Software personality disorders

I had a big chuckle reading “Is your app an ass-kisser,” in which Kathy Sierra asks:

If your app was an employee, what kind of employee would it be? When it’s employee performance review time, how would you rate it? These are just a few of the apps I’ve worked with recently…

A great post from Kathy as usual.

What caused my giant chuckle was the visual characterizations Kathy uses to illustrate her points.

We’ve all encountered people like those she illustrates, and undoubtedly we’d be able to recognize parts of ourselves in one or more of them. I did and, no, I’m not saying which ;)

I don’t want to steal Kathy’s thunder so I’m not going to show the images here. Except this one, the anal-retentive guy, which did make me laugh a lot as it represents the diametric opposite of the type of person I’d naturally warm towards.

And it represents still far too many people I encounter, especially re the last sentence in the description.

But getting back to the primary point of Kathy’s post – relating such human personality attributes to software applications – I’ll have to think hard on this. For instance, I don’t have any anal-retentive-type apps; any I did have are long uninstalled.

What do you think? Take a look at Kathy’s post and at least have a big chuckle.