6 ms·

People are multi-dimensional. I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times.

_gmax0 2y ago
I'll buy someone a coffee if they propose a state-space model that identifies a location on the author's plane as a function of time and incentives :^)
- mckn1ght 2y ago
  I was thinking about how to describe the interactions between all possible pairings under a variety of circumstances, like on an axis of virtuous vs conflicting.
  - datameta 2y ago
    Three dimensional chart, not kidding. We sell outselves short. With good design and color coding those are quite readable.
- m463 2y ago
  Just plot your sincerity against your energy level (which might track time of day) Probably could make a garmin watch function to plot "stress level" vs "body battery"
conqrr 2y ago
Same for me at different time. But I also believe I have a natural state to gravitate if the environment provides for.
syntheticnature 2y ago
I think the article sort-of says this near the end, mainly in hinting that continuous grinding can be a problem.
koasterz 2y ago
> I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times. Believer - When you first join the company and they sell you on the vision Grinder - You work hard for a year or two to make a difference Coaster - You realize you wont get promoted, they company will always have no money on the bonus pool, except for the execs. And that the company will go on by sheer force of momentum, not by your grinding. Grifter - You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup. Now you repeat the cycle, except you are the person at the top and someone else goes thru these stages.
- dmarlow 2y ago
  > You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup. They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then?
  - krta 2y ago
    No, certain startups (not from YC!) hire a pool of grinders (50%) and the rest is family, academic friends, LDS church members etc. The rest gets the cozy positions and does nothing.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I find it really funny to be in some place where there is a privileged class, particularly when I discover it gradually. I can see how some people would find it infuriating.
  - koasterz 2y ago
    >> They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then? Not really. Startups cannot really operate without doers, and most doers want something out of the experience -- equity, money, promotion, etc. I've seen two start-ups (one Series A SF startup with bigname VCs) which promoted VC-frields' kids while the doers waited and waited. In one case, the "child" was 25yo, became manager 6mo later, became Director 6mo after that, became senior Director 6mo after that. Some facebook stalking revealed the relationship, some photos at Lake Tahoe. Eventually the startup collapsed because there were so many senior folks w/o real experience. I saw the same individuals follow leadership to a new company, which also had a huge implosion.
joefigura 2y ago
The author makes this point. "These aren’t immutable aspects of your personality. They’re more categories for how you approach the job of software engineering - you’ll move around between quadrants as you change your approach to work, for all the usual reasons."
HPsquared 2y ago
It's all contextual. Just like all the "alpha' etc stuff.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  "alpha" stuff isn't contextual, it's just bs. unless you're talking about the stock measure, in which case it is less contextual (but sorta), but very real and sought after.
maartenscholl 2y ago
The chart in the article is multi-dimensional, it has two dimensions: what you mean is time-varying.
- encoderer 2y ago
  You can be in more than one quadrant at the same time.
  - epcoa 2y ago
    Not if you’re Jan Michael Vincent.
crdrost 2y ago
In addition to people being multidimensional, this sort of diagram usually has a sort of "internal motion" to it. That is, this is an instance of a diagram that you'll see repeated over and over in business texts; I personally call it a "fourbox" but I suppose "business matrix" is more common and "quadrant analysis" or something like that is even more descriptive. The idea is that you identify two different things, graph those as separate axes, label the quadrants and then tell a story about the four different labels. The Eisenhower matrix is the usual example (one axis is how close is the deadline, near vs far, the other is how much is lost by missing the deadline, a little vs a lot. The immediacy is called "urgency", the stakes are called "importance," things that are important-and-urgent should be done by you now, things that are important-not-urgent should be scheduled, things that are urgent-not-important should be delegated to someone else, and everything in the last quadrant should be safely ignored). A "true" fourbox in my view should tell a particular story, which I call "cynefin flow" after a different iconic fourbox that told this story compellingly. According to this flow, there should be motion in a circle about the center of the axes, except that it gets interrupted at one transition between the quadrants and becomes stuck in a U-shape, unless some outside stimulus pushes it over that edge. So there is a motion I -> II -> III -> IV around the quadrants but then things get stuck in IV unless an outside stimulus pushes it back into I. The cynefin story for the Eisenhower matrix ends with things getting stuck in not-important-not-urgent, so that is your IV quadrant. Of the two stories you can tell from there, the more compelling story is that, "Things that are important but not urgent, become important-and-urgent as the clock runs down, but then the deadline will pass and the pain becomes a sunk cost and they become unimportant-and-urgent, only to eventually fade to being unimportant-and-not-urgent, until an external stimulus acts to suddenly attach additional stakes to them and make them important again." So you have a bill (I), that bill comes due (II), you miss the deadline but still have a chance to pay it (III), and finally it gets sent to collections and impacts your credit (IV). And it sits there until either the debt expires or you're trying to get a new house, in which case it becomes Important again (I) to clean up your credit history. Similarly with the BCG matrix, which is a fourbox with your capture of a market on one axis, the market's growth rate on a separate axis. Then the businessfolk carefully write "cash cow, question mark, star, dog" on each of these four quadrants. But what makes it a true fourbox is that your "question marks" that you invest in become "stars" as you capture their markets, then become "cash cows" as growth dries up, then become "dogs" as the market itself stagnates, until some external stimulus creates the opportunity for growth and more question marks again. OP's diagram has "work intensity" on one axis, and a sort of "idealism-vs-pragmatism" axis for the other, and they have identified the intense pragmatist as naturally falling under a Cynefin flow into being a coasting pragmatist as they burn out. Presumably this is the accumulation point and those are the III and IV of the system, in which case some external stimulus causes coasting pragmatists to become coasting idealists, at which point they will naturally become intense idealists as their aspirations come to the fore, and then naturally become intense pragmatists as the organization fails to reward their idealism?
tarsinge 2y ago
Yeah I’m only in my late 30s and I’m in the same boat. Many things and mindsets can be good, it’s not about finding the absolute but finding the most appropriate one for the current context of your life.

I'll buy someone a coffee if they propose a state-space model that identifies a location on the author's plane as a function of time and incentives :^)

mckn1ght 2y ago
I was thinking about how to describe the interactions between all possible pairings under a variety of circumstances, like on an axis of virtuous vs conflicting.
- datameta 2y ago
  Three dimensional chart, not kidding. We sell outselves short. With good design and color coding those are quite readable.
m463 2y ago
Just plot your sincerity against your energy level (which might track time of day) Probably could make a garmin watch function to plot "stress level" vs "body battery"

conqrr 2y ago

Same for me at different time. But I also believe I have a natural state to gravitate if the environment provides for.

syntheticnature 2y ago

I think the article sort-of says this near the end, mainly in hinting that continuous grinding can be a problem.

koasterz 2y ago

> I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times. Believer - When you first join the company and they sell you on the vision Grinder - You work hard for a year or two to make a difference Coaster - You realize you wont get promoted, they company will always have no money on the bonus pool, except for the execs. And that the company will go on by sheer force of momentum, not by your grinding. Grifter - You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup. Now you repeat the cycle, except you are the person at the top and someone else goes thru these stages.

dmarlow 2y ago
> You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup. They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then?
- krta 2y ago
  No, certain startups (not from YC!) hire a pool of grinders (50%) and the rest is family, academic friends, LDS church members etc. The rest gets the cozy positions and does nothing.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I find it really funny to be in some place where there is a privileged class, particularly when I discover it gradually. I can see how some people would find it infuriating.
- koasterz 2y ago
  >> They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then? Not really. Startups cannot really operate without doers, and most doers want something out of the experience -- equity, money, promotion, etc. I've seen two start-ups (one Series A SF startup with bigname VCs) which promoted VC-frields' kids while the doers waited and waited. In one case, the "child" was 25yo, became manager 6mo later, became Director 6mo after that, became senior Director 6mo after that. Some facebook stalking revealed the relationship, some photos at Lake Tahoe. Eventually the startup collapsed because there were so many senior folks w/o real experience. I saw the same individuals follow leadership to a new company, which also had a huge implosion.

joefigura 2y ago

The author makes this point. "These aren’t immutable aspects of your personality. They’re more categories for how you approach the job of software engineering - you’ll move around between quadrants as you change your approach to work, for all the usual reasons."

HPsquared 2y ago

It's all contextual. Just like all the "alpha' etc stuff.

red-iron-pine 2y ago
"alpha" stuff isn't contextual, it's just bs. unless you're talking about the stock measure, in which case it is less contextual (but sorta), but very real and sought after.

maartenscholl 2y ago

The chart in the article is multi-dimensional, it has two dimensions: what you mean is time-varying.

encoderer 2y ago
You can be in more than one quadrant at the same time.
- epcoa 2y ago
  Not if you’re Jan Michael Vincent.

crdrost 2y ago

In addition to people being multidimensional, this sort of diagram usually has a sort of "internal motion" to it. That is, this is an instance of a diagram that you'll see repeated over and over in business texts; I personally call it a "fourbox" but I suppose "business matrix" is more common and "quadrant analysis" or something like that is even more descriptive. The idea is that you identify two different things, graph those as separate axes, label the quadrants and then tell a story about the four different labels. The Eisenhower matrix is the usual example (one axis is how close is the deadline, near vs far, the other is how much is lost by missing the deadline, a little vs a lot. The immediacy is called "urgency", the stakes are called "importance," things that are important-and-urgent should be done by you now, things that are important-not-urgent should be scheduled, things that are urgent-not-important should be delegated to someone else, and everything in the last quadrant should be safely ignored). A "true" fourbox in my view should tell a particular story, which I call "cynefin flow" after a different iconic fourbox that told this story compellingly. According to this flow, there should be motion in a circle about the center of the axes, except that it gets interrupted at one transition between the quadrants and becomes stuck in a U-shape, unless some outside stimulus pushes it over that edge. So there is a motion I -> II -> III -> IV around the quadrants but then things get stuck in IV unless an outside stimulus pushes it back into I. The cynefin story for the Eisenhower matrix ends with things getting stuck in not-important-not-urgent, so that is your IV quadrant. Of the two stories you can tell from there, the more compelling story is that, "Things that are important but not urgent, become important-and-urgent as the clock runs down, but then the deadline will pass and the pain becomes a sunk cost and they become unimportant-and-urgent, only to eventually fade to being unimportant-and-not-urgent, until an external stimulus acts to suddenly attach additional stakes to them and make them important again." So you have a bill (I), that bill comes due (II), you miss the deadline but still have a chance to pay it (III), and finally it gets sent to collections and impacts your credit (IV). And it sits there until either the debt expires or you're trying to get a new house, in which case it becomes Important again (I) to clean up your credit history. Similarly with the BCG matrix, which is a fourbox with your capture of a market on one axis, the market's growth rate on a separate axis. Then the businessfolk carefully write "cash cow, question mark, star, dog" on each of these four quadrants. But what makes it a true fourbox is that your "question marks" that you invest in become "stars" as you capture their markets, then become "cash cows" as growth dries up, then become "dogs" as the market itself stagnates, until some external stimulus creates the opportunity for growth and more question marks again. OP's diagram has "work intensity" on one axis, and a sort of "idealism-vs-pragmatism" axis for the other, and they have identified the intense pragmatist as naturally falling under a Cynefin flow into being a coasting pragmatist as they burn out. Presumably this is the accumulation point and those are the III and IV of the system, in which case some external stimulus causes coasting pragmatists to become coasting idealists, at which point they will naturally become intense idealists as their aspirations come to the fore, and then naturally become intense pragmatists as the organization fails to reward their idealism?

tarsinge 2y ago

Yeah I’m only in my late 30s and I’m in the same boat. Many things and mindsets can be good, it’s not about finding the absolute but finding the most appropriate one for the current context of your life.