Mort, Elvis, Einstein, Amanda does seem to fit well with my experience. While people are a mix, generally I think its fair that there is a primary focus/mode that fits on career goals.

- Mort wants to climb the business ladder.

- Elvis wants earned social status.

- Einstein wants legacy with unique contributions.

- Amanda just wants group cohesion and minimizing future unpredictability.

I don't really like the axes Mort/Elvis/Einstein are on, they all seem like obviously pathological examples.

I think if I were to make three strawmen like this I would instead talk about them as maximizing utility, maintainability, and effectiveness. Utility because the "most business value" option doesn't always make the software more useful to people. (And I will tend to prioritize making the software better over making it better for the business.) Maintainability because the thing that solves the use case today might cause serious issues that makes the code not fit for purpose some time in the future. Effectiveness because the basket of if statements might be perfect in terms of solving the business problem as stated, but it might be dramatically slower or subtly incorrect relative to some other algorithm.

Mort is described as someone who prioritizes present business value with no regard to maintainability or usefulness.

Elvis is described as someone who prioritizes shiny things, he's totally a pejorative.

Einstein is described as someone who just wants fancy algorithms with no regard for maintainability or fitness to the task at hand. Unlike Elvis I think this one has some value, but I think it's a bit more interesting to talk about someone who is looking at the business value and putting in the extra effort to make the perfectly correct/performant/maintainable solution for the use case, rather than going with the easiest thing that works. It's still possible to overdo, but I think it makes the archetype more useful to steelman the perspective. Amanda sounds a bit more like this, but I think she might work better without the other three but with some better archetypes.

> - Mort wants to climb the business ladder.

I think the personas have some validity but I don't agree with the primary focus/mode.

For example, I tend to be a mort because what gets me up in the morning is solving problems for the enterprise and seeing that system in action and providing benefit. Bigger and more complex problems are more fun to solve than simpler ones.

I vote for Amanda. Really, there is no substitute for seeing something easy to understand.

I have been most of my career working with C++. You all may know C++ can be as complex as you want and even more clever.

Unless I really need it, and this is very few times, I always ask myself: will this code be easy to understand for others? And I avoid the clever way.