There is a realization that comes with the accrual of software development experience across a reasonable number of organizations, and it is this:

Traveling from project to project, from one organization to another, across disparate geographies, domains and technologies, I am repeatedly struck more by the similarities between the projects I work on than their differences. Scenes from one job seem to replay in the next one, only with a different set of actors.

You might finish a gig in which you've seen a project flop due to inadequate consultation with end users, only to find your next project heading down the same path for exactly the same reason. And it generally doesn't matter how much you jump up and down and try and warn your new project team that you've seen the disastrous results of similar actions in the past. They will ignore you, insisting that their situation is somehow different. You will stand back and watch in horror as the whole scenario plays out as you knew it would, all the while unable to do anything more to prevent it.

The IT contractor's career can be like some cruel matinee of "Groundhog Day" - without the moral resolution at the end.

But this technological deja vu is not limited to technical scenarios - it extends to people. I find myself working with the same programmers over and over again. Their names and faces change, but their personalities and predilections are immediately recognizable. I find myself playing mental games of "Snap" with my fellow developers. "Bob over there is just like Ian from Acme. James is this workplace's equivalent of Charles from that financial services gig I had last year" - and so on.

Sometimes I fancy that I have met them all. There will be no new developers for me to work with in future - only the reanimated ghosts of projects past. The same quirks and foibles that I've endured in the past will haunt me the rest of my days.

Nobody in the office is particularly fond of Brian. Sure, he's a smart guy and seems to be technically well informed, but he has such a strident and aggressive manner that it's difficult to talk with him for any length of time without feeling that you are under attack. Brian likes it that way and his hostile manner is entirely intentional. You see, Brian is a go-getter. Highly ambitious and energetic, he is determined to advance up the corporate ladder, no matter who he has to step on in the process.

Whenever any action is undertaken or decision made, there is always a part of him thinking "How will this make me look to my manager?". It's not surprising then that not all of Brian's decisions are good ones. He has been known to select cutting edge technologies simply for their buzzword compliance, betting that cool acronyms and shiny new methodologies will make him appear progressive and forward-looking. Although he regularly makes mistakes, Brian never admits to any of them, and generally blames third parties, vendors and colleagues for errors that are actually his own.

Daniel's mind is only ever half on the job, or to put it another way, he doesn't have his head in the game. Daniel lives a very full life - indeed, so full that his private life overflows copiously into his professional one. He has several hobbies that he is passionate about, and he is always ready to regale a colleague with tales of his weekend exploits in one of them. It looks as if his job is just a way of funding his many (often expensive) hobbies.

His work is strictly a nine to five endeavor, and it would be very rare to find him reading around a particular work-related topic in his own time, or putting in an extraordinary effort to meet a deadline or project milestone. He is constantly taking off at lunch times to take care of one task or another, and does not seem to be particularly productive even when he is in the office. Daniel refers to this as "leading a balanced life". He may be right.

Eric knows that knowledge is power. Partly by happenstance but mostly by design, Eric has become irreplaceable to his employer. There just seems to be a vast amount of technical and procedural arcana that only Eric knows. If he should ever leave, the company would be in a mess, as he would take so much critical information with him. This gives him a good deal of bargaining power with management, and good job security.

A few of the company's managers have recognized the unhealthy dependence that exists upon him, and have attempted to document some of the valuable knowledge about certain pieces of software central to the business, but Eric always finds a way to get out of it. There always seems to be something more pressing for him to do, and if he is forced to put pen to paper, what results tends to be incoherent nonsense.

It seems that he just can't write things down - or rather, that he chooses to be so poor at it that no one even bothers to ask him to document things any more. Eric is not keen to help others in those domains that he is master of, as he doesn't want to dilute the power of his monopoly.

John has been working for his current employer a long time. A very long time. Longer than most of the senior management in fact. John has been working here so long that it is highly unlikely he will ever be able to work anywhere else. Over the years, his skill set has deteriorated so greatly and become so stale that he has become an entirely unmarketable commodity.

He has been keeping himself employed for the last decade just patching them up and making one piecemeal addition after another in order to try and keep them abreast of the business's changing function. Tired of chasing the latest and greatest technologies, he has not bothered learning new ones, sticking to the comfortable territory defined by the small stable of dodgy applications he has been shepherding for some years.

John gets along with everyone, particularly those more senior to him. He can't afford the possibility of getting into conflict with anyone who might influence his employment status, as he knows that this will likely be the last good job he ever has. So he tries to stay under the radar, hoping that the progressive re-engineering of his pet applications with more modern technologies takes long enough for him to make it over the finish line.

Oliver is very enthusiastic about open source software development. He contributes to several open source projects himself, and tries to incorporate open source products into his projects wherever possible - and it's always possible; mainly because Oliver begins a project for the principal purpose of providing himself with an opportunity to try out the latest and greatest CVS build from Apache, Jakarta or wherever.

Oliver rarely has to justify his technology selections to his colleagues, as he is always sure to surround himself with other open source believers. On occasions when he needs to explain the failure or buggy nature of some open source package, he relies upon the old saw "we can always fix it ourselves". However there never seems to be enough time in the schedule for this to actually occur; so every release of his project bristles with the underlying warts of its open source components. If all else fails, it can at least be said that the price is right.

Quincy is one of those guys who has no need to brag about his technical skills or the depth of his technical knowledge. He's not much interested in being "alpha geek" at the office, he just wants to do a good job and then go home to his wife and children.

Quietly spoken and unassuming, he looks on with amusement at Zealous Zack's ever-changing enthusiasms and shakes his head, knowing that in a few more years Zack will have gained enough experience to know that the computing industry is full of "next big things" that generally aren't. Given a task, he just sits down and does it. He doesn't succumb to heroic bug-fixing and late night coding efforts - his code is good enough to begin with that there are rarely any problems with it. He probably won't get many pats on the back from management, whose attention will largely be captured by the technical prima donnas that swan around the project space, dropping buzzwords and acronyms like they were the names of celebrities they knew personally.

But without Quincy and those of his ilk, the project would fail - because someone has to get the work done.

Sam is just passing through. If he is a contractor, everyone will already be aware of this. If he is permanent staff, his colleagues might be a little surprised to know just how certain he is that he won't be working here in a year's time.

Sam is committed to accumulating as much experience with as many technologies as he possibly can, in order to make himself more attractive to future employers. His career objective is simply that he remain continually employed, earning progressively higher salaries until he is ready to retire.

Warren's native tongue is English; but it does him little good. Listening to Warren explain something technical is like listening to Dr Seuss - all the words make sense when taken individually, but assembled together they seem to be mostly gibberish with no coherent message.

Such is Warren's talent for obfuscation, he can take simple concepts and make them sound complex; take complex topics and make them sound entirely incomprehensible.

This is big problem for everyone attempting to collaborate with Warren, for they generally find it impossible to understand the approach Warren is taking to solving his part of the problem, which virtually guarantees it won't work properly in conjunction with other's work. On those rare occasions when he tries to document his code, the comments aren't useful, as they make no more sense than Warren would if he were explaining the code verbally.

Management has made the mistake of assuming that Warren's diatribes are inscrutable because he is so technically advanced and is describing something that is inherently complex. That's why he is in a senior technical position. But his pathetic communication skills are a major impediment to the duties he must perform as a senior developer, which routinely involve directing and coordinating the technical work of others by giving instructions and feedback. Warren is a source of great frustration to his colleagues, who would give anything for precise and concise communication.

Xavier takes a little getting used to. Although his programming skills are decidedly mature, his personality seems to be lagging behind. He has an unhealthy fascination with Star Trek, Dr Who and Babylon 5. Graphic novels and Dungeons & Dragons rule books are littered about his cubicle, and he can often be found reading them during his lunch break, which he always spends in front of his computer, surfing various science fiction fan sites and overseas toy stores.

Project meetings involving Xavier are generally ... interesting, but somewhat tiring. He regularly interjects quotations from Star Wars movies and episodes of Red Dwarf, laughing in an irritating way at his own humor, oblivious to the fact that others without his rich fantasy life are not amused by his obscure pop culture references. Xavier seems to spend most of his time by himself. No one has ever heard him mention a girl-friend. Those who have worked with him for any length of time know that he is best kept away from customers and other "normal people" who would not understand his eccentricities.

Zack is a very enthusiastic guy. In fact, there seems to be very little going on in the world of computing that Zack is not enthusiastic about. Like a kid staring in the candy store window, Zack gazes longingly at every new buzzword, acronym and advertising campaign that crosses his path, immediately becoming a disciple of every new movement and technology craze that comes along. Sometimes these enthusiasms bring with them certain ideological conflicts, but Zack is too busy downloading the Beta version of the next big thing to be worried about such matters. He runs Linux on his home PC, has a Mac Mini in his living room, and worships at the church of Agile.

Having Zack on your project can be challenging, particularly if he exercises any control over technology selection. He will invariably try and load down your project with whatever "cool" technologies he is presently over-enthused about, and delight in the interoperability problems that result as an opportunity to introduce even more technologies to save the day. Zack never quite learnt to distinguish work from play.