They are the kind of people who cultivate deep intellectual interests in particular fields like Japanese animation and science fiction, according to research done for IBM by Renegade, a marketing firm. They share the mind-set that drives a person to stay up all night to solve the puzzle of a few buggy lines of programming code. At industry events, developers want to do more than drink and dance. So IBM is sponsoring gatherings in cities including New York, Seattle and San Francisco, which feature talks by renowned Internet programmers and team coding contests with hand-held computers as prizes. There is no hard sell.
Developers seem most impressed by the simple beauty of code that works.
At the Microsoft Developers Conference in Orlando recently, the crowd yawned when Microsoft executives talked of the company's Internet vision. Software programming is problem solving, and developers tend to gravitate to the technology that is the most useful for the task at hand. The young developer from Oregon, Kadhim, speaks of the appeal of software as a kind of infinitely malleable medium for technical artistry. It's like cracking a puzzle. In January, Kadhim joined Fujitsu Software, which makes specialized software tools for Cobol programmers.