Before going on to describe Lumpenprogrammers — the lowest programmers in the techie hierarchy, the ones who “remediate” old COBOL code — Robert X. Cringely describes two broad classes of “good” programmers — hippies and nerds:
Hippie programmers have long hair and deliberately, even pridefully, ignore the seasons in their choice of clothing. They wear shorts and sandals in the winter and T-shirts all the time. Nerds tend to be neat, the sons and daughters of fathers who in a previous era would have worn pocket protectors.Nerds carry calculators; hippies borrow calculators. Nerds use decongestant nasal sprays; hippies snort cocaine. Nerds typically know forty-six different ways to make love but don’t know any women.
Hippies know women.
In the actual doing of that voodoo that they do so well, there’s a major difference, too, in the way that hippies and nerds write computer code. Hippies tend to do the right things poorly; nerds tend to do the wrong things well. Hippie programmers are very good at getting a sense of the correct shape of a problem and how to solve it, but when it comes to the actual code, they can be sloppy and make major errors through pure boredom. For hippie programmers, the problem is solved when they’ve figured out how to solve it rather than later, when the work is finished and the problem no longer exists. Hippies live in a world of ideas. In contrast, the nerds are so tightly focused on the trivial details of making a program feature work efficiently that they can completely fail to notice major flaws in the overall concept of the project.
Yes, this is an over-generalization, but it is also correct.