Dynamos vs Planners, an Important Profile Spectrum for Engineers

This spectrum plays a very important role on how your job and career plays out, it's worthwhile to be aware of it.

I am writing this article as an informative piece, and so that we can put our hands on its link so as to give it a concrete name and description. It is not new information by any means; anyone who has slogged through one of those long annoying strongly disagree...strongly agree surveys to determine if you would be a "good fit" culturally will find this information familiar. Without further ado...

The Profiles

The Dynamo is your bootstrapper person. Most would describe this person as a "self starter", "showing initiative", "getting stuff done", "getting hands dirty", "working face first", and on and on. The Planner, by contrast, is going to be your individual that is detail-oriented and plans out the solution end-to-end. While I present these profiles here as being on a spectrum, if asked, I would refuse to identify with one or the other as both profiles have desirable features that are not mutually exclusive. However, it would not be entirely honest to claim that one could manifest as a perfect version of both profiles simultaneously. Now that terminology has been established, let's look at the implications, for both the project they serve, and how it shapes we engineers.

The Pros and the Cons

The Dynamo

Pros

• Gets stuff moving and gets it done
• Bypasses bottlenecks and deadlocks
• Good at identifying and delivering meaningful and impactful results
• Highly valued by managerial and business leadership
• Tend to become highly visible individuals both within and outside the team
• Often given ample credit, sometimes praised as project saviors

Cons

• Susceptible of introducing technical debt of all varieties, especially that of wrong abstractions
• Often makes unilateral design decisions without gathering or waiting for consensus from colleagues.
• Requires good experience, knowledge, great effort, and boldness to actually be successful in rushing out changes against legacy code bases to deliver value
• Dynamos can expect to rework a lot of implementations. For that same reason, Dynamos are inclined to provide little to non-existent high-quality unit tests or documentation.
• Other critical facets of software development, including testability, developer experience, automation, maintainability, and documentation may be neglected by Dynamos.
• Dynamos assume much riskier behavior, leading to volatile outcomes swinging from success and praise to termination and project failure.

The Planner

Pros

• Planners view tasks through a large variety of lenses, considering many topics such as feasibility, optimal solutions, extensibility, reusability, testability, maintainability, good design, and plausible risk.
• Planners are detail-oriented
• Planners are more willing to build consensus amongst colleagues for solutions
• Planners are more inclined to ship testing and documentation along with their tasks, often building out these entities before doing the implementation so as to having a gauge to judge for correctness.
• Planners are very good at preventing a variety of classes of problems from ever harming the project by virtue of thorough research and planning beforehand.

Cons

• Planners are susceptible to blame for, or causing, project delays and deadlocks.
• Planners are prone to being bogged down by bureaucratic processes, and culpable of introducing and enacting new processes that do more harm than good.
• It is difficult to identify, and much less quantify, the positive impact a planner can have on a project by virtue of preventing problems from ever arising, and will not likely receive credit for it.
• Planners don't garner the same attention as a Dynamo might, especially amongst managerial and leadership colleagues.
• Through more thorough conversation and documentation, Planners are less likely to retain unique knowledge crucial to the success of the project, thus making Planners more expendable.

Conclusion

I hope you find this topic exploration informative. My goal, having been a good Dynamo, a bad Dynamo, a good Planner, and a bad Planner at various times in my career, was to portray the profiles not as one being better than the other, but more in their realistic flattering and not-so-flattering light. The important takeaway I have is to identify this behavior, and that all projects throughout all moments of their lifetime need one profile over the another, and that we can and should adapt. Perhaps you recognize these themes in your own project, and see the effect that they can have. Perhaps you identify with one or the other, and find the conclusions similar to your own experiences. If not, leave a comment below! Thank you for reading!