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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I accept the distinction. For the amount that the concept gets bandied around, there’s actually very little evidence that people fall into discrete personality types like these.

We are all stronger and more experienced in some areas than others, but simply writing yourself off as ‘Not a process person’ removes your ability to level up and takes away your ability to do any better.

It’s especially sad as these ‘scripts’ often do not come from inside, but are baked into people from leadership and then justified by Myers Briggs style psychobabble.

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I like the distinction between pioneer, settler, and city planner when thinking of the people working on new products. To me, it’s more about the lifecycle of a product as opposed to putting people into boxes.

I feel like I know what business/code trade-offs I should make depending on which of those characters I’m currently playing. I also know what type of flexibility I should build into the product early on and which best practices can wait until market fit has been found.

I wouldn’t want to take a city planner into the wilderness (sewers and squares before we know if anyone wants to even live here, lots of high quality code that has no users). And I also wouldn’t want to be a mayor having pioneers running my subway/water system (bandaid fixes, poor long-term decisions, spaghetti code)

But I agree with you overall that people can adopt these roles based on context and aren’t limited by them

Over the course of 35 years developing software, I completed several circuits of pioneer/settler/planner loop. Learning to function well in all three domains was as important to increasing my professional value as learning different languages, tools, OS's, and problem domains.

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. It's not about typecasting a individual person. It's about recognizing that there are these divisions in the work that's available. It's a feature of the environment, and you should recognize it and your relationship with it.

Then you can be aware, for your own good, of where your preferences and strengths lie, and make conscious decisions about what to take on, whether working on your core competencies is wallowing or increasing your depth; whether a stretch would constitute "levelling up" or just stress.

(Incidentally, in response to your swipe at Meyers-Briggs, the same is true there: it's a tool to help you recognize your own inclinations and be aware of them so that you can grow meaningfully and purposefully. It's not for boxing yourself in and saying, "I can't/shouldn't do that because I'm an ABCD".)

People do treat these as binary typecasting instead of shifting scales. On the leadership side, it means that they will treat as immutable personality type something that may be just reaction to the position you are in.

And once you self-identify as pioneer (because it sounds cool) you just become more of pioneer and prevent yourself advantages of process (or vice versa).

That is similar to the same problem as with Meyer-Briggs - most people are in the middle of all scales and their result shift over time. Those in the extreme end are rare. But both extreme and and middle get the same type description.

And you end up inflexibly casted in one group although you are more similar to people in different groups that are also in the center then to extremes of own group.

> writing yourself off as ‘Not a process person’ removes your ability to level up and takes away your ability to do any better.

I've worked at places with varying levels of process. I don't get enjoyment or fulfillment from following a process, defining processes for others to follow, or from enforcing process on others.

When I have choices, I would rather be paid to do things I enjoy and let me feel fullfillment than working at a job where I have to spend a lot of time doing stuff I don't enjoy. You can say, that proper process enables more productivity, but I haven't experienced that, and building better process isn't something I'm good at, so it makes sense for me to seek out opportunities with less process and more individual ownership and deployment freedom so I can be a cowboy.

i agree with this a lot about pioneers not “leveling up.” saying you’re a pioneer and can only do the initial work on a project and not bring it past the first stage isn’t some great skill. kind of like someone who gets promoted to level where they can’t perform and then are out of a job. and quitting the company because of it just shows immaturity and inability to learn

“pioneers” as mentioned in this article are not critical to a business, it’s the people who can do both ends of this spectrum

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