Engineering Archetypes

In every interview I run, I ask the same question:

What is your archetype? No wrong answers.

With the rise of coding and co-working agents, I (as an engineer) feel the pressure to think through what the engineer role is morphing into — or any role, for that matter. As I've wrestled with that over the past year or so, I find it both comforting and insightful to focus on why I'm an engineer: the motivation, the thing inside each of us that makes us want to build.

If anyone looks at you and says they're motivated by the sheer joy of chatting with Claude, Codex, OpenCode… run. The tools may change, but that doesn't define the why. Although I see it from the perspective of an engineer, the question has the same gravity for everyone: what is your archetype?

Call me a nerd (not a dork — I'm a nerd, there's a difference). I spent uncountable hours during my early formative years AFK farming trees around Lumbridge or defeating thousands of MapleStory slimes. In those games, the skill systems and abilities spoke to me; your choices, skills, and decisions were rooted in the type of character you set out to be. I strongly believe that we as engineers are no different: there is a grounding "archetype" that drives the motivation to craft with code, fight through error logs and networking issues, and continually build more.

Although not technical in nature, the question generally opens a dialogue that a resume would never get to the bottom of. The goal is to get every engineer to explain their passion — not interview for a job. It's important, but I don't really care as much about how a month-long project drove an 11% decrease in query times while you worked with "stakeholders" internally and led a team of just you to continually monitor a ticket queue…

Here's a sneak peek at some of my favorite archetypes I've heard in recent interviews.

The Tinkerer

Gets out of bed to try something new. It doesn't have to be new to the world — just new to them. LLMs and agents are wonderful, but building a first Ruby on Rails website to try something new brings the same dopamine rush. The best tinkerers can focus on large projects while using their open-minded nature to bring the best experiences and patterns into their decision making. Oh, and they're required to own at least one Raspberry Pi or home server and tell everyone how great it is. They probably also use Neovim (in my own experience).

The Architect

Dreams about the perfect design, blueprinting features and infrastructure ad nauseam, catching themselves hacking away at a pub-sub architecture while their friends chat about sports across the table. Technology is cool. Infrastructure is cool. And the architect strives to put those puzzle pieces together into new and complex systems.

The Optimizer

The database query just took on the magnitude of seconds rather than milliseconds, and the optimizer's eye started to twitch. Especially in fast-moving environments (like a startup), we balance the trade-off between building quickly and building perfectly, leaving ample space to optimize over time. That's where the optimizer thrives: instinctively recognizing code, infra, cost, and design inefficiencies and chomping at the bit to get their hands dirty and fix them. We all know the people on our teams who build performance dashboards for their own use, not necessarily for the team. Those are the optimizers.

The Scholar

Similar in some ways to the tinkerer, the scholar revels in new information. Their social media rabbit hole is actually articles, papers, and videos about technology. How does a hypervisor actually work? Where does Postgres actually store its data? When is the right time to use an adversarial training model? They work on what they find interesting so they can learn deeply technical concepts — and sometimes even apply them.

The Problem Solver

Less here for the specific technology — shows up to make a user's day better. Often equipped with a diverse tool belt, the problem solver is an adrenaline junkie for recognizing an issue and racing toward a solution. The problem solver is that engineer who watched some tutorials on making a todo list and then designed their own second brain that solves all of their own issues. Some people are full of ideas; problem solvers are full of ideas and solutions.

Me? I'm an architecting tinkerer. I love to see things come to life. Bonus points if I can learn a new technology along the way, or if there are well-used infrastructure moving parts. I've curated my current skillset of building a large-scale application by pulling learning from every new thing I build — sometimes successes, sometimes failures. At the end of the day, there is no dopamine rush greater for me than witnessing a well-designed system or feature come together and run for the first time.

Obviously this is a non-exhaustive list, and there really are infinite archetypes and combinations to choose from. So, what's your archetype?

No wrong answers.