Curse You, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator!
What follows was pulled from my e-mail archives and I thought, hey, somebody reading my blog, if ever there is such a someone, might be interested in the deeply flawed aspects of my personality. I could find no better post to enlighten you than this (tongue-in-cheek) missive from early 2010. Enjoy!
What do you do when you discover you’re in the wrong career?
I took an MBTI temperament sorter the other day as part of work. I continued a trend I noticed after a year in China. Where I used to routinely score ENTJ before I went to China (the Chief), I now score ENFJ/ENFP, the Mentor/Teacher/Advocate. I guess I am to take from this that my time in China made me more in touch with my Feelings and those of others as well and also made me a little less certain, decisive, and judging (J).
I’ve been doing a leadership class at work (good conversation about that - can leaders be taught?) and as a result have had my team take the test and I’ve been studying the results. I even graphed them in order to demonstrate the degree of my nerdiness. On that graph there is a nice tight grouping of INTJ and ISTJ. My only real problem with that is, if you know anything about MBTI, all the opinions and constant bickering. These guys are hard to lead because they get paid to have these opinions and frequently distrust the opinions of others. But that, too, is another post. This is about me and I used to score steadily in the ENTJ area which allowed me to leverage my E to great advantage in engineering circles. Irony of ironies, even our Trainer/BA is an INTJ and I am now the outlier, the wild hair data point, the ENFJ in ENTJ’s clothing …
As I begin to feel mildly nauseated at this turn of events, my whole Jungian world hanging in the balance, I turn to the online world to understand who it is I really am. You can imagine the staggering revelation I experienced when I discovered the following blurb on the ENFJ’s DISFAVORED CAREERS (careers for which my personality type is not suited for general happiness):
race car driver : This I can live with. I’m not much into fast cars. I don’t even like Driving games. The fastest car I ever had was a ‘94 Ford Taurus (white with crimson interior).
scientist : I’m not going to weep over this one. While I do posit a good many things, anyone who knows me knows I am not the most rigorous thinker. I still believe we are all simply numbers. But late nights, drunk at a Perkins diner, a laboratory setting does not make. Even my very stringent use of Wikipedia seems to fall short of the discipline.
computer specialist : Huh? Hmmmm. Oh yeah, they mean hardware nerds. Nah, never been into hardware. Strictly software for me. I’ve never built my own box and wouldn’t know which end to use on a soldering gun (I’m told it’s the end without the cord but I still don’t know what that means).
airline pilot : I gave up on this dream long ago but it wasn’t easy. I spent many an hour on Flight Simulator but my dream sort of disintegrated with the twin towers. That is to say that I was going to get my private pilot certification until we got attacked by guys who trained at the facility I was also going to train at and the Bush administration shut them down for two years. By the time they opened up again something had just turned off inside of me, sort of like the right to due process that we used to enjoy in these United States, apparently also a victim to terrorists.
computer programmer : What?!?! Huh?!?!? This is core. Fabric. This is my life for the last eighteen years. Nay. Since I was thirteen I have tickled keys feverishly, puzzled many a circuitous thread of logic, lived in obsequity, in homage to the great Compiler, built layer upon layer of bit-wise detritus, weaving it, no, whipping it into a frothy ball of leaky memory. This postulation tears at the very heart of who I believe myself to be. It is the first broken link in the chain of my identity … But perhaps it is a fluke. Surely, I am not merely a “computer programmer”. No. I am a Software Designer. Or a Web Designer. Yes, that’s it. I am not mere programmer. THAT is why this profile suggests I would be unhappy. I have clawed my way up the food chain and out of so nasty an existence. I am on a higher plane of software development. Of course I would be unhappy as so mere a thing as a programmer …
financial manager : I could have guessed this. I take no joy from watching my debt pile up. That much is certain. Perhaps, if it was somebody else’s money … wait, it is somebody else’s. Well, if I got paid to mismanage my money maybe I could, like all those other investment houses, mismanage other people’s. Perhaps that would make it worth it. But I don’t think so.
epidemiologist : Now here is a possibility that, on paper, makes me a bit wistful for potentials. Perhaps in some other universe I am diligently working to fight Trichispondophyllangial Dungitis (a disease commonly associated with navel-gazing activities like obsessing over MBTI scores). Saving the world from sure destruction, one petri dish at a time. But alas, it shall never be in this particular wrinkle in the fabric of time and space. I do indeed lack the stuff needful of such pursuit.
truck driver : While I did date a truck driver in college, I do not see myself carting cattle out of Texas like she did, my lonesome (although never lonely) be-halter-topped cowgirl. I must admit, I have thought about what might make long hours of tedium on the country’s highways and by-ways palatable and considered that, with a good laptop and speech recognition software, I could contract code or perhaps even write a novel in the vein of Jack Burton, the hero of Chinatown. But alas, I am no longer meant to be a Computer Programmer, which does leave that other most difficult of conceptual endeavors, Writing novels or screenplays about truck drivers who save the world from wizard kings from the era of the Three Kingdoms.
electrical engineer : This I never understood. Who in their right mind would pursue such a thing. I never knew my Ohm from my impedance mismatch. And who could? Well, other than you, Jack, I mean. Besides I’m more into meditational mantra and activities of the impudent sort. I cannot kowtow to circuitry in the way my mind can work with a runtime interfacing with an abstraction of an OS which in turn is layered on a kernel, like the nth layers of heaven’s
progression from the hell that is physical reality (and circuits through which we progress as little impulses of electrons) to the nirvana of a perfectly abstracted library of infinite programming potential and goodness. And besides all that, I would never have graduated. I would have been the gelatinous mass of fetal writhing, under the desk at the back of the Calculus lecture hall screaming “drop, drop, drop” over and over. Ohm, he calmly intones.
software designer : Gadzooks!!! May I say it again? Gadzooks!!! If I have not been this, if I have not been fulfilled by the endless hours spent in this endeavor, all those nights at 3 in the morning, foreswearing my wife, with my compatriots (Dusty, the fixer, Andrew Thomas, the comedian, and our gun-toting ex-commando client, or perhaps with Frank as we shared a single cube between the two of us and he kindly let me sit close to the door so I could hang my withering, purple, stockinged foot out after a soccer injury nearly crippled me, or perhaps with Jack trying to get continuous integration to accept the build night after night as we introduced one after another unrealistic feature into the product for YET ANOTHER PIVOTAL DEAL-MAKING DEMO, or perhaps it was the lost sleep in service to the client who insisted that adding features was a mere matter of moving slices of imagery around on a screen (”I don’t understand why you can’t just move it from here to there and call it this and make it work in a completely different manner in one day.”)) and I MUST work on the software toiling over the numerous bugs I had managed to introduce into the code base, all those UI mock-ups referred to as often as not as “cat puke”, sequence diagrams no one reads, requirements poured over in confused contemplation as more effort went into the TOC than the actual use case, I ask you, if not for all this, what have I toiled for but to be a software designer? Simply to have that moniker embedded amongst all of the acronyms for various and sundry technologies that might get my resume hits on Dice that I may enjoy a higher than average income? Hmmm. Well perhaps it was about the money.
web designer : If the previous entry was a barrage of jabs throwing me off-balance and onto the ropes, this is right hook that brings the stars (or the tweety birds if you prefer). Where the E in my ENTJ used to distinguish me as a social butterfly among ogres (no offense, guys) this was, perhaps, my only other distinguishing talent. Where the INTJ turns toward her models, her domain languages, her APIs and business objects implemented in lovingly structured, pattern-based purity, I would turn my attentions to User Interface. Where Dusty would try using every single control from the tool palette in one form of infinite length and function in the earnest desire to satisfy the requirement and get back to his architecture, I would tease out the subtleties of dimension, lay-out, weight, and alignment, ease of use and elegance implemented in the visage of a technology. My designs would make use of colors that would turn a construction company on their head (where they would want Red, I would see Salmon). And oh the joy of seeing users beguiled by the dynamic update of colorful circles dancing around maps and statuses updating in real-time. Or that perfect wizard-based process that stepped the user so assuredly through all manner of convoluted logic. Or that time, dare I refer to it twice, at the Insurance company where I designed a mock-up for an insurance estimation tool that was compared to “cat puke?” To see this taken from me as a job I would find disagreeable. Oh, I am truly reeling in the corner, on the ropes and about to go down …
business consultant : Pah! What is business but a set of constraints to be managed? I scoff at anyone who suggests it is otherwise.
DJ : And now I am down. I am kissing the canvas, spittle trailing on the mat away from my broken lip. My eyes reel wildly in their sockets as I try to make sense of the world now spinning violently about me. Can I tell you how much I love music and sharing it with others? Can I tell of you of the countless mixed-tape masterpieces I have shared with women in the earnest desire to … er, broaden their musical spectrum? Dare I mention the many times I have compiled CDs to be screeched out in dashboard pounding performances while my kids groan on in the back seat of a long, long car adventure? Oh, cruel, cruel world, do not take my Radio Voice!
bookseller : Sniff. I had a job in college at B. Dalton’s Booksellers. That job was HARD! I did get a discount on books though, which is nice.
And so, there you have it. The writing is on the digital wall. In a matter of a couple short years my life’s effort from 13 to 40 has been invalidated in the continuing and long-trending genesis of Craig McWherter’s Jungian distillment. In my sudden and wrenching exodus out of ENTJ and into ENFJ, from the Chief to the Mentor, from the Field-marshal to the Teacher I find myself in the uncanny valley where the reality of my predicament seems to warp into something not quite right.
Am I to be culled from algorithmic herd? Is my previous life’s hard work at an end and I find that my rewards lay somewhere out there along a different thread of execution?
