My Personality

So yesterday I got to spend most of the day in a "Teamwork and Collaboration" class. Woo Hoo. It was 7 hours, and contained about 2 hours worth of information, but it came with free breakfast/lunch/snacks and I suppose that spending some time interacting with teammates is a good thing.

The main idea of the course was to identify everyone's "Myers-Briggs" personality type. Basically you determine which way you lean on 4 traits and that determines which of 16 types you are. Then you look in the book at features those types tend to have, and things they tend to not have. Then we looked at how different team members can bring different things to a group, but how we have to adjust our communication to bring everyone in.

Yay.

I'm not going to blow air at how I'd have rather spent the day coding than than talking about feel-good corporatisms all day, but I would like to talk about what the test had to say about me.

For those who aren't familiar, and don't care for Google, a summary of Myers-Briggs 4 traits are:
Extroverted or Introverted
Sensing or Intuition
Thinking or Feeling
Judging or Perceiving

Anyone who knows me or has read any of my blog can probably guess that I'm a Thinker. I'm also Extroverted which seems right seeing as I prefer working in groups. Perceiving vs. Judging is basically whether you like to make a decision and stick with it or leave the decision in the air and learn more about it. If you've read my blogs, you probably know I'm not a big fan of schedules and feature lists which makes me a perceiver. So far so good.

The second category was the one that I found most interesting. It's called the information category, and it is determined by how you get info about something. Some people like to gather up the details of the project and figure everything out from there. These are the Sensers, and they tend to be very good at detailed work, but tend to be bad at seeing the big picture. The Intuitives would rather start by figuring out the why of the problem before the how. The details aren't important except in how they come together for the bigger idea. Intuitives are very good at seeing how the project can grow and interact beyond itself.

Now I see a lot of myself in both sides of it. I'm a very meticulous programmer, and I'm very detail oriented when the importance of the work warrant it. On the other hand, I'm always looking at how a program will interact with other things, and I'm always designing code with future expansion in mind. I'm not inclined to start working on something until I understand how it interacts with everything else, and I if it's appropriate I would rather change the goals than blindly work to meet them.

So am I strong at both? Neither? Somewhere in the middle?

For what it's worth, the MB test gives a cute little name to all 16 types. The two I was torn between were the sensing Promoter (ESTP) and intuitive Inventor (ENTP). Based solely on the two titles I'd probably pick the later, but the description accompanying the former fit me very well: "Maverick non conformist who loves problem-solving and trouble shooting. Gets stuff done. Won't "go with the flow" if he doesn't agree with a decision. Tends to ignore how he will impact others emotionally". The Inventor description was good too, but much like a horoscope it's always possible to find a bit of yourself in all the types.

So what did the test rate me? On each trait (E/I, S/N, T/F, P/J) we got a score between 5 (even) and 10 (extreme). Most scores were 6 or 7.

I was an ESTP: 8, 9, 8, 6.
I'm a 9 for sensing!

How can that be? How can I be so good at big picture stuff? I was starting to think this whole day was going to be a horrible waste of time. How could the descriptions of sensing and intuition be opposites if I identified so well with both, and how could the test give me such an extreme score if I'm so balanced.


As the day went on we started talking a lot more about each of the traits, but I kept flipping through the book and slides to figure out why my information trait seemed to make no sense. The in-depth reading started to shed some light on the subject. The conclusion I reached:

I don't see the big picture, but I can see an enormous number of details.

I approach a large project as a large collection of details. I'm happy to sit around talking about what a program should do at a high level, but in my head I'm not happy with a suggestion until I can see how it would be implemented. Fortunately for the intuitives in the room I can "pseudo-mind-implement" most things very quickly. But I'm not really seeing the big picture outside the project. As more an more ideas are expressed as to what features should be added, I'm working overtime to pseudo-implement them all and to see how they fit with each other. This allows me to identify conflicting ideas very early as their pseudo-imps won't be compatible. It also lets me suggest features that would be easy to implement based on combinations of other features.

I basically build the whole program in my head. That's probably why I'm so quick at writing code. People find that my work style is to talk talk talk for ages, and then I'll implement the whole thing one night. They just see the code go from 0 to done in no time and think I could be amazingly productive if I spent more time coding and less time brainstorming. Alas that can't be...

So in the end it seems I really am an extreme senser. So what differentiates me, a big-thinking senser, from a real intuit? Well I think that I'm bad at the creative side of brainstorming. I'm great at assembling ideas to make new ones, but I need ideas to start with.

Need is the mother of invention, and I almost always find myself working on projects that need to get done. When I took some time off to be a ski bum, I did very little programming. I had all the time in the world, but no pressing projects. The few times I was working on something, I'd quickly process the whole task and spit it out, but then I was left waiting for more. Of course I have a few ideas in my mind about fun things to work on, but none of them sprung forth into a real project that actually got much done.

So I did learn the value of a diverse team during the 7 hours. I need the external ideas and projects so I have something to solve. Now I just need to get out of silly team-building exercises so I can get back to brainstorming with inuitives.