Superheroes and con artists: Abusing fictional tropes for better teams

Hiring and maintaining a software team is a challenging proposition. Programmers are among the toughest craftspeople to manage and assess. To gain a fresh perspective (and relieve the boredom), Don Kelly turns to the pulp fiction of his adolescence for inspiration, explaining how he maps teams from fictional universes into the software teams he would like to build.

As a software architect, you will eventually be consulted on the composition of a programming crew. Even if you have mastered every technological problem in the known universe, hiring for and maintaining a team will be the most difficult challenge you will ever face. When hiring hackers, it doesn’t matter how many of your toughest problems they defeat; you will still face that proverbial herd of cats. To gain a fresh perspective (and relieve the boredom), Don Kelly turns to the pulp fiction of his adolescence for inspiration, explaining how he maps teams from fictional universes into the software teams he would like to build. Pulp fiction offers us a dynamic world of heroes and villains—from teams of costumed marvels defending us from space-faring alien gods to street hustlers snagging your last dime—from which you can derive a multitude of team patterns. These patterns, which have saturated our consciousness over years of peer review by armchair thrill seekers, can be used as a starting point for building a software team. Perhaps you need a lone consulting detective to dig through the clues left behind by a failed startup, or maybe you need an intrepid gang of adventurers ready to change the world. Whatever your challenge, Don explains how to apply this concept in our universe (with some real-world examples of his own successes).