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Are most of your friends developers too?

Jess Lee on May 24, 2019

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Ben Halpern

For most of my life: no.

I've almost never had dev friends, but these days I'm making a lot more friends in the space, usually because I met them through DEV 😄

I think if I had more dev friends I'd never have felt the urge to create a more welcoming space. I always felt like I had a hard time breaking into the software "cliques". And if I had a hard time with that, folks from underrepresented backgrounds face greatly steeper challenges.

I've always had fairly nerdy friends, and some of those relationships helped nudge me into software one way or the other, but nobody actually really wrote code.

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Tyler V. (he/him)

This basically sums up what my response was going to be 😅

I love all my new Dev/Twitter friends though💜

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Stephen Belovarich

No. I have some and we talk shop, but it’s great to have friends apart from work life.

Late 30s me is like “Where’d all the friends go? That’s right they had kids. But wait my parents had kids and still invited friends over for dinner, went out and did things.” 🤷‍♂️

Sometimes the people you mentor end up becoming a friend.

Sometimes the people you’d least expect become a friend. I’m honestly looking for more of this type right now living in a country where things are so divisive.

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Reem

None of the friends I've had up until a year ago would I say are full-fledged developers, however, neither was I! I met a couple of people in Australia when I went to women in tech and startup events and lo-and-behold! I found myself immersed with meeting amazing developers (whether noobs or veterans) that inspired me to become one myself! :)

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Ayja Weems

Most of my friends are not devs, we’re all into very different things and on separate career paths. I am starting to network and make more dev friends though, so anyone can feel free to chat with me!

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Sophie The Lionhart

Yes and no. For me most of my close friends are, even in college. The lifelong learning, tinkering, and curiosity are things I like in people and most developers have that ingrained in them making them an easy target for friendship. Most of my non-dev friends are foreigners I guess cause we can learn and talk about a lot just due to culture differences and the fun of language speaking which gives it a slightly different kind of lifelong learning vibe perhaps?

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Brian Barbour

I'm literally the only person I know that codes. I hope to change that by joining communities like this one and on Slack.

...It sucks a lot because I want to just share and talk about what I'm building and learning--but to most of them I'm speaking gibberish.

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Bradley Collins

The only friend I have that's a developer is my old boss (who is a great friend and mentor) but the rest are in the tech space or gaming industry in some capacity.

I am a very shy person so I haven't been able to get myself to any meetups to meet new people in the dev industry outside of work :(

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Jonathan Silvestri

Pretty even mix of devs and non-devs.

My non-dev friends at this point are mostly my college friends whom I was incredibly close with.

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Forest Hoffman

The majority of my friends are not developers. However, there is a large percentage of them that have actually coded at one point, or are learning. I think it's cool and exciting when my non-dev friends ask questions or vent about some programming problem they're having! It's cool we can relate in that way.

ex:
Friend: "Gah! I honestly have no idea what's wrong with this function. I'm tearing my hair out over this!! Do you ever feel that way?"
Me: chuckles "Yeah, most of the time." XD
Friend: ._.

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Yechiel Kalmenson

Most of my friends from my pre-development days are not developers (with the exception of one of my friends who sort of mentored me when I was transitioning).

But of course I've since made many new friends in the developer community, largely thanks to communities like CodeNewbie and the DEV community 🤗

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John shim

not even a single person knows what code editor is. I think it had to make friends when you start this career when your young which is really challenging to make friends and find time for friends too.

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Ice or Fire

Yes. Most of my friends I've met at work.

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Gift Egwuenu

Yes. I've gotten to meet a couple of new friends since I became more active in my community and I also have non-dev friends I think I like the mix.

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Ben Halpern

Mix is key. It's great to escape into a world where nobody has APIs on their mind 😄

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Larizza Tueros

Most of my friends are devs because that was the ones that stick of my time at college and my BFF from high school it's a dev too.

I used to have some friends that are not related to IT (or quit the career) but I've been distant with everyone since I move to another city(something I need to fix)

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K

No.

My flatmate is a dev, but he's a factotum anyway, so that may not count 😬.

One of my girlfriends does quite some development at work lately and I'd consider her a dev, but her "title" is marketing specialist.

I tried to befriend some devs at university and work, but it didn't work out.

Since I usually don't go on tech meetups or conferences and work from home I never meet other devs.

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Angelique

Some, but definitely not the majority. From my closest group of college friends, I'm the only coder, and, post-college, I've made many friends from my other hobbies (e.g., comic books, fiber arts), as well as the local and virtual tech community.

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Nope. Not a single one. They all think I live in the matrix or something. Or, they treat me like Chandler Bing where I’m a ‘trandspondster’.

I’m making more local connections in the local Yorkshire area though so hopefully they’ll grow into more dev friendships ☺️

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Reem

omg... Perfect Friends reference right there. Relatable, too.

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Hassan Sani

Nooooooooo. I like to check my level of sanity among people and my non-dev friends always help with that even though I hear words that I mostly process like a native/git keyword 😄 I love the mix it gives me.

But I do spend more time with my developer friends than my non-dev friends 😄, and it cool.

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Jean-Michel Plourde

No. I only have one friend who's in dev and he lives in another province. Living in a semi-rural area means most of my close friends/family are working manual jobs (mech, factory, driving, etc.)

Fortunately, people at my job and classmates are dev, so I can talk about new things with them.

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bleskop stevens

What friends?

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Erhan Kılıç

No and I'm happy with that :D

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Oleg Aleksandrov

3-4 years ago, i don’t have friends developers, but now most of my friends are developers.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Nope, not by a long shot my close friends are not even developers. Some of them are people I met during youth events or youth startup communities I was helping out in my country.

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Chen Hui Jing

I've got friends from different points in my life that practically don't overlap at all. The best friend is a Dev though (I see her as my best friend, not sure if it works the other way around 🤣)

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Bos Eriko Reyes

No. Not really. Usually my friends like Basketball and Dota 2 (which I like as well). Would be nice if there's even only a single one, though. Haha

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Matthew Daly

I didn't become a professional developer till my early 30's. Most of my friends are therefore non-developers I know from previous jobs, and a few school friends.

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Xing Wang

Not neccessarily developers, but many of them work either work for tech companies, or doing startups also, and many close friends are former co-workers.

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Angelika Jarosz

Nope. Some are, but my hobbies outside of tech are where i meet a lot of people!

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Sandor Dargo

Developers? No. Most of my friends are DBAs. Lol, no. I have two groups of friends, one group is centred around IT and are mostly devs.

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starchturrets

Friends? What are those?

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Lucas Olivera

Half of my friends are, I think it's funny how we tend to get closer to people who thinks like us.

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Periklis Gkolias

Yes, though I met most of them outside the context of my work.

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Nathan Tamez

Most of my friends are not just developers but are in STEM fields