to find practical solutions to work through the problem. They enjoy the details and tend to prefer

over-communication. They often prefer to work behind the scenes instead of up front as a leader.

Description:

A technical business analyst works on the business side of an organization and facilitate process improvements within the company's information technology department. The business analyst works alongside QA, Software developers, design and Project Management to help the company become more effective by breaking down tasks into smaller more manageable tasks. It is quite common for a business analyst to certify in SCRUM.

Cyber Security

Persona:

INTJ, ENTJ, ESTJ, ISTJ, INTP. Thou shall not pass! Think of intense, these personality types take their job quite seriously. Like secret service, they are very much sucked into their work and are methodical and very detail oriented. They want all the information and often dive into deep research.

Description: A Security Software Developer is a specialized type of Software Engineer. Also known as IT Security Software Developer, Security Developer, Cyber Developer. Their role is to prevent attacks through their expertise and knowledge of databases, networks, hardware, firewalls, and encryption. They keep computer systems running smoothly, prevent the theft of financial and personal information, and block intruders from accessing and divulging proprietary data.

Machine Learning and Data Science

Persona:

Again we see a plethora of INTP, INTJ, ISTJ. and the love for logic and a deeper level of puzzle. This field allows a deeper dive and ability to exercise their conceptual power, analytical thinking, and ability to solve difficult problems.

Description: This is an overlapping field that covers machine learning, deep learning, AI, statistics, research, and applied mathematics. Machine learning covers statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to "learn" with data, without being explicitly programmed. Data science is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to data mining.