The blog post is well written and I enjoyed reading it, but judging people on limited interactions will ultimately lead you to discount their opinion because of your preconceived notions.
Dear Engineer. If you're not pattern matching him, he's pattern matching you.
To my mind, the good thing about these categorizations is that there are so many of them, and when they're helpful, they are really helpful. Like when you can say: well they're an ENFJ, but an Enneagram 6 and high D, high I, and also they are resistant to follow-through, you've got lots of information, (useful or not is a second q)
I personally liked the "conduit" thoughts, I have worked with people like that many times, and mostly they REALLY annoy me. I tend to spend my energy teasing out micro-clues about what they really think, but I think you probably hit the nail on the head - the best way to engage is to use them to get a read on the lay of the land without expending the direct effort, and then if you can hold your nose and build up their rep in your org, you could use them to tell everyone else what's up.
As you go up in management ranks, it can actually be extraordinarily difficult to get real information about your organization, so they can be valuable there as well.
Anyway, great thoughts!
I think this statement should be tacked onto many more articles / blog posts. While I don't know if the implications for this blog post makes sense with it, I can appreciate the sentiment and think more people would do well to drive it home.
