Programmer Personality Test

 I found this Programmer Personality test the other day. It is based of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test but obviously recrafted for programmers. Now I have mixed feelings about Myers-Briggs (my son  the psychology major dismisses it completely) but a lot of people put stock in it. This test, while it claims to be serious, has too few questions in my opinion to be reliable enough for serious evaluations. And of course I am unaware of any real research behind it. On the other hand it was quick and easy to take and I found the results interesting. My results are below. My comments on the results are below that. 

Your programmer personality type is:

   PHSB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

My comments on the results.

Planner is completely right. If you read this blog regularly you'll know that I am an advocate of old-fashioned planning and through design before coding. That may make me a dinosaur but it worked for me my whole career.

High level is true today but wasn't always true. There was a time when bit fiddling was a great joy for me. Setting flags, traversing lists (using pointer arithmetic) and low level coding were fun and interesting. As I've gotten older I really like to reuse code. I have been there, done that, and have no need to prove to anyone that I can "do it from scratch." Give me the blocks and I'll build you your tower!

Solo situation? Yes, I guess so. But honestly I work fine on large multi-person projects. This happens because of the planning phase. As long as all the inputs and outputs are well defined there is no problem with people coding in something like isolation as long as everyone follows the specification. I like working on a piece of code that is small enough to keep in my head at one time. Until the program isn't broken down into manageable pieces so that individuals can work on them the planning isn't finished to me. That being said I have never given pairs programming a try on a real project. It is an idea I think I might like.

No one who has read my posts on the value of commenting (like this one which started a lot of discussion in the comments - comments on comments?) will be surprised by me fitting into this definition of "liberal programmer." I like my code documented and "pretty." White space is your friend!

What do you think about this test? Does it get you right?

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