[lfjokes] Personality Types, for Security Consultants

[Adam Shand]

After 10 years as a cryptography/security consultant, I recently crossed
over the line, and became a "security architect" for a startup.  It seemed
a good idea at the time, until one day, when I saw in my inbox an
"invitation" to a series of off site management training sessions. Oh,
good: 8.5 hours locked in a room with an HR type and an urn full of bad
coffee, singing the company song, coloring inside the lines, practicing
the bland, meaningless smiles...  I'll just catch up with everything else
on Tuesday, right?

So, inevitably, in the middle of listening to the usual noise about how to
empower our subordinates (half of us in the room counted ourselves lucky
not to have subordinates, but I digress), we flinched as the the HR type
whipped out the dreaded Meyers-Briggs test.  Yes, even though all of us
had taken this personality test more than once before, in similar
self-improvement death marches, and even though we all could classify each
other as ESTP or INTJ on sight, and even though we all knew... Well, we
had to take it again, and we had to have our long familiar "scores"
explained to us again, and we all were very upbeat about it, because after
all, this was a self-improvement death march, and not a death march of
some other variety.

During this mess, I reflected on my own "seat of thepants" classification
of personality types, honed and refined during my decade of teaching
crypto 101 to brokerage sysadmins:

I mainly use two orthogonal axes to classify people.

First,  everyone is either an Ally, or is not an Ally.
Second, everyone is either an Enemy, or not.

So, we can group people (coworkers, customers, investors, etc.) into four
classes, right off the bat, without any insipid HR testing:

     People who are Allies;  People who are Enemies;
     People who are both;    People who are neither.

People who are both Ally and Enemy call themselves "diplomatic," but of
course, they're really just Traitors, or at best just unnecessary
competition. They should handled as briefly as possible, if you get my
drift.

People who are neither Enemy nor Ally like to pretend that they're just
bystanders, but this point of view is wasteful of these persons' great
potential, which must properly be "developed."  So, I further subdivide
this one group into two categories:

     People who can be used as Weapons;
     People who can be used as Hostages.

So, instead of M-B's 16 personality types, I count five:

     Allies, Enemies, Traitors, Weapons, and Hostages.

This system of personality analysis is, I submit, at once more
comprehensive and more useful than the feel good Meyers-Briggs in many
realistic situations, whether you're in a design review, a maximum
security prison, or even in an all day meeting with HR.  Well, OK, that
last one isn't strictly a realistic situation.

But you get my drift.