I think in many professions you can categorize people as professionals or auteurs (insofar as anyone can ever be classified, binaries are false, yada yada).
Professionals as people ready to fit into the necessary role and execute the required duties. Professionals are happy with “good enough”, are timely, work well with others, step back or bow out when necessary, don’t defend their visions or ideas when the defense is unlikely to be listened to. Professionals compromise on ideas, conform in their behavior, and to some degree expect others to do the same. Professionals are reliable, level-headed, and can handle crises or unexpected events. They may have a strong and distinct vision of their goals or their craft, but will subsume it to another’s without much fuss if they don’t think they have the stance or leverage to promote it. Professionals accurately assess their social status in different situations, and are reluctant to defy it.
On the worse end of this spectrum is the yes-man, the bureaucrat, and the aggressive conformer. On the better end are the metaphorical Eagle Scouts, the executive, the “fixers” who can come in and clean up any mess.
Auteurs are guided first by their own vision, maybe to the point of obsession. Auteurs optimize aggressively and wildly, but only for their own vision. Auteurs will interrupt you to tell you why their idea is better, or why yours is wrong. Auteurs have a hard time working together if they disagree, but can work well together if they agree, or with professionals who can align with their thinking. Auteurs don’t care that their ideas are non-standard, or don’t follow best practices, or have substantial material difficulties. Auteurs will let a deadline fly past if their work is not ready. Auteurs might look past facts that contradict thems. Auteurs don’t feel that sorry if they make themselves a pain in the ass for others to move toward their goals. Auteurs will disregard status, norms, and feelings to evangelize.
On the worse end they are kooks, irrationally obstinate and arrogant, or quixotic ineffectuals. On the best they are visionaries, evangelists for great ideas, obsessive perfectionists who elevate their craft whether the material rewards are proportional to their pains or not.
I think LW might have more sympathy for the Auteurs, but I hope people recognize the virtues of the professional and the shortcomings of the auteur, and that there is a time and place to channel the spirit of each side.
I can buy these as character sketches of two imaginary individuals, but are there actual clusters in peoplespace here? There’s a huge amount of burdensome detail in them.
It’s not burdensome detail; its a list of potential and correlated personality traits. You don’t need the conjunction of all these traits to qualify. More details provide more places to relate to the broad illustration I’m trying to make. But I’ll try to state the core elements that I want to be emphasized, so that it’s clearer which details aren’t as relevant.
Professionals are more interested in achieving results, and do not have a specific attachment to a philosophy of process or decision-making to reach those results.
Auteurs are very interested in process, and have strong opinions about how process and decision-making should be done. They are interested in results too, but they do not treat it as separate from process.
And I’ll add that like any supposed personality type, the dichotomy I’m trying to draw is fluid in time and context for any individual.
But I think it’s worth considering because it reflects a spectrum of the ways people handle their relationship with their work and with coworkers.
Essentially, treat it as seriously as a personality test.
Exactly. The world is complicated, apparently contradictory characteristics can co-inhabit the same person, and frameworks are frequently incorrect in proportion to their elegance, but people still think in frameworks and prototypes so I think these are two good prototypes.
I think you’re being a bit harsh though—the problem with personality tests and the like is not that the spectrums or clusters they point out don’t reflect any human behavior ever at all, it’s just that they assign a label to a person forever and try to sell it by self-fulfilling predictions (“Flurble type personalities are sometimes fastidious”, “OMG I AM sometimes fastidious! this test gets me”).
Professional/Auteur is a distinction slightly more specific than personality types, since it applies to how people work. It comes from the terminology of film, where directors range from hired-hands to fill a specific void in production to auteurs whose overriding priority is to produce the whole film as they envision it, whether this is convenient for the producer or not. Reading and listening to writers talk about their craft, it’s also clear that there’s a spectrum from those who embrace the commercial nature of the publishing industry and try hard to make that system work for them (by producing work in large volume, by consciously following trends, etc.) to those who care first and foremost about creating the artistic work they envisioned. In fact, meeting a deadline with something you’re not entirely satisfied with vs. inconveniencing others to hone your work to perfection is a good example of diverging behavior between the two types.
There are other things that informed my thinking like articles I’d read on entrepreneurs vs. executives, foxes vs. hedgehogs, etc.
If I wanted to make this more scientific, I would focus on that workplace behavior aspect and define specific metrics for how the individual prioritizes operational and organization concerns vs. their own preferences and vision.
I can see the ” irrationally obstinate and arrogant” bureaucrats and “aggressive conformers” at one junction, and I can see evangelist Eagle Scouts and perfectionist fixers at the other junction.
Steve Jobs seems to be a classic second-junction type.
It does seem like these are two mostly unrelated skills—leadership, teamwork, and time management on one hand, and vision, creativity, and drive on the other. They don’t really oppose each other except in the general sense that both sets take a long time to learn to do well. There are enough examples of people that are both, or neither, that these don’t seem to be a very useful way of carving up reality.
I think they do. Not in the “never shall they mix” kind of sense, but I would argue that these types form discernible separate clusters in the psychological space.
Anyone got any actual evidence one way or the other?
(My own prejudices are in the direction of the two things genuinely being opposed, on handwavy grounds to do with creativity being partly a matter of having relatively inactive internal censors, which might be bad for efficiency on routine tasks. But I don’t have much faith in those prejudices.)
I was thinking 4 quadrant. Horizontal axis is competence, vertical axis is professional vs. auteur.
Steve Jobs was something of an auteur who eventually began to really piss off the people he had once successfully led and inspired. After his return to Apple, he had clearly gained some more permanent teamwork and leadership skills, which is good, but was still pretty dogmatic about his vision and hard to argue with.
The most competent end of the professional quadrant probably includes people more like Jamie Dimon, Jack Welch, or Mitt Romney. Professional CEOs who you could trust to administrate anything, who topped their classes (at least in Romney’s case), but who don’t necessarily stand for any big idea.
This classification also corresponds to Foxes and Hedgehogs—Many Small Ideas vs. One Big Idea / Holistic vs. Grand Framework thinking.
But it is not a true binary; people who have an obsessing vision can learn to play nice with others. People who naturally like to conform and administrate can learn to assert a bold vision. If Stanley Kubrick is the film example of an Auteur—an aggravating genius—and J.J. Abrams is the professional—reliable and talented but mercenary and flexible, there are still people like Martin Scorsese who people love to work with and who define new trends in their art.
So maybe junction is a good way to think of it, but there are extraordinarily talented and important people who seem to have avoided learning from the other side too.
As written, I’m skeptical of the claim that LW is more sympathetic to the so-called “Auteur”-perspective. The large amounts of productivity posts and discussions attest otherwise.
I think in many professions you can categorize people as professionals or auteurs (insofar as anyone can ever be classified, binaries are false, yada yada).
Professionals as people ready to fit into the necessary role and execute the required duties. Professionals are happy with “good enough”, are timely, work well with others, step back or bow out when necessary, don’t defend their visions or ideas when the defense is unlikely to be listened to. Professionals compromise on ideas, conform in their behavior, and to some degree expect others to do the same. Professionals are reliable, level-headed, and can handle crises or unexpected events. They may have a strong and distinct vision of their goals or their craft, but will subsume it to another’s without much fuss if they don’t think they have the stance or leverage to promote it. Professionals accurately assess their social status in different situations, and are reluctant to defy it.
On the worse end of this spectrum is the yes-man, the bureaucrat, and the aggressive conformer. On the better end are the metaphorical Eagle Scouts, the executive, the “fixers” who can come in and clean up any mess.
Auteurs are guided first by their own vision, maybe to the point of obsession. Auteurs optimize aggressively and wildly, but only for their own vision. Auteurs will interrupt you to tell you why their idea is better, or why yours is wrong. Auteurs have a hard time working together if they disagree, but can work well together if they agree, or with professionals who can align with their thinking. Auteurs don’t care that their ideas are non-standard, or don’t follow best practices, or have substantial material difficulties. Auteurs will let a deadline fly past if their work is not ready. Auteurs might look past facts that contradict thems. Auteurs don’t feel that sorry if they make themselves a pain in the ass for others to move toward their goals. Auteurs will disregard status, norms, and feelings to evangelize.
On the worse end they are kooks, irrationally obstinate and arrogant, or quixotic ineffectuals. On the best they are visionaries, evangelists for great ideas, obsessive perfectionists who elevate their craft whether the material rewards are proportional to their pains or not.
I think LW might have more sympathy for the Auteurs, but I hope people recognize the virtues of the professional and the shortcomings of the auteur, and that there is a time and place to channel the spirit of each side.
I can buy these as character sketches of two imaginary individuals, but are there actual clusters in peoplespace here? There’s a huge amount of burdensome detail in them.
It’s not burdensome detail; its a list of potential and correlated personality traits. You don’t need the conjunction of all these traits to qualify. More details provide more places to relate to the broad illustration I’m trying to make. But I’ll try to state the core elements that I want to be emphasized, so that it’s clearer which details aren’t as relevant.
Professionals are more interested in achieving results, and do not have a specific attachment to a philosophy of process or decision-making to reach those results.
Auteurs are very interested in process, and have strong opinions about how process and decision-making should be done. They are interested in results too, but they do not treat it as separate from process.
And I’ll add that like any supposed personality type, the dichotomy I’m trying to draw is fluid in time and context for any individual.
But I think it’s worth considering because it reflects a spectrum of the ways people handle their relationship with their work and with coworkers.
Essentially, treat it as seriously as a personality test.
Ah. That seriously. :)
Exactly. The world is complicated, apparently contradictory characteristics can co-inhabit the same person, and frameworks are frequently incorrect in proportion to their elegance, but people still think in frameworks and prototypes so I think these are two good prototypes.
Like Hogwarts houses? Star signs? MBTI? Enneagram? Keirsey Temperaments? Big 5? Oldham Personality Styles? Jungian Types? TA? PC/NPC? AD&D Character Classes? Four Humours? 7 Personality Types? 12 Guardian Spirits?
I made one of those up. Other people made the rest of them up. And Google tells me the one I made up already exists.
Where does Professional/Auteur come from?
One of these has pedigree!
I agree that human typology is often noise. Not always though, it can be usefully predictive if it slices the pie well.
Yes! Like those.
I think you’re being a bit harsh though—the problem with personality tests and the like is not that the spectrums or clusters they point out don’t reflect any human behavior ever at all, it’s just that they assign a label to a person forever and try to sell it by self-fulfilling predictions (“Flurble type personalities are sometimes fastidious”, “OMG I AM sometimes fastidious! this test gets me”).
Professional/Auteur is a distinction slightly more specific than personality types, since it applies to how people work. It comes from the terminology of film, where directors range from hired-hands to fill a specific void in production to auteurs whose overriding priority is to produce the whole film as they envision it, whether this is convenient for the producer or not. Reading and listening to writers talk about their craft, it’s also clear that there’s a spectrum from those who embrace the commercial nature of the publishing industry and try hard to make that system work for them (by producing work in large volume, by consciously following trends, etc.) to those who care first and foremost about creating the artistic work they envisioned. In fact, meeting a deadline with something you’re not entirely satisfied with vs. inconveniencing others to hone your work to perfection is a good example of diverging behavior between the two types.
There are other things that informed my thinking like articles I’d read on entrepreneurs vs. executives, foxes vs. hedgehogs, etc.
If I wanted to make this more scientific, I would focus on that workplace behavior aspect and define specific metrics for how the individual prioritizes operational and organization concerns vs. their own preferences and vision.
Do you think it’s a circle?
I can see the ” irrationally obstinate and arrogant” bureaucrats and “aggressive conformers” at one junction, and I can see evangelist Eagle Scouts and perfectionist fixers at the other junction.
Steve Jobs seems to be a classic second-junction type.
It does seem like these are two mostly unrelated skills—leadership, teamwork, and time management on one hand, and vision, creativity, and drive on the other. They don’t really oppose each other except in the general sense that both sets take a long time to learn to do well. There are enough examples of people that are both, or neither, that these don’t seem to be a very useful way of carving up reality.
I think they do. Not in the “never shall they mix” kind of sense, but I would argue that these types form discernible separate clusters in the psychological space.
Anyone got any actual evidence one way or the other?
(My own prejudices are in the direction of the two things genuinely being opposed, on handwavy grounds to do with creativity being partly a matter of having relatively inactive internal censors, which might be bad for efficiency on routine tasks. But I don’t have much faith in those prejudices.)
I was thinking 4 quadrant. Horizontal axis is competence, vertical axis is professional vs. auteur.
Steve Jobs was something of an auteur who eventually began to really piss off the people he had once successfully led and inspired. After his return to Apple, he had clearly gained some more permanent teamwork and leadership skills, which is good, but was still pretty dogmatic about his vision and hard to argue with.
The most competent end of the professional quadrant probably includes people more like Jamie Dimon, Jack Welch, or Mitt Romney. Professional CEOs who you could trust to administrate anything, who topped their classes (at least in Romney’s case), but who don’t necessarily stand for any big idea.
This classification also corresponds to Foxes and Hedgehogs—Many Small Ideas vs. One Big Idea / Holistic vs. Grand Framework thinking.
But it is not a true binary; people who have an obsessing vision can learn to play nice with others. People who naturally like to conform and administrate can learn to assert a bold vision. If Stanley Kubrick is the film example of an Auteur—an aggravating genius—and J.J. Abrams is the professional—reliable and talented but mercenary and flexible, there are still people like Martin Scorsese who people love to work with and who define new trends in their art.
So maybe junction is a good way to think of it, but there are extraordinarily talented and important people who seem to have avoided learning from the other side too.
As written, I’m skeptical of the claim that LW is more sympathetic to the so-called “Auteur”-perspective. The large amounts of productivity posts and discussions attest otherwise.
You may be right. Hackernews then. An avowed love of functional programming is a sure sign of an Auteur.