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.
Thanks David, this is an extremely helpful addition. It is true that creative people often tend to disregard the importance of review, to the point we feel only the creation part is valuable. That's also the reason we prefer coding to QA, but it is QA that guarantees the end result is useful.
One way I like to think of this is as switching roles between creator and critic. In creator mode you just output as much value as you can, but then you switch to critic mode and the job is no longer to find new answers but to criticize and refine what's already there. It works a lot for me when writing, for example.
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.
Thanks David, this is an extremely helpful addition. It is true that creative people often tend to disregard the importance of review, to the point we feel only the creation part is valuable. That's also the reason we prefer coding to QA, but it is QA that guarantees the end result is useful.
One way I like to think of this is as switching roles between creator and critic. In creator mode you just output as much value as you can, but then you switch to critic mode and the job is no longer to find new answers but to criticize and refine what's already there. It works a lot for me when writing, for example.
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.