so out of the habit

[kaigou]

Realized I've only been posting like what, once every few weeks? It's been... real. Around here. Short version of current lessons (re)learned:

1) You cannot have a successful project without someone to make the decisions, aka 'manager'. Especially in agile. No project manager, you might as well accept the project will most likely fail. Or if it succeeds, it will be through no small amount of teeth-pulling, a lot of arguing, and a whole lot of flailing.

2) If #1 isn't obvious, I'm on a project where the project manager has a) been interim and b) been busy with other things and c) thought the project would be fine without a hands-on manager. Recipe for fail!

3) This is complicated by the realization that I'm working with an ENFP* who is utterly clueless (and mostly uncaring for) deadlines, and too busy chasing the awesome with no care for the fact that he's rewriting everything almost daily, breaking the build, and making it impossible for me to get anything done in my area of the project. Multiply the lack-of-care with an INTP on the other side, who is equally entranced not only by ideas (and equally bad with deadlines), but downright hostile to task management apps like Jira or Rally, yet loves to talk about how we're building an awesome app. This is turning me into an unhappy ENTJ, because someone around here has got to actually build this app. As opposed to just talking about it (the INTP) or re-building the parts already built (the ENFP).

4) What the hell an ENFP is doing as a web dev, i don't even. Really. I'm out of evens.

5) I'm the only contractor. Guess who's going to get blamed when we don't deliver.

6) Yes, I am making plans. They may change, but it's still plans. As long as I'm pretending to be an ENTJ at work, I might as well do good with it.

7) If I did not have a local network of other women devs to keep me balanced, I really don't know where I'd be right now. Probably in a bunch of miserable interviews as a BA or IA again, having fled the madness that has been this year's dev jobs. Having a network of people who know what it's like is all that's kept me sane.

*If you're not familiar with MBTI, look it up; my teammates aren't edge cases. They're pretty much textbook. It's me, as more of an xNTx, who's flexing to make up for the areas they lack. Like, planning, and follow-through, and the all-important communicate-with-others. The last one, times infinity. If I hear one more "oh, I forgot to mention", I'm gonna start throwing things.

WHY AM I THE RESPONSIBLE ONE. How did this I can't even. You know something's gotta be seriously wrong when I'm the one who ends up with the title "responsible one". Ugh.

ETA: on the plus/tangential side, for those of you still paying attention to the wip, I'm starting again. Now that I've done another massive round of research and let it simmer. Believe me, I've had the time -- sometimes hours while waiting for the ENFP to get around to, y'know, undoing/fixing whatever he's broken this time. Yes, hours.

Comments

[ivoryandhorn]

...Given this post I think you can be forgiven for infrequent posting. |D

Here's hoping your co-workers get it together soon.

[kaigou]

Heh, it's been aggravating, since the first four months at this place have been awesome and I totally adore the people and despite the past month's hell, if they offered me a job tomorrow I would take it, no hesitation. But they don't/won't have the budget for another FTE until earliest end of January, and this project will end before then.

That said, while I remain hopeful that they get their acts in place, I'm not optimistic. The only thing that will save us, really, is that I've set things up architecturally such that the interface is just a bunch of pieces, and it's all cut and paste from here on out. In other words, it'll be pretty hard to mess it up -- but I'm also pretty sure they'll find a way.

[staranise]

As an *NFP, I am so, so sorry. From the bottom of my heart.

[kaigou]

Hah, I'm used to NFPs. ENFP mom, INFP spouse, ENFP sister (though she's borderline enough to really be an ENxP), and who knows how many NF friends. Normally it's really a pleasure, but this poor ENFP has imposter syndrome, so he's trying to pass himself off as an INTP and he just can't do it. I just don't see how he can expect to tough it out long enough for a career in this industry; he's surrounded by NTs and that's soul-killing for you NFs. We NTs are just too harsh. (I try to modulate, but even as self-aware as I am, I still slip up regularly and talk like an NT.)

When I set aside any annoyance for paying the price for others' incompetence, I'm left with the sense that watching the little emotional-meltdown NF at work is like watching a trainwreck. If trains could have emotional meltdowns.

(This is not to say NFs are walking basketcases. Most aren't, but when they get way off balance and totally stressed to the edge, everything becomes laden with the emotional, to a degree that makes me want to run away. Or to snap at him to get him to stop. Yes, I know the latter reaction just compounds things, but damn, it's hard not to bite his head off, if it'd mean I wouldn't have to watch him have another meltdown.)

[staranise]

Uuuugh, yes.

My supervisor last year was ENFP, which was cool but we didn't really click; this year, for the first time, I'm working under an INFP, and I love her lots but I am also like "How have people not shot me before?" Because really, I think, it's the extra little dash of P that makes us infuriatingly indecisive and inconsistent. And my supervisor and I are both counsellors--a job basically tailor-made for INFPs. As webdevs? I can hardly imagine.

(My occasional participation in open source projects has largely been, whether I mean to or not, traipsing through the system and documentation and finding aaalll of the things that NTs think are totally self-evident. I'm like a landmine detector as I flail around going, "But I don't understand!")

[kaigou]

Normally, no one wants to shoot an NFP. For the most part, NFPs are just so genuinely likeable (as are SFPs) and affable, that they're hard to hate. They also tend to genuinely like people in return, and that's pretty awesome to be around. But what drives an NFP is very, very different from what drives an NT (whether NTP or NTJ), and what you get rewarded for (and what's verbalized) in the tech industry tend to be NT-focused things. There's just very little here that's going to give an NF any substantial, soul-feeding kind of satisfaction.

Instead, we NTs -- because the rest of the team consists of INTP, INTP, INTJ, INTJ, ENTJ, and an ENTJ personnel manager to boot! -- pivot on things like competence. We don't care so much about whether you like us, so much as whether you respect us. So the INTP teammate who says (of the ENFP) "this guy is so smart!" is saying "I like this guy!" but the ENFP doesn't hear that. What he hears is that he has to keep coming across as smart in order to be liked. (After all, the INTP is just saying what he would want to hear.) So the ENFP just keeps piling on what's gotten him that "so smart!" reaction, and that's to have dragged in all this confusing, irrelevant, unnecessary front-end tech that's just turning the entire project into a mess. Because he thinks he has to, because he doesn't realize how the NTs around him measure competence (and because the INTP's search for Teh Awesome has gotten wrapped up in the ENFP's worry about Do They Like Me).

It was a damn uncomfortable (if productive) meeting where I finally got the INTJ to pin down the code so we could review it. The ENFP probably did feel like he was on the spot and being personally attacked, because NTs just can't ask a question in a neutral tone. Well, more like nothing's neutral to an NF.

Hell, if anyone's competence got questioned, it was mine (at that meeting) for saying I'd done a last-possible-minute switch from one major framework to another. Reqs changed, so the tech had to change, so I changed it. I didn't see it as a slam on my knowledge; it was an INTJ checking to make sure I was aware of the costs. But I could see in hindsight how that would've felt like an ambush, if I were an ENFP, all b/c of the NT-style of question asking.

Bah, the tl;dr is really that I jsut can't figure out, ultimately, what would make an ENFP come play in an NT-dominated sandbox. I just can't see anything that would satisfy an ENFP, but I see a lot that'd make the average ENFP a neurotic mess.

[staranise]

Bah, the tl;dr is really that I jsut can't figure out, ultimately, what would make an ENFP come play in an NT-dominated sandbox. I just can't see anything that would satisfy an ENFP, but I see a lot that'd make the average ENFP a neurotic mess.

I can make a stab at this one! Which is, the thing that you use the tools for. Worst-case scenario, your ENFP's in webdev because somebody told them to go into IT to make money, and jobs that NFPs are really good at which involve people and language skills, like documentation or end user tech support, are less lucrative. At which point their longevity in the field will probably be determined by how large the external pressures to keep their job are.

If they want to survive, they've got to attach to a much larger, values-based reason for the work, instead of hooking the success exhaust hose back into the motivation air intake. (The longest I spent doing this kind of work it was to make it easier for teachers to work with homeless youth, which made any amount of tedium bearable.) If they can do that, then what kicks in is the *NFP disinterest in details in a good way; they're flexible, openminded, and work on making everything harmonize. What I suspect, though, is that your ENFP is spending too much time thinking about the end user; the lack of personality sync in your team means he's not thinking about what his teammates want and need. (Fs in IT are kind of precious, I think, because there isn't enough emphasis on the end user experience; but if only one fish is swimming upstream, it's not getting anywhere.)

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

I would nuance this a bit. 1 & 2 *can* work, with the right team members. But not when in conjunction with 3 or some variation thereof where the team is not completely focused and working *as a team*.