Grok Personality Types
Understand the different types of personalities and how to interact with them in a professional context.
Some programmers are successful as a one-person company. The vast majority of us, however, need to play nice with others.
Much of what we’ll do in the professional world requires regularly interacting with others. The introverted programmer might rather hole up in their cube and write code instead. However, our ability to interact effectively can accelerate—or limit—the coolness of the code we get to hole up with.
These “soft skills” aren’t necessarily what programmers are known for. This lesson will focus on the high points of appreciating people’s personality traits and how they interact in professional contexts.
The golden rule of “Do to others what you would have them do to you” applies to teamwork, too.
Understanding personalities
One thing about personalities is obvious: not everyone is like us. But perhaps not so obvious is that there are various measures of personality that can quantify just how much everyone is not like us.
One very common measure is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which measures how people perceive the world and make judgments. We can take a test to determine our MBTI, and it would certainly be handy to know the MBTIs of people we work with, but those are luxuries we probably won’t get.
What’s more important is to understand the factors used in Myers-Briggs—or other personality measurements—and use those to assess the people around us based on observation. We may not guess their types exactly, but we can get close enough. If we get a rough picture of how we deal with the world and how they deal with it, it can help us to relate to that person in a meaningful way.
Temperament: Introversion/extroversion
The first type of measurement is the scale between introversion and extroversion: inward-facing vs. outward-facing. These are terms we’ve likely heard before, and we can probably put ourselves on the scale quite readily. In very general ...