Graham Wheeler's Random Forest

The last post in this series covered the Five Factor Model of personality. In this post we’ll dig into personality patterns that people can exhibit. Everyone has some combination of the five factors, but how does that combination manifest as a personality type? There are many different models of personality types, but one used in psychology and psychoanalysis is the categorization in the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

It is very common in modern software engineering organizations to use agile approaches to managing teamwork. At both Microsoft and eBay teams I have managed have used Scrum, which is a reasonably simple and effective approach that offers a number of benefits, such as timeboxing, regular deployments (not necessarily continuous but at least periodic), a buffer between the team and unplanned work, an iterative continuous improvement process through retrospectives, and metrics that can quickly show whether the team is on track or not.

Shankar Vedantam has a great NPR show/podcast, “The Hidden Brain”, and occasional appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered. In December he had a show on Evaluating Personality Tests. It was enjoyable, especially the Harry Potter Sorting Hat references, but I felt it was a missed opportunity because of the focus on Myers-Briggs, and the fact that he mentioned the Big-5 model only in passing. In fact, Myers-Briggs is not taken very seriously in the psychology world, and Vedantam surprised me with spending so much time on it, given his show’s focus on research in psychology.