Sébastien Paquet on thinkers vs. builders
Sébastien Paquet, commenting on a “discussion of some of the internal tensions among the many bright people” in the W3C’s Semantic Web team:
It seems that, as it often happens in ambitious projects such as this, there is a cultural split between the “thinkers” and “the builders” [my emphasis]; the leader seems to belong to the latter camp, and a key question is how much he can/should be criticized publicly by members of the former.
The Builders usually want to get started, and can’t understand why the Thinkers spend so much time talking. The Thinkers, on the other hand, can’t understand why the Builders doesn’t see that there are very important issues to straighten out, first.
I’m a Thinker, and I have to remind myself all the time to try to think more like a Builder.