The Product Engineer

At its core it is about raw physical "existential modes" and not the more superficial label of "personalities", and it's very hard to appreciate what that means even in the case where you think you know what it means. Like if you're a trained psychologist. Certain drugs might be windows into our fellow humans' worlds. Other than that, strokes and other forms of brain damage are the only cases I know of people that have experienced multiple "existential modes". For example[1].

I think in terms of hiring, the broad strokes are useful but I wouldn't dilly dally with the specifics too much since they can be misused easily, nevermind all of the other variables in play. And as far as I know there isn't really a central place on the internet that describes the scheme as a whole. Dilly dallying through MBTI forums was one of my pastimes in ages long past and that might be the way to make sense of it today, keeping in mind how slippery things get when everyone's self is involved.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...

Insofar as I fit all the criteria you're listing, those traits are all things that push me to want to work on a small, independent product where I can dictate the vision for it. If I'm willing to "learn programming somewhere along the way as a necessity" to express that vision, there's no reason I won't also decide to learn how to start and run a business "along the way, as a necessity."

To put it another way: in the games industry, the "product engineers" there are called "game designers." Game designers don't generally work as freelance consultants, or put themselves on the market as employees for companies like EA or Sony to snatch up. Instead, if you have the actual vision required to come up with a decent game, you'll make it—and sell it—yourself, either as a one-man show, or by starting your own small games company.

The only game designers working for the big games companies are the ones that grew into that role from whatever they got hired to do (usually either programming or art)—and, even then, only embraced their roles once the company decided to start letting them come up with products "from scratch" that they could basically run as their own little ventures, rather than just stewarding along some existing product of the company's.

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† I say "entrepreneur", but not in the typical HN meaning of the term. Most "startup founders" I ever hear about seem to be either pure-engineering types who just think about cool tech all day, or pure-business types who think about what'll be profitable all day and follow trends. Entrepreneurialism seems to actually be much more common outside Silicon Valley in regular-old small businesses, where someone with a "product vision" like "feeding people really weird pizza" will get a loan and set up a pizza place to fulfill that vision.)

Yes, and that tendency is mutable too.

> the box you slot yourself into circumscribes the habits you'll form, and then things that become habitual feel more "natural."

You mean they feel more comfortable, and sometimes that will be conflated with feeling "natural". Habits of the mind are just that: ruts and tracks that have deepened over time with repeated actions. They can be changed, like anything else in the phenomenal universe.

> Everyone on HN is pretty familiar with the introvert/extrovert distinction, and also how carefully it has to be explained lest it be confused with "outgoing" vs. "shy." The real distinction, as the 'common wisdom' goes, is about how you "recharge."

That might be the common wisdom, but that was not how Jung or even MBTI defines introversion and extroversion.

> I personally think it's clearer to phrase it in terms of the contrapositive: introversion/extroversion is about what you reject when you're out of willpower. Whatever comes more naturally to you—whatever's more habitual—will "cost" less to keep on with.

I've been talking with my meditation buddies about this on and off for the past year. Some of them are (or were) software engineers and some of them are not. Over the past year, I've been finding that idea of introversion and extroversion is BS, but I have not looked into it deeply enough to find any good insight.

It smells like BS to me because it seems like a truism that hasn't been thoroughly examined.

> And do note that most of the MBTI factors do occur separately in other personality-trait assessments, that were not created by mystics. :)

They appear in other personality-trait assessments because Jung and the mother-daughter team of Meyers and Briggs were credible enough scientists/speakers that people forgot where it came from. I didn't say Jung was a mystic. I said Jung had mystical experiences. He had been trained as a scientist, then out of the blue, he started having experiences for ten years. He went with it and started observing it, making theories about it, much like a cultural anthropologist would when they immerse themselves into a different culture. Where did you think Jung got his ideas of archetypes and collective unconscious from? He observed them directly and called them such. It's really funny to me how "mysticism" has become such a dirty word and used for name calling :-D

Customers tell you what their problems are but they're not trained in telling you the solution. The mistake that's often made is that customers tell you their problem in the form of a solution. The role of the PM is to then take the solution, reverse engineer the problem out of it and then work with the team to figure out the true solution.

Where the technical/non-technical split lies between the PM and the engineers can vary. Ideally, the PM is technical enough to come up with new possibilities on their own and understand the technical implications and tradeoffs of each possibility but not every PM has the background or inclination towards that. The next best thing is that the PM works closely with the engineers to communicate the user goals and trusts engineering to find clever solutions to those goals. But the worst is a PM who thinks they're technical enough to come up with features and then steamrolls over engineering objections over the implementation.