[nlh]

I hadn't heard the Packer vs. Mapper analogy before and it's good. It reminds me of an experience I had in a different domain many years ago that I haven't been able to express in such succinct terms.

I hired a bookkeeper/comptroller/finance person for a very small startup and she was 100% a Packer. She had years of experience and interviewed very well but once she started I realized she knew all the motions of bookkeeping but she didn't actually grok what double-entry accounting was or what a balance sheet and how assets and liabilities and equity relate to each other.

So anytime we ran into a novel situation that could have been easily puzzled out by someone with a foundational understanding of accounting, she got paralyzed, made something up, and then blamed others for "not training her for this situation". Total nightmare.