Are you an East Coast or West Coast developer?

​​ Since moving from a an XP, machine learning/AI company working in technology to an organisation using scrum in financial services I have noticed a big difference in the applicants for roles on my teams. I guess this is obvious, but what was really interesting was that so many technologies, practices and even mentalities are not just different, but appear to be clustered.

I first drew this up to discuss with recruitment agencies as we wanted them to try and target people with a different profile. We thought their different perspectives would have a positive impact by questioning the ‘status quo’ and injecting some of the better practices they had seen the other side of the fence. I do however think there is an ongoing benefit of this visualisation… knowing where you are you can work out strengths and weaknesses of the technologies and processes you utilise, and also think of what benefits you are missing out on from the alternative world

I guess we at smartstream are attempting to move more towards the middle of this ven diagram in an attempt to get the best out of both worlds. Maybe seeing it drawn up like this could give you the same benefit of hindsight?

As an edit. Since drawing this up I have also attended some conferences which made me realise they fit into this too. Devoxx for example has lots of people from industries using sprints, spring and angular where ‘xp day’ a few years back was more people using xp, python and ruby.

Finally, I heard this described really well in a podcast as the “West Coast” v “East Coast” development shops… basically Silicon Valley’s funky AI based startups verses New York’s resiliency and stability focused financial services organisations.

Hope this helps