So what am I? I can easily say that I am all of the first three you mentioned. Researcher, Explorer, and Craftsman. And exactly which depends on what I’m doing at the time.

Truth be told, I pretty much knew this all along (and come to think of it, I’m frackin’ proud of it!) and have long wondered how much of a liability this was going to be. It’s feeling more and more like a liability all the time and I am really wondering exactly how to deal with it.

And hence the reason I ended up here.

Do I really want to change? No actually. I just may need to learn how to be a little workhorse-ish from time to time.

Great write Joe!

besides everyone having something of this 6 (including the architect) i’m pretty sure i’m more of a reasearcher with a little activism in my hearth cause i like to follow the stadarts.

my actual job somethimes requires that i “incarnate” the five kinds, as many programmers on small statup companies do

… but i simplily love to look to new solutions and different ways to the problems (and to the solutions … sometimes i’m in the shower and when i reallyse i’m wondering about semantincs and search engines…

today this character plays a vital role in my career and in my company.

For instance, I’ve never met an activist that can get along with a researcher…and vice versa.

I’d like to see a relationship model similar to the bartle types or something.

I’m a Craftsman (Activist/Workhorse) if we want to get into astrological terms. I constantly beat myself senseless trying to do quality work while incorporating FORWARD and if I do it poorly, start all over again. I’m such a terrible programmer, I would fire myself, fortunately I’m the boss and can look the other way.

Joe,

Does GreyNoten blog anywhere that you know of?

-e

As far as collaboration with different types of programmers, the person in my career I had the hardest time getting along with was a definite Explorer and we butted heads constantly; I hated dealing with his code, and we couldn’t agree on anything.

I guess the key difference is that the Activist sees the system as a collection of buzzwords and whizzy technology where the Architect sees it as a coherent whole. I’ve known a few people who did this, but none of them had any fear whatsoever of unfamiliar areas of code. They understood the whole structure well enough to have a good idea what a new chunk of code was going to do. What the DID hate was somebody messing with the architecture without their consent.