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Comment by boo-ga-ga | Hacker News Reader

Any article that splits people into two groups and says one group cannot inherently be good at something immediately puts me off, sorry.

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I can definitely say that I am a mapper and not a packer. But I can also say that I am pretty much _all_ mapper and no packer. This means that it takes me forever to understand a lot of things that presumed packers (or more balanced individuals) would get in a jiffy. This is not intended as a humble brag! For the longest time on some projects I just don't f**ing get it, I start to feel dumb and in way: out of place. The imposter syndrome makes itself heard. It's genuinely uncomfortable.

But then I start to get it and finally do get it. The packers are now "experts" at their acquired knowledge and seem to have a hard time changing opinion where they should.

Back in school I had real problems getting good enough in subjects that required learning pieces of fact that don't quite go together or display some inherent system. My friends didn't. Things that have a system or are "logical" in the wider sense, easy peasy.

EDIT: I would call myself a decently accomplished programmer and engineer at this point after 25 years or so working with it.

This is me as well. I’m not very good at memorizing things so I have to build a mental model of a system that I’m working in and extrapolate.

It gives me a lot of anxiety to be in that trough before it clicks.

Very much so. I've gotten better at simply dealing with the fact that I don't undertand wtf I'm doing, and to just accept that at the outset. Now, this is in no way unique and I'm no snowflake. But there's a definite cost.

I'm similar. It takes me longer to get comfortable than others because it has to join up for me. It has been observed by many that I seem slow to get started on things.

Others seem to be happy taking snippets of stuff and just applying them straight away. But equally, they have not developed a deeper understanding and they will struggle when faced with edge cases. Pros and cons I guess.

For me, it's very much about finding the right level of abstraction. And sometimes things take a lot longer to understand because pieces of the code focus on the wrong abstractions to see how it all fits together. You see that a lot in large orgs with teams with their own coding styles/conventions, focused on their own assigned goals.

So you are saying there are those who split people into two groups and those two do not, and the first group is inherently bad at writing articles?

This is the flaw in having an entirely hateful view of splitting, that view is itself an example of splitting. You have to instead believe that there is a time where it is appropriate and useful to split (e.g, war) and times where it isn’t (general thinking)

There's so just room for some sort of splitting to represent truth.

The article talks about packers and mappers and that either is it isn't a useful distinction. I am open to either, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea because it's "splitting" by nature.

I get that splitting can be useful and logical in many particular situations. But when we talk about very general case like being a good engineer, it is definitely not a good way to reason.

So you're saying that the splitters are split into two groups? One group which knows when it's a good time to split, and the other group which doesn't?,

This feels like a false equivalence. Splitting articles try to make broad generalizations about human behavior, but, as any social scientist knows, human behavior is extremely complicated and multidimensional. A critique of these articles is about falsity, which is binary.

"Someone wise once wrote 'Our world's divided into two types of folk. Now, theres the type of people who divide the world into different types of people, and then there's the type who don't.'"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ntIkCITF188&t=1m6s

Presumably authors of articles holding such a view/opinion as to split people into two groups do not hold such a view/opinion as an inherent characteristic of their being.

The problem is on assuming the groups are static.

The first group has been bad at writing articles up to now. That just doesn't tell you anything about what their next article will look up.

This isn't what GP said, but nice try at a 'gotcha'.

You might find this interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

Funny, this was exactly where I stopped reading and went to the comments instead

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