IT Extremists

Working in IT I have met a number of what I would call “IT Extremists”. There are different factions of these people but they are all characterized by a common trait, they don’t see reason and they all take things way too far.

Here are some examples:

The Scrum (Nazi or Taliban) - This is the person who fixates on following every minimal detail of scrum and feels the need to apply it to everything even when it isn’t a good fit. They quote the Scrum manifest to you and are completely inflexible. Use the right tool for the job and don’t try and remove a screw with a hammer.

The framework extremist - this is the person who insists that you have to know this framework or that framework but a sound understanding of programming principles and a couple of languages means it doesn’t take long to pick them up anyway.

The reinvention extremist - this is the person who insists that every part of the system should be home grown.

The opensource extremist - this is the person that professes or preaches opensource but often doesn’t feed anything back into this ecosystem and just uses it because it is free. I put it to these people that perhaps some moderation, a happy medium would be somewhat better for all concerned. I also suggest that those who use open source should consider contributing something to it either monetary or feed back into the system some of their developments instead of abusing it. Do unto others as you would wish to be done unto.

aliases:

• /blog/2012/08/18/it-extremists/