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Comment by mirntyfirty | Hacker News Reader

The healthy places I’ve worked have had a variety of personalities and personality types. Some of the people could be considered type B or less productive, but were great communicators that had an endless supply of tasks to do that they were quite competent at. As such, they provided great support to their teams and improved the culture.

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I have seen many of these type of people in a large organisation, they are not really Type B, more like a Generalist. They dont excel in any single one thing, but they are good to decent in nearly everything. They also act like oil in the whole gigantic machine, smoothing out everything so Type A ( or so in this context ) could concentrate on their work. The many small things that are hidden within an organisation, and in daily communications when they helped but could not be accurately measured.

They are, in effect, the 10x people. Because of their presence they made things around them far more productive, while they themselves might not be as productive. Most, if not all middle management aren't very good at understanding this.

Your esteem for Generalists made me think of glial cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia

> Some of the people could be considered type B or less productive,

Type B? Is that an established concept?

Not an expert on these types of things but I think that there’s this notion of a type A personality that gets overly glorified in the self-help and corporate productivity realms...at least from what I’ve noticed. I’ve found it to be silly though because I’ve also noticed top workers that are perfectly calm, easy to talk to, and not competitive in the slightest.

And yes, these types of subjective things can be argued eternally but these have been my observations and experience.

> not competitive in the slightest.

I prefer collaborating and building a team. I find people who “like to complete” to be short sighted, and often produce bad work over the long run - they already think they are “the best” and often don’t improve in a broader picture. The cup is already full so to speak.

Almost all paths are for “type A”s in the tech world.

Seems people didn’t learn anything from MoneyBall.

type A/B is an unscientific concept that is mainly used by a subset of people to justify their neurotic behavior

So basically people with a superiority complex

For real, splitting personalities in 2 types is such a reductionist approach that the only ones who take it seriously are the self-help coaches

MBTI is debatable, but it tries to be a better measure than just A/B

I don’t know where these terms come from, but I’ve heard it as Type A is organized, disciplined, uptight and Type B is disorganized, undisciplined, laid back

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