Personalities

Quick background: He Says, She Says Saturdays (HSSSS) have been a regular (?) feature of my brother’s and his wife’s blogs for the last two years. Now my other brother and I have blogs too, we’re joining in the fun to produce He Says, He Says, He Says, She Says Saturdays. The purpose of these is to discuss a general topic and hopefully various similar/different viewpoints will be revealed. This first HSHSHSSSS is on the topic of personalities.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a lecture which talks about current/future software engineering approaches. One of the topics covered was that of personalities and whether people work better together if they have the same personality or whether opposites really do attract. The study (published in Empirical Software Engineering, vol 14 issue 2) concludes that different personalities can indeed be more productive together, however it is not a complete study and many parameters were not investigated. Most people never do a personality test and so will never know how they compare to those around them and will simply know that they get on better with some people than others.

In order to fix this, here’s my personality profile done at 41Questions

These results put me as a “reliable realist”. Rather than paraphrasing the description from the website, I’ve copied it straight in here for you to read:

Serious and quiet, interested in security and peaceful living. Extremely thorough, responsible and dependable. Well-developed powers of concentration. Usually interested in supporting and promoting traditions and establishments. Well-organized and hard working, they work steadily towards identified goals. They can usually accomplish any task once they have set their mind to it.”

This sounds like it describes me quite well. It also lists the possible careers that this kind of person does, again this pretty much covers exactly what I do:

“Business executives, administrators and managers, accountants, police, detectives, judges, lawyers, medical doctors, dentists, computer programmers, systems analysts, computer specialists, auditors, electricians, math teachers, mechanical engineers, steelworkers, technicians”

I can’t really complain about any of that. The one thing I will comment on though is that whilst I am obviously introverted and make decisions based on what I think, my methods of processing information and the way I structure my life are both stuck in the middle. This continuous scale demonstrates that people cannot always be dropped into handy pigeonholes.

So what do you get? Give it a go and leave me a comment to see how we compare.

Also check my family to see how similar/different we are:

• My older brother
• His wife
• My younger brother