This is a very elegant way to describe this juxtaposition of roles. While I have definitely embodied all thee of these for years, I have found over the last 5-10 years I have added a fourth mind/role to the mix which I think everyone in this field should nurture/grow as well (including students). I call this one the “reviewer”. I look at what I am producing from the viewpoint of someone who has not seen it before and must review / maintain it. It is this mode that inspires good comments, documentation, commit messages, and breaking that clever/optimized spaghetti function up into something easier to digest. The advantages are clear for work on a team, but often I find that the the eventual beneficiary is future me when/if I have to return to some area down the line (e.g. fix a bug or work on an improvement). Perhaps this is only an aspect of the Engineer, but I find it helpful to explicitly shift into this particular mind.
I like this distinction of mindsets. Although when I read the “hacker” characteristics, I see they all fall under scientist and engineering, too. As someone who trained as a scientist but did research that falls closer to engineering, I think all the hacker characteristics are essential to both science and engineering.
But still, I like the distinction into these three separate categories, nomenclature notwithstanding
For anyone checking this out: life works this way, too. Categorizing things into subsets like these can be a really useful framework for interpreting data from just about any discipline. I often envision my writing "job" as threefold: writer, editor, and marketer. All three necessitate different mindsets, but all three need to meet up and powwow, to be cohesive.
This is a very elegant way to describe this juxtaposition of roles. While I have definitely embodied all thee of these for years, I have found over the last 5-10 years I have added a fourth mind/role to the mix which I think everyone in this field should nurture/grow as well (including students). I call this one the “reviewer”. I look at what I am producing from the viewpoint of someone who has not seen it before and must review / maintain it. It is this mode that inspires good comments, documentation, commit messages, and breaking that clever/optimized spaghetti function up into something easier to digest. The advantages are clear for work on a team, but often I find that the the eventual beneficiary is future me when/if I have to return to some area down the line (e.g. fix a bug or work on an improvement). Perhaps this is only an aspect of the Engineer, but I find it helpful to explicitly shift into this particular mind.
I like this distinction of mindsets. Although when I read the “hacker” characteristics, I see they all fall under scientist and engineering, too. As someone who trained as a scientist but did research that falls closer to engineering, I think all the hacker characteristics are essential to both science and engineering.
But still, I like the distinction into these three separate categories, nomenclature notwithstanding
For anyone checking this out: life works this way, too. Categorizing things into subsets like these can be a really useful framework for interpreting data from just about any discipline. I often envision my writing "job" as threefold: writer, editor, and marketer. All three necessitate different mindsets, but all three need to meet up and powwow, to be cohesive.
That's really a nice way to think about it.