[HN Gopher] Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters
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Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters
Author : rbanffy
Score : 169 points
Date : 2024-12-04 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seangoedecke.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seangoedecke.com)
| encoderer wrote:
| People are multi-dimensional.
|
| I'm 42 and I've been all of these things at different times.
| conqrr wrote:
| Same for me at different time. But I also believe I have a
| natural state to gravitate if the environment provides for.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I think the article sort-of says this near the end, mainly in
| hinting that continuous grinding can be a problem.
| koasterz wrote:
| > I'm 42 and I've been all of these things at different times.
|
| Believer - When you first join the company and they sell you on
| the vision
|
| Grinder - You work hard for a year or two to make a difference
|
| Coaster - You realize you wont get promoted, they company will
| always have no money on the bonus pool, except for the execs.
| And that the company will go on by sheer force of momentum, not
| by your grinding.
|
| Grifter - You see the company hire friend after friend of
| execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive
| Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you
| realize you need to get something too, so you use company time
| to form your own startup.
|
| Now you repeat the cycle, except you are the person at the top
| and someone else goes thru these stages.
| dmarlow wrote:
| > You see the company hire friend after friend of execs,
| friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive
| Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you
| realize you need to get something too, so you use company
| time to form your own startup.
|
| They do this because no one wants to work at their startup.
| How do you see this being solved then?
| krta wrote:
| No, certain startups (not from YC!) hire a pool of grinders
| (50%) and the rest is family, academic friends, LDS church
| members etc.
|
| The rest gets the cozy positions and does nothing.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I find it really funny to be in some place where there is
| a privileged class, particularly when I discover it
| gradually. I can see how some people would find it
| infuriating.
| koasterz wrote:
| >> They do this because no one wants to work at their
| startup. How do you see this being solved then?
|
| Not really. Startups cannot really operate without doers,
| and most doers want something out of the experience --
| equity, money, promotion, etc.
|
| I've seen two start-ups (one Series A SF startup with
| bigname VCs) which promoted VC-frields' kids while the
| doers waited and waited.
|
| In one case, the "child" was 25yo, became manager 6mo
| later, became Director 6mo after that, became senior
| Director 6mo after that. Some facebook stalking revealed
| the relationship, some photos at Lake Tahoe.
|
| Eventually the startup collapsed because there were so many
| senior folks w/o real experience. I saw the same
| individuals follow leadership to a new company, which also
| had a huge implosion.
| joefigura wrote:
| The author makes this point.
|
| "These aren't immutable aspects of your personality. They're
| more categories for how you approach the job of software
| engineering - you'll move around between quadrants as you
| change your approach to work, for all the usual reasons."
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's all contextual. Just like all the "alpha' etc stuff.
| _gmax0 wrote:
| I'll buy someone a coffee if they propose a state-space model
| that identifies a location on the author's plane as a function
| of time and incentives :^)
| mckn1ght wrote:
| I was thinking about how to describe the interactions between
| all possible pairings under a variety of circumstances, like
| on an axis of virtuous vs conflicting.
| datameta wrote:
| Three dimensional chart, not kidding. We sell outselves
| short. With good design and color coding those are quite
| readable.
| maartenscholl wrote:
| The chart in the article is multi-dimensional, it has two
| dimensions: what you mean is time-varying.
| encoderer wrote:
| You can be in more than one quadrant at the same time.
| epcoa wrote:
| Not if you're Jan Michael Vincent.
| crdrost wrote:
| In addition to people being multidimensional, this sort of
| diagram usually has a sort of "internal motion" to it.
|
| That is, this is an instance of a diagram that you'll see
| repeated over and over in business texts; I personally call it
| a "fourbox" but I suppose "business matrix" is more common and
| "quadrant analysis" or something like that is even more
| descriptive. The idea is that you identify two different
| things, graph those as separate axes, label the quadrants and
| then tell a story about the four different labels. The
| Eisenhower matrix is the usual example (one axis is how close
| is the deadline, near vs far, the other is how much is lost by
| missing the deadline, a little vs a lot. The immediacy is
| called "urgency", the stakes are called "importance," things
| that are important-and-urgent should be done by you now, things
| that are important-not-urgent should be scheduled, things that
| are urgent-not-important should be delegated to someone else,
| and everything in the last quadrant should be safely ignored).
|
| A "true" fourbox in my view should tell a particular story,
| which I call "cynefin flow" after a different iconic fourbox
| that told this story compellingly. According to this flow,
| there should be motion in a circle about the center of the
| axes, except that it gets interrupted at one transition between
| the quadrants and becomes stuck in a U-shape, unless some
| outside stimulus pushes it over that edge. So there is a motion
| I -> II -> III -> IV around the quadrants but then things get
| stuck in IV unless an outside stimulus pushes it back into I.
|
| The cynefin story for the Eisenhower matrix ends with things
| getting stuck in not-important-not-urgent, so that is your IV
| quadrant. Of the two stories you can tell from there, the more
| compelling story is that, "Things that are important but not
| urgent, become important-and-urgent as the clock runs down, but
| then the deadline will pass and the pain becomes a sunk cost
| and they become unimportant-and-urgent, only to eventually fade
| to being unimportant-and-not-urgent, until an external stimulus
| acts to suddenly attach additional stakes to them and make them
| important again." So you have a bill (I), that bill comes due
| (II), you miss the deadline but still have a chance to pay it
| (III), and finally it gets sent to collections and impacts your
| credit (IV). And it sits there until either the debt expires or
| you're trying to get a new house, in which case it becomes
| Important again (I) to clean up your credit history.
|
| Similarly with the BCG matrix, which is a fourbox with your
| capture of a market on one axis, the market's growth rate on a
| separate axis. Then the businessfolk carefully write "cash cow,
| question mark, star, dog" on each of these four quadrants. But
| what makes it a true fourbox is that your "question marks" that
| you invest in become "stars" as you capture their markets, then
| become "cash cows" as growth dries up, then become "dogs" as
| the market itself stagnates, until some external stimulus
| creates the opportunity for growth and more question marks
| again.
|
| OP's diagram has "work intensity" on one axis, and a sort of
| "idealism-vs-pragmatism" axis for the other, and they have
| identified the intense pragmatist as naturally falling under a
| Cynefin flow into being a coasting pragmatist as they burn out.
| Presumably this is the accumulation point and those are the III
| and IV of the system, in which case some external stimulus
| causes coasting pragmatists to become coasting idealists, at
| which point they will naturally become intense idealists as
| their aspirations come to the fore, and then naturally become
| intense pragmatists as the organization fails to reward their
| idealism?
| d0mine wrote:
| Have you meant "intense _idealist_ " burn out into "coasting
| pragmatist"?
| encoderer wrote:
| I think you have something here in how it relates to a
| fourbox "looking right" or not. Thanks for sharing.
|
| Curious, did you write all this out for this comment? I
| appreciate it either way because I was truly skeptical at
| first but kept reading thru the end.
| jp57 wrote:
| Business schools call it a 2x2. A friend who teaches at a
| business school told me, "You can't be a business school prof
| if you don't have a two-by-two."
|
| But the idea that every 2x2 is a state space that has some
| kind of attractor path in it only covers a subset of such
| plots. There are lots of other kinds that don't fit that
| paradigm, e.g. binary action vs binary outcome, diagnostic
| test pos/neg vs condition true/false, etc.
| jessekv wrote:
| Not sure why, but the image of a 4-stroke engine came to my
| mind when I read your comment.
| dboreham wrote:
| The believer/grifter axis might be what psychologists call
| "external" vs "internal" locus of control.
| dingnuts wrote:
| it's the cynicism axis
|
| both extremes are insane
|
| the middle should be labeled "realist"
| parpfish wrote:
| That chart is confusing because they've put the quadrant labels
| on the axes so a) the axis dimensions are unknown and b) there
| are two labels on each quadrant
| wccrawford wrote:
| 0 is in the middle of the chart. The extremes are the words on
| that axis.
| gipp wrote:
| Those are the labels for each end of each axis, not for the
| quadrants. Believer/grifter is one axis, coaster/grinder is the
| other.
| parpfish wrote:
| But the written breakdowns per type below imply that those
| are the quadrant labels. Otherwise the write ups should be
| for term pairs (eg, believer+coaster)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, the quadrant visualization does not make sense. What is
| the bottom-left quadrant? Coaster or Grifter or both? What
| about the top-right? None of the above? I can't figure it out.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "and this article is really aimed at people who are trying to
| have a bit more empathy for the assholes they work with."
|
| and now you have my attention. only, i'm reading it from the
| asshole's perspective.
| wccrawford wrote:
| The trick is that there's actually assholes in all 4 quads. And
| nice people, too.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| or that depending on where you position yourself right now,
| there's assholes in 3 quadrants, but since you can
| simultaneously be in multiple quads, you're an asshole too.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the real problem is that it's impossible to work as a
| believer/grinder in any large organisation (e.g. filled with
| grifters). It's not sustainable to work as a grinder for a long
| time in the first place, but it's especially terrible when it's
| unrewarding.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > it's especially terrible when it's unrewarding
|
| you just described the angst of every phd student.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why would someone grifting prevent you from griding?
| throw646577 wrote:
| "Grifter" is a terrible word choice for the "personality type" in
| the description.
|
| Grifting is always a form of aberrant behaviour -- manipulative,
| cruel, deceitful, larcenous. Unless you are Humpty Dumpty, I
| don't know why you would choose a word for a quadrant that
| requires you to clarify that you do not mean to associate its
| actual meaning with the behaviours in that quadrant.
|
| "Politician" (albeit with a small p) is a much, much better word
| for the personality type in the description.
|
| Politics is only _sometimes_ a form of aberrant behaviour.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Given the description in the article, I'd say Cynic/Idealist
| instead of Grifter/Believer.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Or maybe even loyalist/idealist to purge any hint of
| negativity from the first category
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Does it? Loyalty is for henchmen. You only need it if you
| have a habit of asking people to do something slimy.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Could be but
|
| > They respect the company mission as written, but what
| they really value is what the leaders of the company show
| they care about.
|
| > Grifters aren't very good at changing the culture of
| their organizations. They tend to go with the current
| instead.
|
| To me loyalist fits this well, not because they are
| necessarily going to do dirty work, but because they are
| loyal to the rules that are in place.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| No you're right, it's a better label.
|
| I just am too much of a believer/anarchist to see loyalty
| as any better than grift. A grifter does their own evil,
| a loyalist does someone else's. I'm not sure which is
| more repugnant but I'm sure that my view on this is quite
| biased. I guess that makes me the target audience re:
|
| > this article is really aimed at people who are trying
| to have a bit more empathy for the assholes they work
| with
| gchamonlive wrote:
| This discussion would benefit a lot from The Banality of
| Evil, but I'm definitely not the best one to introduce
| it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
|
| But I think it would very much argue in favor of people
| being on average more like loyalists. Just regular Joes
| trying to get a promotion and causing untold damage in
| the process.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| go back to the very start; the perspective is supposed to
| be the assholes you identify in each category where you
| don't see yourself. By definition it should be negative,
| and this should feel uncomfortable because you don't want
| to view yourself in the same light. The fact there's so
| much debate implies they nailed the labels.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > the perspective is supposed to be the assholes you
| identify in each category where you don't see yourself
|
| There is literally a "Me" in the graph.
|
| This gives me a little Zizekian vibes, where it's
| intentionally trying to confuse and shock in order to try
| to shift your perspective without you even realising it.
| I like it. The relabeling is just another form of
| understanding by interacting.
| throw646577 wrote:
| I think Realist more than Cynic, maybe. Because the
| activities in that description are perhaps realistically
| transactional, not cynical.
|
| I dunno. The whole thing is wobbly really.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I think this is great. I've certainly had companies where I
| believed in the mission and others where I was just doing the
| work to help along the project or advance my own career
| experience. But I wasn't ever there to deceive people or
| fraudulently misrepresent myself.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| > I'm naming them this way because these are the names you'd
| give them when you're complaining about your coworkers
| throw646577 wrote:
| Are they? Someone who actually does the work is not a
| grifter, by definition.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| I think you'd have to work at it to be a successful
| grifter. If there's a sucker born every minute, then you
| really gotta be able to scale.
| throw646577 wrote:
| Work at grifting, yes -- but the description associated
| with that quadrant is someone who actually works for the
| goals of the organisation: this is the literal opposite
| of grifting.
|
| Like, the post says "You want a grifter leading a
| complicated engineering project".
|
| No, you really, really, really don't.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > No, you really, really, really don't.
|
| You do.
|
| Believers are too inflexible and will kill the project
| eventually because of it.
|
| Coasters won't work enough to deliver the project.
|
| Grinders will eventually burn out and devolve into
| coasters, or start divert the project into unrelated
| territory (focusing too much on optimization, testing,
| accessibility).
|
| Grifters are the only ones who can lead projects, because
| they understand where the wind blows.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Yeah. And I'll just add, so often the success of a
| project is not in its technicals, but the smoke and
| mirrors that are used to sell it. Be that to upper
| management, clients, regulators...
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| grifting is hard work!
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| > I think you'd have to work at it to be a successful
| grifter.
|
| It might take work to be get away with being a fraud, but
| you're not doing work that's helping anyone you're
| working with.
| mattcantstop wrote:
| I agree with this wholeheartedly. I fed ChatGPT the description
| and they said a name without such a negative connotation was
| "navigator." I think this is better. It also recommended
| "politician" as well. I think navigator is fitting. They let
| the structure of the system they find themselves in determine
| their path. The system navigates for them.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Water vs Rock, for my Tao enthusiasts. Combined you have
| beautiful functional waterways upon which to leisure or work.
| d0mine wrote:
| Politics in SE: Self > Team > Org (it fits grifter) The reverse
| fits believer: Self < Team < Org
|
| A<B means that person considers B's interests to be more
| important than A's (in the work context here).
| jameson wrote:
| > I think a lot of programmer arguments bottom out in a cultural
| clash between different kinds of engineers
|
| True. Also it should be the managements'/team leads' role to act
| as a midiators. It's a waste of time to constantly argue over
| what is "right" when all proposed solutions are functional.
|
| Should we spend more time flushing out the unknowns? Should we
| launch ASAP and interate fast? Should we automate the process? Do
| we have data to back our assumptions?
|
| The "culture fit" is not superficial and I've always been
| advocate of fire fast if one is culturally unfit because it slows
| down everyone
| mckn1ght wrote:
| You are talking about a third dimension that I thought of
| immediately upon reading this, which is risk aversion,
| mentioned long ago in https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
| (the original is no longer accessible, thanks Google+)
|
| I'm just trying to imagine the different traits for liberal vs
| conservative grifters (thought leader vomit vs machiavellian
| connivance), believers (thought leader vomit vs constant market
| research), grinders (ship lots of code vs write lots of tests)
| and coasters (shitpost all day on random slack channels vs do
| the bare minimum to appear to be working)
| jameson wrote:
| very interesting read
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You can see your "coaster score" on Hacker News, it is the number
| on the upper right, next to your username ;)
| adamc wrote:
| I would say that I'm a "believer" in this terminology, but I
| don't think either coaster or grinder fits; depending on the
| task, I might be either. It's determined by how hard I find it to
| get going on the task, which often reflects ambiguity and lack of
| direction. When the task is vague, it can take a while to figure
| out an approach to try.
|
| Which is, I guess, a way to say that often when I'm "coasting",
| I'm working -- just not as effectively as I would like. I usually
| feel guilty when I'm unsure what to do.
|
| I've definitely burned out a few times.
| dartos wrote:
| Humans are complex.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I believe that's consistent with the author's "coaster"
| description. "They work enough to get the job done" which is
| sometimes very little, but can sometimes be a lot if that's
| what's necessary.
|
| They're also a good source of slack -- "They're also good for
| teams that have a lot of last-minute requests or questions".
| Coasters can do more work when that's what's needed. OTOH, a
| grinder always working at 100% can never give more.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| " _Why do engineers get mad at each other so often?[...]a
| cultural clash between different kinds of engineers: believers vs
| grifters, or coasters vs grinders_ "
|
| Engineers don't get mad at each other often, the issue is that
| none of those four archetypes are engineers. Engineers have a
| common formal training, certification and can build things to
| specification and timelines which avoids most of the culture
| clashes.
|
| If you want to resolve what's described here the solution is to
| work somewhere that looks more like Lockheed and less like a
| frathouse.
|
| And if you really care about software engineering as a
| discipline, avoid an organization that sounds like this:
|
| _" In most software companies, you really want a handful of
| engineers obsessing about issues like accessibility, security and
| performance all the time, even when the organization as a whole
| doesn't care about it_"
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Companies like Lockheed are rather famous for blowing time and
| budget estimates in spectacular fashion. I don't know if the
| engineers are to blame but not necessarily a great example.
| unobatbayar wrote:
| It's one big tragedy from my experience.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| All models are wrong but some are useful and all that. Now I just
| want to see a megamodel combining this, the software "political"
| axis w.r.t. risk aversion (that I mentioned in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42320862), and finally, a
| summary of how each node interacts with each other node given
| various circumstances like whether it's a collaborative or
| conflicting situation (a concept I learned from a required
| Strength Deployment Index workshop; mentioned in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321007), to prescribe
| various incentives or strategies to unstick the participants and
| keep them flowing.
|
| Maybe throw in some flavor from the 6 types of working genius
| (WIDGET: wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement,
| tenacity) and meyers-briggs personality types for fun.
| jollyllama wrote:
| s/Grifter/Professional/g
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| yeah i agree. grifter has a connotation of scammy, and author
| is using the term differently.
| eweise wrote:
| Is it only in the software fields that people who 'They work
| enough to get the job done, but typically no further' are
| coasters? Someone who gets their job should be an excellent
| employee.
| mrnotcrazy wrote:
| I think in engineering maybe you can have different levels of
| doneness? At my job closing a ticket means the job is done but
| better than closing a ticket is documenting the solution. Even
| better is automating a solution for the future so maybe
| coasters are more likely to be close tickets and move on.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Many managers leave the definition of "done" up to the
| programmer.
| dave333 wrote:
| Natural career progression is through initial growth
| (believer/grinder), plateau (slow transition to coaster/grifter),
| mid-life crisis (believer/grinder in different area/personal
| life), crash landing/retirement (coaster/grifter).
| JohnMakin wrote:
| IME grifter/grinders get rapidly promoted in large companies that
| allow upward movement. I've not worked with many principals that
| were not like this.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| grinders - really? I've seen the opposite. They tend to be
| taken for granted and not recognized is my experience.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Per the article I think that type of person is a
| grinder/believer.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| "aimed at people who are trying to have a bit more empathy for
| the assholes they work with."
|
| I love it!
| oldnewthrowaway wrote:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
|
| Said another way, with one fewer category, but with a clearer and
| more general approach.
|
| I've never read anything better to describe nearly all
| organizations of a certain size.
| xianshou wrote:
| Aha! Finally, a perfect spiritual complement to the Gervais
| principle:
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
|
| According to Rao, every company survives by blending some
| combination of the following populations, varying by stage of
| lifecycle:
|
| - Sociopath = people who know the game and play it to win
|
| - Clueless = people who buy and spread the story the company is
| selling
|
| - Loser = people who accept the wage bargain, generally
| exchanging low devotion for minimal advancement
|
| This maps nicely to OP's quadrants:
|
| - Sociopath = grinder-grifter
|
| - Clueless = grinder-believer
|
| - Loser = coaster-grifter
|
| - (Coaster-believers get fired.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I am not a fan of assigning labels to people because I'm a fan of
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics
|
| A taxonomy of partial engagement in software development would be
| an interesting topic. I've worked at quite a few places where
| there was something pathological I couldn't change or where I
| could have worked harder but it would have created a lot of
| strife with people who (don't work as hard|don't work as
| smart|don't see the big picture|aren't careful|don't know how to
| write joins in SQL|learned to design software by learning answers
| to interview questions|...)
|
| In a case like that you can still get stuff done with 50%
| engagement, getting a lot more done might not be feasible without
| getting the support you need from your co-workers and if you
| lower your standards your life gets easier and you still get
| something done. It can sometimes feel pretty good and it can
| sometimes feel like dying inside.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| The definition of 'grifter' here just didn't sense to me and I
| tried. Interesting idea on the article but I don't think it was a
| great execution.
| debacle wrote:
| Please don't try and redefine terms like "grifter." It is a very
| important word, especially in today's political climate.
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