Question to software developers and IT workers on their online habits.

September 3, 2009 11:19 PM

Question to software developers and IT workers on their online habits.

Question for software developers.

I'll be going into an interview next week for a digital marketing position at an ad agency. The client is a software company giant and this is for the consumer branch of the company and not the commercial branch. So target customer will be businesses and developers as opposed to regular users.

The position will have focus on social networks and new media, but I'm not a software developer myself and am not familiar with the online habits of developers. Therefore I'm hoping that those who are developers here can provide me with insight. I really want to go into this interview ready so I'm trying to do as much homework as possible.

Here are a few specific questions:

1) Is it common for software developers and IT individuals to discuss, educate, and learn online with other fellow developers?

2) If so, what are some popular hang out spots for developers?

3) What do software developers and IT workers think of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook? Are there values in these tools in your line of work?

4) How are you using your mobile phone to make both your work life and personal life easier?

Those are just some questions off the top off my head. It will be a huge step in my career if I land this position so I deeply appreciate any insights provided.

HUGE thanks.

posted by willy_dilly to computers & internet (20 comments total)

1) yes. absolutely. all the time.

2) probably depends on what they do - eg when i'm managing a project, i might spend time on gantthead. if somebody is a java developer, for example, they might hang out on java forums. and so on.

3) no value whatsoever for work.

4) it's a phone. i can make or recieve calls with it. i divert my landline to the mobile most of the time, as i travel a fair bit for work, and people don't always know where i am.

disclaimer: not a developer, but i do work in IT, in various kinds of roles that aren't hands-on technical (analysis, project mgt, business liaison, consulting, that kind of thing)
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:45 PM on September 3 [1 favorite has favorites]

wait.

this is for the consumer branch of the company and not the commercial branch. So target customer will be businesses and developers as opposed to regular users.

i think you have that 100% the wrong way around.

normally,

consumer = private, home user, regular person
commercial = SOHO, SME, Corporate, ie business users
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:48 PM on September 3

Yes you're right I accidentally switched it. So the account is indeed for commercial and NOT consumer. Thanks for the catch.
posted by willy_dilly at 11:52 PM on September 3

1. Yes. Remember, these people invented the Internets back in the stone age.
2. StackOverflow is on its way to becoming the AskMe of programming. Other than that, community specific (here, you'd do well to research what your software giant is doing specifically and come back with a refinement). I figure a lot of time is spent on generic tech/nerd news sites as well (also fractured along community self-identification, might be hackernews, slashdot, techcrunch etc). Also, I'm on a bunch of mailing lists - archaic, yes, but much more usable than forums, really. Also, Google still basically rules my world. Whatever question I have, I take it there first, since etiquette pretty much everywhere requires you to have spent some time looking for your own answer before "sharing" problems. All kinds of secondary things I've discovered come from there.
3. Facebook? Twitter? Valuable tools? Bwahaha. I tend to see value in a LinkedIn or similarly business-oriented profile to keep track of the many ephemeral contacts from former projects, but even that is something that mostly lingers in the background.
4. It's like a very small laptop! All kinds of status information and control interfaces can be made available and accessed from i/smart/whateverphones. Even before that, I could dial into work from whereever I was and save the day (if it required less than two-hundred keystrokes).
posted by themel at 12:02 AM on September 4 [1 favorite has favorites]

1) yes, every day.

2) I mostly frequent mailing lists. A lot of Apple lists (cocoa-dev, carbon-dev, darwin-dev, etc) plus some others that relate closely to projects and technology I use.

3) Not really for business at the moment, just personal. Part of my job involves coming up with new ways to integrate with other technology, so I like to keep current on the latest online social trends (and my boss does too).

4) It's pretty much a phone. Reading my email on it really helps when I'm on vacation, but other than that I don't use its features much at work.
posted by sbutler at 12:06 AM on September 4

1. yep
2. StackOverflow is pretty nice. Raymond Chen's blog is interesting. But mostly I just go through whatever Google spits out about a given topic.
3. Useless. Messaging stuff like AIM and Skype is useful, though.
4. Even if I had one I wouldn't use it, except as a phone. I think 90% of software developers are sitting at their computers all day anyway, so there's no need for fancy phone stuff. But I assume the story is different for sysadmins, hardware folks, etc. Or for developers who also perform some administrative functions (making sure a database stays up, etc.).
posted by equalpants at 12:42 AM on September 4

1) yes

2) stack overflow, google, msdn

3) no, they're for personal life.

4) email (gmail and exchange), im (mobile communicator), facebook, internet, calendar. I avoid phone calls and work odd hours, and with people in different timezones, and have friends in various timezones, so I am on email at any time of day.
posted by jacalata at 1:09 AM on September 4

Well, I think Facebook is pretty useless from a business standpoint but I can see some value in Twitter, depending on how you use it.

For example, I've got a couple Twitter accounts that follow people who post about technical subjects germane to what we do and I use a Yahoo! Pipe to feed the "stories" being followed into a news feed on our IT intranet.
posted by JaredSeth at 1:09 AM on September 4

SSH and iAWSManager make it possible to admin an Amazon EC2 instance farm from the iPhone, handy in an emergency.
posted by nicwolff at 1:26 AM on September 4

3. Many (not all) tehnical IT people are "a bit paranoid", which is why I stay clear of these.

4. E-mail: I get advance notification before problems become PROBLEMS.
posted by devnull at 2:07 AM on September 4

3: it's not exactly social networking, but i spend time on a site called metafilter - as an alternative to water cooler conversations, etc. refreshes my brain in between other tasks.
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:30 AM on September 4

1+2. In my experience it's largely a matter of (i) Running into a problem, (ii) Googling for solutions to that problem, and (iii) Using a resource (newsgroup, forum, tutorial, other resource) to get the solution. I'm not particularly social in my web habits - it's almost entirely a straightforward reference. It used to be (when the web was smaller) that I'd ask questions on relevant forums, but now I find there's pretty much always a decent answer somewhere for all but the most obscure questions, and for the remainder there's rarely any help even if I ask somewhere.

3. No value whatsoever for work, and I rarely use them outside work.

4. My client can get hold of me when I'm out taking my kid to lunch or something. I can theoretically (but don't) check my email.

It's my experience that developers/IT workers (particularly those in my late-30s age group) tend to be on a par with my 70-year-old mother in terms of using technology or social networking in their everyday lives.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 3:55 AM on September 4

Speaking from sysadmin/IT guru rather than a developer perspective;

1) Yes, absolutely.

2) Technet, various linux forums (ubuntu, opensuse, centos), slashdot, petri.co.il. The almighty google occupies a lot of my online time.

3) for personal use only, and in a limited capacity. IT workers are generally much more aware of the privacy implications of sharing personal information far and wide; and also, it's a stereotype, but the constantly meandering meaningless chatter on those sites constantly blast at you, complete with overload of blinking flashing ads and games and everything just makes my head ache, so I go there only when I absolutely have to to get in touch with someone.

4) email, evernote for GTD, text messages and being contactable by the limited number of people who have my number (mostly friends and family)


As an aside; techies hate advertising, and often have the tools to avoid it. The one I can't avoid, constant unsolicited marketing phone calls on the office line, fill me with hatred. We even get them from companies we already have a relationship with (Hello, have you got 2 minutes to talk about our virtualization solutions? No, because I'm using your products right now to fix a gorram problem, and you're stopping me working)

You know what makes me like, and buy, software?

1) making it good. Bad software dressed up as wonderful by marketing spin, that then doesn't do what it should, means that company will struggle to ever do business with me again - fool me once, etc. So don't oversell what something to do, it'll do more damage to your client in the long run.
2) getting people who I trust to evaluate it, and recommend it. Not random shills on forums, or popup flash adverts, or spam email, but honest evaluations on places like techcrunch, ars technica, or simply people I know personally who use it themselves.
3) Good support. People who know what they're doing, answer emails and read their own company forums who can actually know more about their product than I do (which is pretty rare, if you don't have the most facile problem you're usually SOL) are worth their weight in gold, and I'll come back again and again to suppliers who actually give a crap about what happens after they've got their first chunk of money.
4) fair pricing for the product. Don't charge a silly amount for basic functions dressed up with buzzwords and a pretty website.
5) a good website that's clear, allows you to drill down to details (screenshots good), and doesn't force me to phone someone up in the US at great cost or jump through a sign-up evaluation form to do a demo, or worse just find out basic details such as what it costs.
6) being able to try it out. Seriously, no demo, no sale except for the most minor of stuff.
posted by ArkhanJG at 4:16 AM on September 4 [2 favorites has favorites]

3. I've never gotten any development-related use out of Facebook. On Twitter I follow, and am followed by, 20-something friends most of whom are also in the business; we do occasionally ask our followers technical questions ("What's the best way to separate a filename from its full path in bash?"), or mention what technology we're playing with, or complain about the shortcomings of the language we're stuck with at work.

I believe that the bright lights of some development communities--Rails comes to mind--are on Twitter and are followed by people who are interested in their presumably Rails-related tweets. I don't follow anyone I don't know personally other than Sockington, though, so I'm not sure how useful this sort of community participation is in getting one's job done.

The main job-related value, I think, of these social sites is in networking. Through Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn I'm in touch with a lot of former colleagues who I would have certainly lost touch with otherwise. That's of course not specific to development work, though.
posted by magicbus at 4:46 AM on September 4

1) Is it common for software developers and IT individuals to discuss, educate, and learn online with other fellow developers?
Most definitely

2) If so, what are some popular hang out spots for developers?
For my work, codeproject.com has been valuable. It has forums.

3) What do software developers and IT workers think of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook? Are there values in these tools in your line of work?
LinkedIn is good for networking. I stay far far away from anything along the lines of MySpace,Facebook,Twitter. E-mail works just fine.

4) How are you using your mobile phone to make both your work life and personal life easier?
By keeping it in my pocket at all times.
posted by hungrysquirrels at 5:51 AM on September 4

1. All the time.

2. Stackoverflow (people used to use expertsexchange a lot but stackoverflow really took over), usenet, codeproject forums as above. Unix developers tend to hang out on Freenode IRC, Windows users not so much. Lots of field-specific mailing lists too.

In general, developers and IT users are savvy web users so we're more likely to google what we need and find help, be it on one of the above sites, or just a personal website or blog of someone else with the same issue. It can be really frustrating to solve some problems and a lot of us like getting the answers out there to help people in the same situation in the future. Example, I have some strange bug in software X, it takes me a week to figure it out after tons of fruitless searching. I post my solution online to my blog or usenet or whatever, and include all the search terms I would have used to find it in the first place. The next guy with the same bug can find the answer in minutes instead of a week.

3. No value to me. These sites are often aimed at people who can't make & maintain their own blogs/websites, so there's less of an overlap than you'd think. Also consider a lot of IT and engineering departments are in large companies that may block access to these sites.

4. I know our on-call DBAs and IT folks use their Blackberries all the time, though it generally makes their lives harder :) Otherwise, general connectivity is useful to keep in touch. Iphone/etc is good to check external connectivity when sites go down.
posted by reptile at 6:30 AM on September 4

Echoing all the other answers...

1) Totally

2) Whatever Google spits out, SomethingAwful programming forums, Slashdot

3) Email + IM, everything else is useless cruft beyond 'Hey I used to work with you, how's it going?'

4) Pocket -> move to ear -> speak/listen -> move to pocket
posted by wrok at 6:33 AM on September 4

Others have covered 1, 2 and 4 really well but I will speak up for #3. Social sites for me matter because I work with distributed teams across the globe a lot of which are asleep while I am at work. Social media helps me understand them more as people which helps me interact better with them when I have to parcel out work and do problem solving with them.

As for interacting with the greater IT/Development community, those social apps behave just like just like any other sort of news/blog/rss/newsletter feed that you get. Authoritative and Expert sources use social media to announce and broadcast their findings/thoughts/techniques. Grant Josh Bloch isn't pulling Real Shaq-esque things but some people do communicate using these toolsets.
posted by mmascolino at 6:36 AM on September 4

Oh, one of the most creepy things a salesperson ever did to me was track me down on facebook, and try to add me as a friend using their work email so we could, and I quote 'get to know each other better so I can help you choose the products you want from us'.

On facebook. From a company we ordered something small from once. It was borderline stalking.

So yeah, be aware that co-mingling personal social media sites and business contacts for advertising purposes can get really creepy if done badly.
posted by ArkhanJG at 7:20 AM on September 4

Others have covered 1, 2 and 3 -- I'll comment on 4. I love my iPhone. And I hate talking on the phone. In fact, I held out for as long as possible before getting a phone on my work desk. But my iPhone is a little laptop that is always in my pocket that also, conveniently enough, makes phone calls. The email is always there. Various monitoring services email me when there's a problem. I have ssh apps so I can connect to my websites and tweak/restart things in emergency situations (it's cumbersome, but it can be done). I use the camera to take pics of collaborated whiteboard scribblings that might come in handy later. I sometimes text coworkers when they're not around when it's quick and simple and an email is overkill. I am always using the web browser to look things up when I'm on the go. Having a browser always on, even when my network is down, has been a lifesaver.

Personally, my iPhone never lets me escape the clutches of Facebook. I'm addicted to podcasts, which I can download on the go. And I play a lot of stupid games while killing 5 minutes here and there. Oh yeah, I call people occasionally, too.
posted by cgg at 8:21 AM on September 4