A long-time friend pointed me to another "categorize yourself" site the
other day, this time it's a
Programmer Personality Test. He pointed out that it's only 12
questions, wouldn't take long, and he'd be
interested in how I scored. I found the questions really irritating, but
the results led to some interesting discussion that my friend suggested might
be worth a blog entry.
I get either a DLSB or PLSB, depending on which arbitrary choices I make on
several questions where neither option is at all representative of my world
view. He found this interesting, since I'm the only other person he's talked
to about this that also got a P. He also noted that LS seems to be very
strong in all the "real programmers" he knows, and wondered if that might be
why managing programmers is so much like herding cats.
One of the bits that I find so artificial about this is that the model that
I personally find most effective in the loner/group continuum isn't reflected
by the questions at all. It's neither a "do it all myself" nor a "engage with
everyone before doing anything" approach. The free software community
collaboration experience has proven to me that the most effective
approach is a hybrid, where you "do something" followed by engaging
collaborators, who may well help you decide to throw a lot away, which is ok
if it was a learning experience, and/or it leads to a better result. In the
end, you may not even be the center of attention or "owner" of the result.
In fact, often the way to get something done right is ensure that you get the
right person to do it, which often isn't yourself... but the strategy for
getting the right person to do it is almost never to engage in group-think
before doing any work! It seems to me that in our community, leading usually
starts with doing, while success is related to who else gets motivated to
follow your lead and join in the doing...
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