Developers are Athletes, Architects are Coaches/Managers/Trainers

Kris Syverstad writes about how developers resemble athletes. Reading his post I felt almost as Kris had been reading my final term paper in methodology from last spring where I used the exact same analogy. I wrote about developers as athletes in the context of higher learning, and how some students are suited for the extreme and some are more comfortable with the regular amount of training.

I think the resemblance can be taken further, regarding the age/experience aspect. Good developers and elite atheletes need to make a tremendous effort to keep up to date in their fields. I can definately see that sometime in the (not so near) future I will have to slow the pace a bit. Many top-atlethes become team managers or trainers for new promising athlethes and they prove to be successful coaches aswell (the xp-crowd just entered the room).

I am not saying that a good architect must have been an extremely good developer, just as all sportscoaches might not have been in the top. But it helps, and it's a motivating factor for the athlete or developer. Beeing a top athlete requires beeing able to take charge of your own actions and take responsibility, which also applies for architects, lead developers and such, and often make top devs suitable.

I could go on for hours elaborating this analogy, but what might be more interesting is to use some empiria from sports in areas such as motivation, training, and teambuilding. The competitiveness in sports have cultivated extremely refined processes and methodologies to tune atheletes to the maximum of their capabilities.

I guess most developers would rather eat pizza. Me for one would like to be treated as an athlete (this weblog accepts sponsorship-, and endorsementdeals).