The 'A' Developer

Well pointed out Mohammad. 'A' Developer should work smarter and continuosly invest in his or her career. Investment should be made in acquiring hard skills, soft skills, business skills and ability to promote him or her as a great contributor. Let me add some more

• 'A' developer should not only look at things from a technology perspective, but also from a business perspective.
• 'A' developer should understand the 14 key areas I covered at http://java-success.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html so that he or she can understand the potential faiuires and write more robust, maintanable, and extendable applications.
• 'A' developer will be a good problem solver, will have great analytical skills and ability to research things.
• 'A' developer will have the abilty to list design alternatives, technological choices, and tools and pick the right ones for the job at hand.
• 'A' developer will be flexible and adaptable to changing and growing business needs. Will liase with multi-disciplinary teams to get the job well done.
• 'A' developer will have the ability to translate the business requirements into technical specifications. He or she will identify gaps in the requirements and will pro-actively finalize the requirements. So, he or she is never stuck all the time behind the keyboard.    

Some good points in the list for sure, but I don't agree with them all. For instance, I see a direct contradiction between 5 and 14. We resort to patterns to overcome limitations in the language (especially true in Java), rarely will patterns actually simplify things and I truly dislike the idea of sneaking in design patterns for the sake of patterns themselves.

I don't think hardworking is an essential part of a complete developer. Developers work using their brains, not their muscles. They need to be smart and effective. They should keep everything simple, and always want to learn more. A developer should be a team player. A development team must work together as a team, real team, helping each other, helping a new member to adapt to the environment, and so on. Smart developers know how to code properly and effectively and they always want their codes to be readable by others in their team. For them, code crafting is an art.

So far in my career, I never see any development team work as a real team. Most of the ISVs need you to be a team player in their job requirements, but once you get in, you hardly find a real team worker inside. And most likely, you can only find a group of hardworkers. To them, having each developer working in isolation is part of team work. From their point of view, newbies should learn to adapt to development environment on their own, and that's a team work skill. They just need to finish whatever they are asked to do, as much as possible if they could, and if they could, they would be admired as good team workers. In these kind of ISVs, code quality is not essential.

A lot of point I feel "mine", some about I need to work on but I agree, some I disagree or I feel they are "non central" for a first class developer, but the most important objection I do is that there are too much point.

You are saying: it has to be perfect, almost, and identify many point about "perfection. 

Do less, cut the list down to ten and then republish it after having cut again to five, eventually trying to mixing more concept in a single point, without faking :)

I tried to focus on detail of single points but I find more comfortable tumblring you message and answer there couse I have a lot to say and cut. 

My only comment about articles such as this, and you do get a lot on this forum, is what is the point, what are you trying to achieve by posting a bunch of assertions that you ask other if they agree or not ?  What are you going todo with these assertions based on whether people generally agree or not? Do you actively grade developers on them internally at your company or for interviews assesment?

Anyone can publish a bunch of assertions and ask for feedback, but it also seems a bit meaningless if there is no goal.

Admitidly these seem atleast sensible relative to

http://java.dzone.com/news/your-architecture-starts-be-su

This should of atleast attempted answer what the hell is an optimal system in the first place before pontificating some unqualified nonsense.   

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