Shoot Your Shot 2016:
Part I: Am I the right “type” to be a programmer?
Social psychology has long fascinated me, and one element of social psych that has held my attention is the categorizing of cognitive tendencies/trends/preferences across groups (i.e. personality/psychological profiling).
In one of the more popular personality profiling systems, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) — a continuation on Jung’s theories on personality work — people are one of 16 personality types which make their distinctions in having varying combinations of 2 values on 4 spectrums: Introversion or Extraversion, Intuition or Sensing, Thinking or Feeling, and Perceiving or Judging.
Auxillary functions/preference stacking aside, a quick scan through the spectrum that composes the 16 personalities: the introversion/extraversion pole (social contact effect on energy): Introverts (not synonymous with shy) gain energy through alone time and lose energy through prolonged social contact. Extraverts have the opposite characteristics. Intuition or Sensing (information gathering): intuitive people tend to synthesize information through abstraction/symbolism pretty well and often read between the lines; sensors are more apt to be “down to earth” and engage themselves with things generated/perceived by the 5 senses. Thinking and Feeling (decision making poles): thinkers tend to be logical, systematic and objective in their decision making, and feelers often judge situations through an emotional, subjective lens. Finally, judgers tend to be very structured, methodical and like to have situations meet with closure, while perceivers prefer to take a spontaneous “I’m just going to see what the day brings” approach.
Some argue that the types built on these preferences are innate and with us from birth (nature), some argue that these tendencies are malleable and a product of environment/experience (nurture) and some find that these classifications don’t do the human experience justice and/or are derived from murky schools of thought, tied to BS things like racial supremacy/eugenics (manure?).
Well for the sake of this post, we’ll pretend like there is at least some feasibility to personality typing, and with the MBTI in particular.
In a study titled “Personality types in software engineering” published in the “International Journal of Human-Computer Studies” ( http://eng.uwo.ca/electrical/faculty/mcisaac_k/docs/mbti-IJHCS-v2.pdf ) the authors found the distribution of the 16 personality types among the U.S. adult population:
Table 1 (from above link)
The MBTI types and their distribution among the US adult population
ISTJ ISFJ INFJ INTJ
11.6% 13.8% 1.5% 2.1%
ISTP ISFP INFP INTP
5.4% 8.8% 4.4% 3.3%
ESTP ESFP ENFP ENTP
4.3% 8.5% 8.1% 3.2%
ESTJ ESFJ ENFJ ENTJ
8.7% 12.3% 2.5% 1.8%
In looking at the table, we see that ISTJs make up 11.6% of the U.S. adult population — a pretty substantial number. What is even more interesting (at least to me) is that those “typed” ISTJ compose 24% of all the computer programmers that were surveyed for the study, and that TJ types ( people with Thinking and Judging) made up 50% of the list.
Type distribution of software engineers and SRTT comparison with an adult population sample (n ¼ 100;
ISTJ ISFJ INFJ INTJ
24% 2% 1% 7%
ISTP ISFP INFP INTP
8% 5% 2% 8%
ESTP ESFP ENFP ENTP
8% 1% 3% 7%
ESTJ ESFJ ENFJ ENTJ
15% 4% 1% 4%
So if you’re not an ISTJ or a (thinker/judger) type in general, but are interested in software engineering, should you show yourself the door?
As an INFP that codes, and one who has pondered this before and has used studies like this to perhaps sew seeds of impostor syndrome, I would say nope don’t show yourself the door.
It’s ‘Shoot Your Shot 2016’, and in a follow-up post, I’ll share my thoughts on why I may have decided that all this psychological preference as a precursor to career happiness may be manure (and not just to appease my INFP ego :) ).
Life’s good. Let’s go get it.
-JB