Maybe it's just my personality but basing hiring decisions or life choices on a grid someone else put together based on context-free questions about adjectives makes me wanna scream. What's the emoticon for needs Chlorpromazine?

What's the emoticon for needs Chlorpromazine?

I believe thats

:-) ... :-( ... :-) ... :-(
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-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

The MBTI is not quite as simple as "a few context-free questions about adjectives".

I won't try to tell you anything, I'll just mention a fact: if you go to the length to make some statistics about distribution of personality types among professions you'll find that you can indeed make useful predictions based on the MBTI. (The same seems to be true for the distribution of zodiac signs among professions, btw; make of that what you will.)

Whether you believe the stated causality for this or not: the facts show that there is at least a correlation.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I'd like to see the evidence behind your claim that you can make statistically significant predictions of zodiac signs between professions.

I understand why the MBTI would show positive correlations with choice of profession. I see no reason to believe that astrological signs would. Extraordinary claims and all that.

I agree. I have met a few and they are bizarre. They are neither fish nor fowl.

I am an ENTP too. I want to hear what you think of programming, what you like about it. Cause I am getting bored with programming. I'm wondering if you also find debugging painfully boring. Or finishing up projects. Or perhaps not. I'm curious to find out what kind of programming job you have, you know, pick at another ENTP's brain a bit.

Well I like mental puzzles, I like learning things, and I like feeling like I've helped people. I've been able to do these things as a programmer.

For me the key to not burning out is to get to know people throughout my organization. That gives me a social outlet. That also let's me find small things that I can change to make things better for people - which is generally good for them and makes my job more enjoyable. I also enjoy finding things that I can explain about how the system works which gives them a better idea of what they can and cannot easily do. (I like social interactions and answering questions. And on perlmonks I'm known for being social and answering questions. Hmmmm... ;-)

As a rule I don't like extended development. Which is unusual in a programmer. I don't like debugging, but nobody does. (Which is why I like finding ways to do things which will leave me with less debugging later.) I sometimes enjoy maintainance more than development simply because it gives me a lot of reasons to come into contact with end users, and concrete satisfaction in knowing that I've helped someone.

As for what I do, my current employer is http://www.rent.com. My boss is esh. I got the job through perrin. The programmers here do everything that needs doing at a company like this, and we're all pretty senior. Mostly it seems to involve mod_perl and high performance databases. (At the moment I'm avoiding building some fancy web reports. Despite my best efforts, they are nearly done.)

The least enjoyable work experience that I had was one where my boss tried to isolate me as much as possible on an extended development project. I was bored, boxed in, and seriously stir crazy. Luckily that boss got replace. Since then I've come to accept that while I do not work well with many small interruptions, but I need to deliberately take a certain amount of social time at work or else I'll go insane. But I have to ration out how much socializing I allow myself.

I'll be the first to admit that I could be a more productive programmer if I was less social. But that simply isn't in my nature. And even with that handicap, I'm still productive.

Now there are other things that I could do with my technical background and abilities. However none so far seems to be as interesting and rewarding as programming. But I don't have "programmer" written on my heart, and I doubt that I'll be a programmer forever. But I'll not leave just yet.