TypologyTypology

There are two genuinely useful things in that table, and neither one is the top line.

The first: the top two scores are next-door numbers. Three and Two sit beside each other on the Enneagram’s circle, and the system already has a name for a dominant type leaning on its neighbor: a wing. So when the report hedges that it’s “designed to provide less unambiguous results than other Enneagram assessments” and that my true type is “likely one of your top two scores,” that ambiguity resolves to the most ordinary thing the system can say about a person: a 3 with a 2 wing. And notice the gap is only three points. By this table’s own standards, that’s barely a ranking. Hold on to that one, it’ll matter later.

The second: the middle of the table is flat. Seven, One, Five, and Nine all land within two points of each other. Four types inside a two-point band isn’t a ranking, it’s noise, and I’m not going to read my personality out of noise.

Which leaves the bottom as the only part of the table with real separation. Six scored 6. Eight scored 9. The median score was 22. Nobody ever reads the bottom of a personality test (it’s not flattering enough to be about you), but those are the only two numbers far enough from the pack to mean much. Whatever drives me, it isn’t the Loyalist’s scanning for what might go wrong, and it isn’t the Challenger’s appetite for a fight. Interestingly enough, the clearest thing this test had to say about me is what I’m not.

A Three’s failure mode, in the report’s own words, is “deceit / self-deceit (‘I am my success’).” Threes are image-conscious, adaptable to the point of shape-shifting, and they get their sense of worth from how other people see them.

INTJ is close to the opposite claim: decide from your own internal model, and don’t lose sleep over whether the room agrees. So if the Enneagram is right about me, I need the audience. If the Myers-Briggs is right, there is no audience. They can’t both be describing the same person. Right?

Turns out the reconciliation is sitting in the report itself, one line above the failure mode. Under Type 3 at its healthiest, the first three adjectives are “goal-oriented, authentic, inner-directed.” Inner-directed. The Enneagram’s own description of a Three who has stopped performing is, nearly word for word, what Myers-Briggs says an INTJ already is. The two results aren’t describing different people. They’re describing the same drive with and without an audience. I wouldn’t have gotten there from either result on its own.

But there’s a catch sitting under all of that: these two results are nine years apart. The INTJ is from 2014, when I was writing code and managing nobody. The Enneagram is from 2023. Setting them side by side treats both as fixed, and “people don’t change” is the one assumption these systems have done the least to earn. That’s either a reason to throw the whole comparison out, or it’s the most interesting thing on this page. I’ve landed on the second… but it needs the next two sections first.

This is the section that made me want to build this page in the first place.

A personality test is self-report. I answered it, and nothing stopped me from answering as the person I’d prefer to be. But this site already carries the other kind of evidence: 101 notes from an anonymous internal peer-feedback round, and 13 written recommendations from people I worked with and for, going back to 2013. None of it was collected to answer this question. All of it is on the work page.

Now read that stack with the Enneagram in one hand. Almost none of it is about achievement, status, or image, the things a Three is supposed to be known by. Here’s what people actually wrote:

That is a Two. And remember the three-point gap from earlier? By the table’s own standards, Three-over-Two was barely a ranking at all: the ordering was the least trustworthy part of the whole result. The people who actually work with me broke the tie. Unanimously, without being asked, while answering a completely different question.

Between my answers and theirs, I’ll take theirs.

The INTJ is from 2014. That year I was a geospatial engineer on a USAID product team, writing Backbone and d3, and I wasn’t managing anybody. The pivot came at ThreatConnect: hired as a senior UX engineer, left as a director, having grown the front-end team from two people to six and built a design team next to it. Everything since has been a version of that second job.

So the question isn’t just whether the two results contradict each other. It’s whether they were taken by the same person doing the same work. And it turns out there’s a way to check that doesn’t rely on either test: the recommendations on my work page have dates on them, and I didn’t write a single one.

Nobody arranged that sequence. Each one was written by a different person, for a different reason, years apart. But read them in order and watch the vocabulary move: the first is about a thing I made, the second is about what I was like to work next to, and the third is about what it was like to be led by me.

The middle two are the ones that really count, because they’re the same employer three years apart, so it isn’t the culture of a new company talking. In 2018 I’m a developer to work alongside. In 2021 I’m a leader, and the person writing it reported to me.

So here’s the reading I actually believe. Not that one test found the real me and the other one missed. The Myers-Briggs was right about the 2014 engineer. The people are right about the manager they work with now. And the Enneagram, answered in 2023 by the person who’d lived both halves, split the difference: the old drive still in first place, the new thing three points behind.

An inner-directed engineer spent a decade learning to read a room, because the job stopped being about the code and became about the people writing it. Nobody was wrong. The answers just have timestamps.

Now, I’ll be honest: this is still a story I’m telling over a sequence of events, and manufacturing exactly this kind of story is the thing these systems do best. The difference is that this one has dates on it, and I didn’t write any of the evidence.

Which is roughly where I land on all of this. The Enneagram isn’t a measurement, but it is a decent vocabulary, and a vocabulary is useful for noticing things, including the things it got wrong about you.

Though I’ll grant the system one point. It says the characteristic move of a Three is to find the reading that makes them look best, and I have just spent a page arguing my way from the type that’s about image to the type that’s about people. Make of that what you like. I mostly find it funny, which is probably the correct amount of weight to give any of it.