How developers think
Developer behavior stops being strange once you know what it is optimizing for. Craft, reputation, leverage, and focus explain the free work, the tool arguments, the refused take-homes, and the moves.
Lessons
- What do developers actually care about? The one guide to developer motives: the public record on GitHub, the free work, the attachment to the stack, the protected focus, the interview process as a signal, and the reasons people leave.
- What is GitHub, and how do a hundred developers work on one codebase? Pure mechanics before any judgment. What a repository, a fork, a star, and the green squares literally are, and why most good work is invisible.
- Why do developers give their work away for free? The motive under every public artifact: reputation, portfolio, leverage, and craft.
- Why do developers care so much about the tech stack? The stack is daily material, next resume, and market price at the same time. This explains the first candidate question and the hostile reply to a mismatched message.
- Why do meetings ruin a developer's day, and why are estimates always wrong? Focus as a working requirement, and estimates as guesses about ground nobody has walked yet.
- Why do strong developers refuse whiteboard interviews and take-homes? The hiring process as a costly signal, read in both directions. Where the parts of an engineering loop get named.
- Why do developers quit, and is job-hopping a red flag for a developer? Leaving as the moment the currencies stop paying, and two-year tenure as a norm rather than a warning.
- Why do developers ignore or flame recruiter outreach? The module capstone. Every motive so far, aimed at the message. No new vocabulary.