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Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

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Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#81

Post by nomel »

chefandy wrote: post #9
eikenberry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cover letters are one of those things that are only really useful for the first few jobs. Once you've started working you will get most of your future jobs via your network and cover letters are pointless from then on.

If you're content to work within your network or and only care about the craft rather than the overall purpose of your company and tasks, then sure. Jobs your friends and colleagues get you don't require a cover letter.

I've been involved in hiring at several tech companies, including two top 5. Cover letters were never considered in any part of the interview process. Our recruiters didn't even include them in the candidate packet. So, there definitely isn't any uniformity in the way cover letters are perceived.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#82

Post by throwaway0asd »

Barrin92 wrote: post #73
throwaway0asd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather take the intuition of some interviewer because at least that's based on something real. That something real is called discrimination .

Discrimination is the entire point of the hiring process. Why else are you sorting people into Myers-Briggs categories? Are you sending nobody home? What we're arguing about isn't whether you're discriminating but what tool you're using to discriminate. Is craniometry not discriminatory just because it's objective? the relevant question is whether astrology for nerds is better than human judgement just because the fo…

How do you prove human intuition is a better qualifier?

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#83

Post by naniwaduni »

MBTI pretty much takes what are supposed to be basically unimodal binomial distributions and ... slices them and labels the halves different things. Even without getting into whether it's testing something sensible, it's pretty clear that the typology is fundamentally fucked.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#84

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

biomcgary wrote: post #47
Waterluvian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet, you should scan the shape of each candidate’s skull and use that as a metric to aid in decisionmaking.

A stethoscope in the hands of a doctor is a useful, if limited, tool. Don't judge its value if you have never seen one except in the hands of the village idiot. (One could say the same about various programming languages.) If measuring skull shape during the interview process was a) socially acceptable and b) actually predictive of outcomes, why not? The problem is that it is neither. The reason that it is not a) is…

> A stethoscope in the hands of a doctor is a useful, if limited, tool.

The MBTI is tea leaves reading. It has been experimentally shown to have no relationship to reality and no predictive power time and time again. Even the axis don’t make sense as some are heavily correlated.

The Big 5 is useful but far more complicated. It uses scale and has no pretty little boxes but at least it seems to consistently measure something.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#85

Post by themodelplumber »

JohnFen wrote: post #72
themodelplumber wrote: post #2

> And that’s it—there’s simply very little data on how well the Myers-Briggs (and other type-based personality tests) measures personality and even less on how it might predict job performance. I was surprised there wasn't any mention of a very interesting issue here, i.e. MBTI and other typological instruments come with user manuals, training, etc., and those materials specifically say "do not use this for hiring".…

> if you are concerned your employer is going to misuse your MBTI type somehow A potential employer will never know what my MBTI type is, so they can't misuse it.

That depends. For example I was trained and tested to meet with a person and determine not only their MBTI type, but also their preferred cognitive processes, without ever talking about personality type with them. The testing was extremely difficult. But the skill is extremely valuable in knowing which questions to ask people as they try to navigate career and life change.

You might be surprised to find how easy it is to make a very good guess, after all there are 16 types and this usually narrows down to 3-4 common applicant types given the job and field. If you know how to differentiate between those types, or have friends who are of those types, it's going to be hard not to make a close guess.

If you want to take on the global MBTI cabal it's important to learn the game IMO. The obvious weaknesses will become your friend rather than a point of defense to get intense about. Less MBTI-sucks and more MBTI-meh.

It's also available in other disciplines, e.g. I once took a course on how to determine personality characteristics from texts and emails. Some obvious stuff, but also some really fascinating ideas in there.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#86

Post by kasey_junk »

throwaway0asd wrote: post #69
cosmotic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they were using astrology? Would that be better than nothing? I think it would be worse than nothing because it demonstrates the aren't competent enough to know when they fell for a scam.

> What if they were using astrology? Then it would be guessing just the same as using no metric at all. This is only worse if the candidate is so naive as to believe they are of superior consideration than the value of a simple measure.

Do we actually have any evidence that “when in the year you were born in” has worse statistical relevance than the admittedly weak relevance of personality tests?

If not (and I’ve not seen it) then the candidate is just stating a preference for not working with companies that are lazy intellectually. That’s not naive that’s sensible.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#87

Post by slothtrop »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #48
slothtrop wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analysis is, but "types" are just preferences/tendencies that everyone has, reflected back from the test. It says "I tend towards introversion or not, being detail-oriented or not" etc. That's it. Mind you, that's of no use to your employer who wants you to do your damn job whatever it happens to be. If you want the job, it's for you.

The types themselves are also nonsense. There's sixteen of them, and all sixteen have significant tendencies in all four axes. It seems extremely unlikely that someone would always have a tendency in every axis all the time, so the types themselves are set up wrong. They're not even acknowledging the possibility of an inconclusive result. It's also easy to see the financial incentive of removing the possibility for s…

> It seems extremely unlikely that someone would always have a tendency in every axis all the time

It's a preference. You're making it out to be more than it is. It doesn't preclude that someone can have little preference for one tendency over another. Most times test results give you percentages.

> Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.

What money? Who pays for this shit? There's like a million free MBTI tests online.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#88

Post by naniwaduni »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #84
biomcgary wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stethoscope in the hands of a doctor is a useful, if limited, tool. Don't judge its value if you have never seen one except in the hands of the village idiot. (One could say the same about various programming languages.) If measuring skull shape during the interview process was a) socially acceptable and b) actually predictive of outcomes, why not? The problem is that it is neither. The reason that it is not a) is…

> A stethoscope in the hands of a doctor is a useful, if limited, tool. The MBTI is tea leaves reading. It has been experimentally shown to have no relationship to reality and no predictive power time and time again. Even the axis don’t make sense as some are heavily correlated. The Big 5 is useful but far more complicated. It uses scale and has no pretty little boxes but at least it seems to consistently measure som…

MBTI is the rough equivalent of taking a Big 5 test, but then instead of presenting the scores, it arbitrarily classifies you as Yes/No for each trait based on whether you're above or below average. Even if the scores themselves would be informative, you're still getting basically randomly sorted on noise for the traits where you're just about average.

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#89

Post by __derek__ »

themodelplumber wrote: post #77
__derek__ wrote: post #64

A previous company used Real Colors, an MBTI knock-off, and it was striking how attached people got to those results. People openly stereotyped whole groups of people because they appeared to cluster in one sector (e.g., SDEs must be Green). They disregarded all counter-examples because they conflicted with these biases. It was weird.

Do you mean True Colors? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Colors_(personality) My impression from some brief training was that it's based on temperament theory and not a knock off of MBTI.

> Do you mean True Colors?

No.[1]

> My impression from some brief training was that it's based on temperament theory and not a knock off of MBTI.

From your link:

> According to this personality temperament theory, which is a refined version of the popular Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [...]

To-may-to, to-mah-to.

[1]: https://realcolors.org/

Re: Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types

#90

Post by phkahler »

Waterluvian wrote: post #41
biomcgary wrote: post #36

When I was managing, I informally typed people during the interview process, which was very helpful in predicting both how they would interact with other team members and how they would do at particular tasks. However, I learned not to rely on self-reported personality types or tests, which are often answered aspirationally, not realistically. To me, MBTI or Big 5 (not the actual tests, but their framing of aspects o…

Better yet, you should scan the shape of each candidate’s skull and use that as a metric to aid in decisionmaking.

>> Better yet, you should scan the shape of each candidate’s skull

Ima guess you score low on openness. And probably T as opposed to F on MBTI.

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