"These aren’t immutable aspects of your personality. They’re more categories for how you approach the job of software engineering - you’ll move around between quadrants as you change your approach to work, for all the usual reasons."
I'll buy someone a coffee if they propose a state-space model that identifies a location on the author's plane as a function of time and incentives :^)
I was thinking about how to describe the interactions between all possible pairings under a variety of circumstances, like on an axis of virtuous vs conflicting.
In addition to people being multidimensional, this sort of diagram usually has a sort of "internal motion" to it.
That is, this is an instance of a diagram that you'll see repeated over and over in business texts; I personally call it a "fourbox" but I suppose "business matrix" is more common and "quadrant analysis" or something like that is even more descriptive. The idea is that you identify two different things, graph those as separate axes, label the quadrants and then tell a story about the four different labels. The Eisenhower matrix is the usual example (one axis is how close is the deadline, near vs far, the other is how much is lost by missing the deadline, a little vs a lot. The immediacy is called "urgency", the stakes are called "importance," things that are important-and-urgent should be done by you now, things that are important-not-urgent should be scheduled, things that are urgent-not-important should be delegated to someone else, and everything in the last quadrant should be safely ignored).
A "true" fourbox in my view should tell a particular story, which I call "cynefin flow" after a different iconic fourbox that told this story compellingly. According to this flow, there should be motion in a circle about the center of the axes, except that it gets interrupted at one transition between the quadrants and becomes stuck in a U-shape, unless some outside stimulus pushes it over that edge. So there is a motion I -> II -> III -> IV around the quadrants but then things get stuck in IV unless an outside stimulus pushes it back into I.
The cynefin story for the Eisenhower matrix ends with things getting stuck in not-important-not-urgent, so that is your IV quadrant. Of the two stories you can tell from there, the more compelling story is that, "Things that are important but not urgent, become important-and-urgent as the clock runs down, but then the deadline will pass and the pain becomes a sunk cost and they become unimportant-and-urgent, only to eventually fade to being unimportant-and-not-urgent, until an external stimulus acts to suddenly attach additional stakes to them and make them important again." So you have a bill (I), that bill comes due (II), you miss the deadline but still have a chance to pay it (III), and finally it gets sent to collections and impacts your credit (IV). And it sits there until either the debt expires or you're trying to get a new house, in which case it becomes Important again (I) to clean up your credit history.
Similarly with the BCG matrix, which is a fourbox with your capture of a market on one axis, the market's growth rate on a separate axis. Then the businessfolk carefully write "cash cow, question mark, star, dog" on each of these four quadrants. But what makes it a true fourbox is that your "question marks" that you invest in become "stars" as you capture their markets, then become "cash cows" as growth dries up, then become "dogs" as the market itself stagnates, until some external stimulus creates the opportunity for growth and more question marks again.
OP's diagram has "work intensity" on one axis, and a sort of "idealism-vs-pragmatism" axis for the other, and they have identified the intense pragmatist as naturally falling under a Cynefin flow into being a coasting pragmatist as they burn out. Presumably this is the accumulation point and those are the III and IV of the system, in which case some external stimulus causes coasting pragmatists to become coasting idealists, at which point they will naturally become intense idealists as their aspirations come to the fore, and then naturally become intense pragmatists as the organization fails to reward their idealism?
Business schools call it a 2x2. A friend who teaches at a business school told me, "You can't be a business school prof if you don't have a two-by-two."
But the idea that every 2x2 is a state space that has some kind of attractor path in it only covers a subset of such plots. There are lots of other kinds that don't fit that paradigm, e.g. binary action vs binary outcome, diagnostic test pos/neg vs condition true/false, etc.
> I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times.
Believer - When you first join the company and they sell you on the vision
Grinder - You work hard for a year or two to make a difference
Coaster - You realize you wont get promoted, they company will always have no money on the bonus pool, except for the execs. And that the company will go on by sheer force of momentum, not by your grinding.
Grifter - You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup.
Now you repeat the cycle, except you are the person at the top and someone else goes thru these stages.
> You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup.
They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then?
Yeah I’m only in my late 30s and I’m in the same boat. Many things and mindsets can be good, it’s not about finding the absolute but finding the most appropriate one for the current context of your life.
I would say that I'm a "believer" in this terminology, but I don't think either coaster or grinder fits; depending on the task, I might be either. It's determined by how hard I find it to get going on the task, which often reflects ambiguity and lack of direction. When the task is vague, it can take a while to figure out an approach to try.
Which is, I guess, a way to say that often when I'm "coasting", I'm working -- just not as effectively as I would like. I usually feel guilty when I'm unsure what to do.
I believe that's consistent with the author's "coaster" description. "They work enough to get the job done" which is sometimes very little, but can sometimes be a lot if that's what's necessary.
They're also a good source of slack -- "They’re also good for teams that have a lot of last-minute requests or questions". Coasters can do more work when that's what's needed. OTOH, a grinder always working at 100% can never give more.
Probably one of the best, must humorous, and dark takes on industrial psychology I've seen. I've spent a lot of time trying to disprove it, and kinda did.
It's like Freud where it doesn't really stand up to serious empirical evaluation, yet there are so many uncomfortable truths.
The author kinda loses the plot after the part about power talk, though.
A taxonomy of partial engagement in software development would be an interesting topic. I've worked at quite a few places where there was something pathological I couldn't change or where I could have worked harder but it would have created a lot of strife with people who (don't work as hard|don't work as smart|don't see the big picture|aren't careful|don't know how to write joins in SQL|learned to design software by learning answers to interview questions|...)
In a case like that you can still get stuff done with 50% engagement, getting a lot more done might not be feasible without getting the support you need from your co-workers and if you lower your standards your life gets easier and you still get something done. It can sometimes feel pretty good and it can sometimes feel like dying inside.
Quintessential example of the "Grifter" in action right here ("General Semanticists")
Why are these people always flirting with psudoscientists and charlatans?
Seriously? Why is this linking to Wilhelm Reich? Why does this look like some shit Lacan would have written? Why does this link to the devils NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming)
Why couldn't scientists in this era just stay in their fking lane and not say dumb shit?
I'm so tired of having to debunk yet another crack-pot stupid ideology from this era. This is psychoanalysis for the STEM-lord, and just as full of nonsense.
I have met a few of the luminaries of the third generation of "the devil's NLP" and I've learned enough speed hypnosis to call up people like that and get them to send me a free copy of their latest training materials but this does not help me with picking up girls.
On one hand I am trained as a physicist and work as a computer programmer and have a lot of respect for arch-reductionists like Forester and Minsky but I also have an a schizotypal brain that causes me to have unusual experiences: I have a knack for dowsing rods, pendulums, ouija boards and the like even if I don't believe in them.
Korzybski is an interesting case because you cannot get a good edition of his Science and Sanity so it is not possible to evaluate his work as a whole. I'd agree with L. Ron Hubbard (half jokingly) that Korzybski did not develop a workable system but Korzybski asked interesting questions and in some sense has less bullshit per mile than most approaches to getting more out of the human nervous system (e.g. I had a therapist who gave me CBT worksheets that Korzybski would have been giving out had he attained the "workable system")
> I think a lot of programmer arguments bottom out in a cultural clash between different kinds of engineers
True. Also it should be the managements'/team leads' role to act as a midiators. It's a waste of time to constantly argue over what is "right" when all proposed solutions are functional.
Should we spend more time flushing out the unknowns? Should we launch ASAP and interate fast? Should we automate the process? Do we have data to back our assumptions?
The "culture fit" is not superficial and I've always been advocate of fire fast if one is culturally unfit because it slows down everyone
You are talking about a third dimension that I thought of immediately upon reading this, which is risk aversion, mentioned long ago in https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150 (the original is no longer accessible, thanks Google+)
I'm just trying to imagine the different traits for liberal vs conservative grifters (thought leader vomit vs machiavellian connivance), believers (thought leader vomit vs constant market research), grinders (ship lots of code vs write lots of tests) and coasters (shitpost all day on random slack channels vs do the bare minimum to appear to be working)
or that depending on where you position yourself right now, there's assholes in 3 quadrants, but since you can simultaneously be in multiple quads, you're an asshole too.
All models are wrong but some are useful and all that. Now I just want to see a megamodel combining this, the software "political" axis w.r.t. risk aversion (that I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42320862), and finally, a summary of how each node interacts with each other node given various circumstances like whether it's a collaborative or conflicting situation (a concept I learned from a required Strength Deployment Index workshop; mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321007), to prescribe various incentives or strategies to unstick the participants and keep them flowing.
Maybe throw in some flavor from the 6 types of working genius (WIDGET: wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, tenacity) and meyers-briggs personality types for fun.
That chart is confusing because they’ve put the quadrant labels on the axes so a) the axis dimensions are unknown and b) there are two labels on each quadrant
But the written breakdowns per type below imply that those are the quadrant labels. Otherwise the write ups should be for term pairs (eg, believer+coaster)
Yea, the quadrant visualization does not make sense. What is the bottom-left quadrant? Coaster or Grifter or both? What about the top-right? None of the above? I can't figure it out.
Readit News
I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times.
"These aren’t immutable aspects of your personality. They’re more categories for how you approach the job of software engineering - you’ll move around between quadrants as you change your approach to work, for all the usual reasons."
Probably could make a garmin watch function to plot "stress level" vs "body battery"
unless you're talking about the stock measure, in which case it is less contextual (but sorta), but very real and sought after.
That is, this is an instance of a diagram that you'll see repeated over and over in business texts; I personally call it a "fourbox" but I suppose "business matrix" is more common and "quadrant analysis" or something like that is even more descriptive. The idea is that you identify two different things, graph those as separate axes, label the quadrants and then tell a story about the four different labels. The Eisenhower matrix is the usual example (one axis is how close is the deadline, near vs far, the other is how much is lost by missing the deadline, a little vs a lot. The immediacy is called "urgency", the stakes are called "importance," things that are important-and-urgent should be done by you now, things that are important-not-urgent should be scheduled, things that are urgent-not-important should be delegated to someone else, and everything in the last quadrant should be safely ignored).
A "true" fourbox in my view should tell a particular story, which I call "cynefin flow" after a different iconic fourbox that told this story compellingly. According to this flow, there should be motion in a circle about the center of the axes, except that it gets interrupted at one transition between the quadrants and becomes stuck in a U-shape, unless some outside stimulus pushes it over that edge. So there is a motion I -> II -> III -> IV around the quadrants but then things get stuck in IV unless an outside stimulus pushes it back into I.
The cynefin story for the Eisenhower matrix ends with things getting stuck in not-important-not-urgent, so that is your IV quadrant. Of the two stories you can tell from there, the more compelling story is that, "Things that are important but not urgent, become important-and-urgent as the clock runs down, but then the deadline will pass and the pain becomes a sunk cost and they become unimportant-and-urgent, only to eventually fade to being unimportant-and-not-urgent, until an external stimulus acts to suddenly attach additional stakes to them and make them important again." So you have a bill (I), that bill comes due (II), you miss the deadline but still have a chance to pay it (III), and finally it gets sent to collections and impacts your credit (IV). And it sits there until either the debt expires or you're trying to get a new house, in which case it becomes Important again (I) to clean up your credit history.
Similarly with the BCG matrix, which is a fourbox with your capture of a market on one axis, the market's growth rate on a separate axis. Then the businessfolk carefully write "cash cow, question mark, star, dog" on each of these four quadrants. But what makes it a true fourbox is that your "question marks" that you invest in become "stars" as you capture their markets, then become "cash cows" as growth dries up, then become "dogs" as the market itself stagnates, until some external stimulus creates the opportunity for growth and more question marks again.
OP's diagram has "work intensity" on one axis, and a sort of "idealism-vs-pragmatism" axis for the other, and they have identified the intense pragmatist as naturally falling under a Cynefin flow into being a coasting pragmatist as they burn out. Presumably this is the accumulation point and those are the III and IV of the system, in which case some external stimulus causes coasting pragmatists to become coasting idealists, at which point they will naturally become intense idealists as their aspirations come to the fore, and then naturally become intense pragmatists as the organization fails to reward their idealism?
But the idea that every 2x2 is a state space that has some kind of attractor path in it only covers a subset of such plots. There are lots of other kinds that don't fit that paradigm, e.g. binary action vs binary outcome, diagnostic test pos/neg vs condition true/false, etc.
Curious, did you write all this out for this comment? I appreciate it either way because I was truly skeptical at first but kept reading thru the end.
Believer - When you first join the company and they sell you on the vision
Grinder - You work hard for a year or two to make a difference
Coaster - You realize you wont get promoted, they company will always have no money on the bonus pool, except for the execs. And that the company will go on by sheer force of momentum, not by your grinding.
Grifter - You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup.
Now you repeat the cycle, except you are the person at the top and someone else goes thru these stages.
They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then?
Which is, I guess, a way to say that often when I'm "coasting", I'm working -- just not as effectively as I would like. I usually feel guilty when I'm unsure what to do.
I've definitely burned out a few times.
They're also a good source of slack -- "They’re also good for teams that have a lot of last-minute requests or questions". Coasters can do more work when that's what's needed. OTOH, a grinder always working at 100% can never give more.
Said another way, with one fewer category, but with a clearer and more general approach.
I've never read anything better to describe nearly all organizations of a certain size.
It's like Freud where it doesn't really stand up to serious empirical evaluation, yet there are so many uncomfortable truths.
The author kinda loses the plot after the part about power talk, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics
A taxonomy of partial engagement in software development would be an interesting topic. I've worked at quite a few places where there was something pathological I couldn't change or where I could have worked harder but it would have created a lot of strife with people who (don't work as hard|don't work as smart|don't see the big picture|aren't careful|don't know how to write joins in SQL|learned to design software by learning answers to interview questions|...)
In a case like that you can still get stuff done with 50% engagement, getting a lot more done might not be feasible without getting the support you need from your co-workers and if you lower your standards your life gets easier and you still get something done. It can sometimes feel pretty good and it can sometimes feel like dying inside.
Why are these people always flirting with psudoscientists and charlatans?
Seriously? Why is this linking to Wilhelm Reich? Why does this look like some shit Lacan would have written? Why does this link to the devils NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming)
Why couldn't scientists in this era just stay in their fking lane and not say dumb shit?
I'm so tired of having to debunk yet another crack-pot stupid ideology from this era. This is psychoanalysis for the STEM-lord, and just as full of nonsense.
On one hand I am trained as a physicist and work as a computer programmer and have a lot of respect for arch-reductionists like Forester and Minsky but I also have an a schizotypal brain that causes me to have unusual experiences: I have a knack for dowsing rods, pendulums, ouija boards and the like even if I don't believe in them.
Korzybski is an interesting case because you cannot get a good edition of his Science and Sanity so it is not possible to evaluate his work as a whole. I'd agree with L. Ron Hubbard (half jokingly) that Korzybski did not develop a workable system but Korzybski asked interesting questions and in some sense has less bullshit per mile than most approaches to getting more out of the human nervous system (e.g. I had a therapist who gave me CBT worksheets that Korzybski would have been giving out had he attained the "workable system")
True. Also it should be the managements'/team leads' role to act as a midiators. It's a waste of time to constantly argue over what is "right" when all proposed solutions are functional.
Should we spend more time flushing out the unknowns? Should we launch ASAP and interate fast? Should we automate the process? Do we have data to back our assumptions?
The "culture fit" is not superficial and I've always been advocate of fire fast if one is culturally unfit because it slows down everyone
I'm just trying to imagine the different traits for liberal vs conservative grifters (thought leader vomit vs machiavellian connivance), believers (thought leader vomit vs constant market research), grinders (ship lots of code vs write lots of tests) and coasters (shitpost all day on random slack channels vs do the bare minimum to appear to be working)
and now you have my attention. only, i'm reading it from the asshole's perspective.
Maybe throw in some flavor from the 6 types of working genius (WIDGET: wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, tenacity) and meyers-briggs personality types for fun.
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