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Is Personality Typing Used In IT? 24

Posted by Cliff from the introverted-intuitive-thinking-judging dept.
Hades- writes: "I'm a dual major at Penn State in a dual major consisting of Computer Engineering and the IST. In one of the entry-level courses of the IST program we have been discussing the Meyers Briggs Personality Indicator and its usefulness. I've written a brief paper on the subject over the past week and now I wanted to see what you, the Slashdot community thinks of this test. The test judges your personality type by answering quite a few questions. The result is a 4-letter personality type. These results can give you some sort of guidance towards a career. However, in this class we've been concentrating on group work. These tests can show who the leader, and what parts other people should be fitting to in the model. My real question is, are any of the technology companies actually using these tests? Are they optional or required? It also brings up a good point in how it would work on different kinds of open source projects by placing some people into positions and the like." Meyers-Briggs Type Indicators [?] have been around for quite a while, however I'm not aware of anyone using the results of these tests in any form of project management. Do you think these tests have any value and should they have any impact on the direction of one's career?
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Is Personality Typing Used in IT? More

Is Personality Typing Used in IT?

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  • People interpreting the data as binary is dangerous, not the tests as a whole.

    The MBTI test results *do* come as a scale, they will show whether your "I" is border-line "Extrovert" or more "Introvert" than anyone else in history. The candidate is usally shown the binary result, but the person paying for the tests normally gets the full results.

    It just goes to show that managers reading these results need to have training before taking them too seriously. I think we all like to be amateur psycologists, but we're not all aware of how amateur we really are.
  • Gee, were we on the same team ;-) My "new" team (a merger of several existing groups) took this M-B test (administered by consultants) about a year ago as part of a team-building effort. The results were mainly intended to illustrate that people have different personalities and associated tendencies which need to be considered when understanding the actions (and re-actions) of other team members. Certainly to some degree it simply identifies traits one could have guessed about someone else if you had been working with them for a while (most of us hadn't). The M-B test can be a useful tool, among many, for honestly understanding one's self and others but alas it can also be abused by management types who don't have a clue. I suspect that the M-B test is widely administered, especially in larger companies where "team-building" is a mantra, but probably just as widely never used effectively.

    The following are two on-line example of the M-B test:

    http://www.allhealth.com/onlinepsych/personality/o lpgen/0,6103,7119_127651,00.html

    http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/mmdi-re/mmdi-re.ht m

  • Hm. I just took one and was thoroughly unimpressed by the results. Sure, they were more or less accurate but they were so vague as to be meaningless. It felt like I was reading a horoscope, silly generalities that might as well impress anyone. I remember once an experiment where a bunch of college students were asked for astrological data and then had horoscopes generated for them. When polled, most felt their horoscope to be reasonably accurate. Then, they handed their paper to the person sitting next to them and discovered that everyone had the same horoscope; only the order of the sentences was changed. It's not quite as genereric with these personality tests, but I don't think it's all that much better.
    // mlc, user 16290
  • Any "competent" astrologer could have done the same.

    You answer a few questions...

    They tell you seemingly insiteful things about you.

    This is hardly new.

    I have witnessed a demonstration where a group was convinced of some divination technique, only to have it revealed to them that their "profiles" were assigned by a random process.
  • i don't know what it is, bunch of multiple choice questions.

    we were told that they were for a personality test that would be used to determine what sort of team we are and what type of personality would best complement us when we decide to hire someone else.


    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • What was the conclusion in your paper? Was there a predominant M-B type in your class? Anybody else out there want to throw out their M-B type that works in IT/Sys-Net Admin? I am INFP
  • Currently, I work for a managment company for hotels and restaurants. The pay is poor but I get a lot more freedom in what I want to do with the IT.

    One thing I didn't get any freedom about was the Eneagram training. Basicly, its a similar idea, that there are X numbers of personality types and everyone should find theirs and learn how it interacts with the other types, thus we can work in teams better. Personally, I don't know if I by it. I call it the Corp. Brainwashing course.

    Anyone have some links about the eneagram?
  • The company [entergy.com] I work for is quite fond of the MBTI, especially when forming large cross-discipline teams. I'm not sure the results were used particularly effectively in my case... or maybe they were, I don't know. I always get stuck with people that are absolutely certain to drive me mad. Maybe they formed the group that way because I would keep my mouth shut about it (being an INTP), or because of other reasons. Perhaps I'm expendable, and it doesn't matter if I go mad.

    It is interesting to see how well MBTI clusters people into various areas of the map, however. For example, 90% of all managers and supervisors were within one or two boxes, system engineers were in another area, etc. And yes, all the people that were absolutely guaranteed to drive me mad were grouped together.

    One other note... I had a Chemistry professor in college that gave a very abbreviated form of type test. He used the results to decide who sat up front in the >300 seat lecture hall. His rationale was that some types would do well no matter where they sat, but others almost always did better when sitting up front. I don't know... it seems to me the front of the hall was pretty much loaded with females. Hehe, come to think of it, that's not a bad result (for the professor, since he was a guy)...

  • I would tell them to go play in the street and
    find another place to work.

    I do not like being pigeonholed.
    It should be illegal for employers to require
    this type of test.
    I am me I am not some four letter acronym.
    This kind of crap leads to persecution like happened
    after Columbine to anyone that is different.

    Having seen the cluelessness of so called
    mental health professionals first hand
    iv seen that they dont know anything
    and like to play God with peoples lives.

    My answer to a request to take this kind of test
    would be shove it up your stove pipe.

  • I agree completely. As a former psychology student, I can attest to the inanity of the psychology witch doctors' mumbo-jumbo. Psychologists are interested in taking your money, not making you better. Mental health is definately an industry, one that invents illness to line their pockets.
  • I took a test and was not too surprised by the results. It pretty much told me what I already know about myself.

    However, one must be careful when applying these tests. A person with merely adequate intelligence can purposefully skew the test. And most people's test scores will reflect what THEY think they are, not what they REALLY are. I know quite a few people who have a very different opinion of themselves than everybody else sees in them.

    There are only 16 personality types. That's a pretty broad brush to paint people with. I'd preffer that if you are going to reduce a person's personality to a word, that you pick something more descriptive. Like "Jerk" or "Dickwad" or "Weenie" or "Nice" or "Helpful".

    I have pretty limited experience in the world of IT, but I have seen a personality test. When people interview you, take you out drinking with your potential cow-orkers, etc. they are guaging your personality.
  • I'm taking the test right now, and most of the answers I don't know . In other words, I would have to write down my answers in order to get anywhere near the same results if I took the test multiple times.

    I must have the wrong personality for this personality test.
  • if more employers spent more time trying to solve problems that already exist, rather than wasting their time on uncovering problems that might exist, we would not need all of these stupid tests. if an employer can not trust his or her own ability to adapt to an employeed and to help the employee adapt likewise, then it is the employer that needs his or her head examined.
  • It was my understanding that personality tests, such as the MMPI were used to help diagnosis of family or employer problems. I doubt taking one of these tests would be helpful for employment purposes as the critiquing results these tests provide are prefect tools that can and will be used to discriminate for lower evaluations. In the course of evaluations, even the most favorable test results could be damning.

    While such tests may be used to help one be humble, they can provide discriminating evidence. Its just like talking endlessly after an officer arrests someone and states the right to remain silent. These tests allow someone to talk so much and gives a powerful set of tools to the prosecution. Why volunteer irrelevant material when it has not direct advantage to your job?
  • <I>What was the conclusion in your paper? Was there a predominant M-B type in your class? Anybody else out there want to throw out their M-B type that works in IT/Sys-Net Admin? I am INFP</I><P>
    The paper mostly consisted of a few basic things, such as a formal definition of the MBPI, how it's used in career paths, team projects, and elaborating more on your own personality type.
    <P>
    BTW, I'm a INFP also! Infact, probably a lot of us here on Slashdot are INFP's. A lot of mathematics, scientists, etc usually have this personality type. I believe it also makes up 1% of the population according to the results.
  • I work at one of those places where, on your first day at work, such a test is just part of the stack of paperwork. Nobody says anything about what the test is, or what it's for, and nobody ever discusses results with you. Most of the people I know (including myself) faked the results because we resented the idea. Under a section that said to describe myself as a person (and take 15 minutes), I wrote "It took me 30 years to figure it out, what makes you think I can summarize it in 15 minutes?" But none of us ever heard a thing about our answers, pro or con.

    Make sure you tell people what it is, and what you hope to get out of it. If possible show them some sample questions before they commit to taking it, so that they have more trust you're not going to sneak in any really personal stuff. Explain to them what the results mean. There's plenty of literature out there describing the major MBTI types. People that I know (I was a sociology major) usually enjoyed knowing what type they were, even if they didn't necessarily believe that it was very indicative of them as people.

  • We all took it, and for those who had been around a while, it confirmed what they knew about each other. For everyone, it helped us learn what we could expect in dealing with other members of the team.

    But that was about it. The results weren't used beyond the occasional joke, or keeping tucked in the back of one's mind "he's always quiet in these meetings because he's an INTP." Never used in project management (our projects are primarly 1-3 programmers at a time, dealing with clients), but at times I wish the results were looked at by people. It would make it a lot easier, for example, for me to deal with some of my clients if I knew roughly what to expect based on their M-B test. As opposed to finding out the hard way over several months.

  • The tests are a crock of road apples.

    Now that I've enraged everyone I'll elaborate.

    The tests are long and vague, relying on a persona's ability to understand themselves. The tests attempt at weeding out self serving answers (I want to seem more sensitive so I'll pick this option on question 23) by having redundant questions, but the bottom line is they are pretty much useless.

    Go ahead and read the descriptions the tests give of the different personality types. You'll find that your personality is probably reflected to some degree in each one of them. It's like a horoscope. It's incredibly vague to the point where anyone can see some kernel of how it relates to them. You might as well read your horoscope on www.theonion.com [theonion.com] as rely on the MB tests.

    As a final note, there are classes on how to "beat" the tests. It's not as much fun as the courses on throwing off lie detector tests but it does show how the MB is only good for entertainment purposes.

    In my opinion, any PHB who even bothers to give his staff the bloody test should be fired ASAP for incompetence.

    BTW: I'd do the same to anyone who uses a horoscope in the workplace too.

    www.matthewmiller.net [matthewmiller.net]

  • There are lots of posts talking about how MBTI, the various descriptions and Jungian psychology in general are a lot like astrology, pigeonholing, etc. Psychology is not an objective science, and you have to take context into account whenever you're using it.

    If you take it at face value then it mostly is, and a lot of people take take it at face value - employers included - which is why a lot of people will be disillusioned about it. There are some definitely incorrect perceptions though, so I'll try to outline some that I've noticed.

    • The linked site has the spelling wrong. It's actually spelt "myers-briggs", not "meyers-briggs". Actually I think they know because I saw this site about a year ago and they commented on it that they spelt it that way because myers-briggs.com was already taken.

    • The official myers-briggs test can ONLY be administered by a trained psychologist, for good reason. The main reason for this is already hilighted in several of the gripey comments posted in reply to this story. Either people misunderstand the results, people misunderstand the questions, people misunderstand the interpretation, or (most annoyingly) other people misunderstand all of the above. Even when it is administered properly you can bet people will start reading rubbish from the results at the first opportunity to get things wrong.

    • Most people probably got their first and (likely) only impression of MBTI from the Keirsey sorter [keirsey.com] (note the word "sorter"), or something like it. Keirsey is not a test and it's not supposed to be. It's a multi choice sorter intended to give people a pointer towards their likely personality type. It's not always correct though. This sorter is really the product of a guy who made it so he could sell more copies of his book. It's free and openly available for people to misunderstand, which is why it's so popular.

    • Type descriptions are absolutes. People have been complaining that they fit at least partly under every description, and this is no surprise. Personally though, I'm definitely much more similar to an INTP than an ESFJ... for whatever it's worth. It doesn't mean I can't or won't act like an ESFJ description under some circumstances. It also doesn't mean I can't be really good at a "typical ESFJ job", or the reverse... even though I probably wouldn't enjoy it as much as someone who relates closer.

    • MBTI is intended to describe how people act.. not why they act that way, or what's going on inside their head.

    • (easily most important): One of the most useful things about Jungian psychology is not to slot people into boxes, but to demonstrate that there are different types of people.

      Before Myers and Briggs brought Jungian psychology out of the closet, the central view in psychology was that anyone could be wired into electrodes and people could be conditioned to any form wanted by electrocuting them. (or something metaphorically equivalent.)

      Either can be argued depending on the context and circumstances. If nothing else, Jungian psychology has introduced an alternative viewpoint to be argued that people's personalities are hard-coded, and there are limits to how much you can be changed. (Consider this the next time you're accepted for the way you are outside of social norms instead of being thrown in a mental institution to be "cured".)


    ===
  • We all took a couple of personality tests in one of my SW Eng classes last year, including the myers-briggs...after the results were tabulated, the prof showed us a slide consisting of our results (in a pie-chart, by personality type), the results of the students in the same class the year before, and the general population. It was a sort of informal survey on whether there was a "geek" personality type. The results were sort of interesting, though - the 2 SW Eng classes were within 1% of each other, and a good 20-30% away from the general population...

    -Cyclopatra

  • Meyers Briggs weaknesses (Score:3)

    by jordang ( 31620 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @09:46AM (#602438)
    I'm a sysadmin with a degree in Psychology. The Meyers Briggs personality inventory, while fun to play with, is about as accurate and incisive as a horoscope. It is an overly simplified and extremely large grained multiple choice personality inventory that can place the subject into one of 16 personality 'types' based on 4 broad categories (introverted / extroverted, thinking / feeling etc) and is prone to subject induced biases as well.

    If you are looking for a comprensive personality inventory, this is not it. Try an MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) as well as TIT and TAT (thematic inventories that do not rely on multiple choice answers, rather a psychologist grades respsonses to set images to deduce one's personality traits)

    Would I use the results of an MB inventory in a hiring decision? No way. It may be more useful in finding an intial 'place' for someone, but I would be very cautious so as not to pigeonhole them based on what a personality inventory thinks they would do best in.

    Jordan

  • professional use vs. self-understanding (Score:3)

    by OblongPlatypus ( 233746 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @07:19AM (#602439)
    I took a Meyers-Briggs test on the web a while ago, just out of curiosity, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with the accuracy of the result. I read a couple of pages long description of my personality type, and I definitely recognized myself in it. It really helped me in some ways, since I've always thought of my own personality as very different from most others. I'm an INTJ, and although they say that's a rare type, I take comfort in knowing that 1% of the population is at least somewhat similar to myself.

    Of course, it may not be quite so accurate for everyone. Either way, I personally wouldn't condone using it in any professional situation, for the simple reason that it would create an unnatural work environment. If all employees know that they've been selected for their task based on a supposedly accurate test, they might (consciously or subconsciously) end up with a way too optimistic attitude, in a way trusting their personalities to do the work for them. (Frankly, I'm in danger of becoming too cocky myself, with a personality type dubbed 'Mastermind' by the Keirsey personality sorter.)

  • Binary and dangerous (Score:4)

    by ErfC ( 127418 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @11:57AM (#602440) Homepage
    The biggest problem with the MB test is that the results are presentes as a set of four letters, with no indication of your score. I took the test twice, a few years apart, and three of the letters completely reversed. (These were two different tests, but I think I might have changed a bit in the interim as well, hard to say.) The thing is, on those three indices I scored pretty much in the middle of the scale. On one I was exactly even -- I forget which one, but it's as if I was as much I as E or something -- and it just labelled me as the default. And on many questions whether I picked A or B was a arbitrary -- either would apply (or neither, at times). This is completely hidden in the way the scores are presented.

    If the test is going to be used for anything serious, I hope (a) the test is a long one (many questions, better stats), and (b) the *scores* are presented for each scale, not just the final set of four numbers.

    -Erf C.

  • Personality tests... (Score:4)

    by abernathy ( 165091 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @09:48AM (#602441) Homepage
    About ten years ago, I and the rest of my coworkers took one of these at the urging of my boss. It seemed to help the boss out immensely in coming to understand that she was a really truly helpful and thoughtful and caring manager. I have no idea how much money the thing cost, but the tester seemed preternaturally elated to help administer the test and to counsel us later, so she must have been a few grand into us.

    You can take the Meyers-Briggs online at: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htm and a bunch of other places. This is just the first one I could find.

    The Meyers-Briggs is based on self-reporting of mental dispositions, which makes it immediately dubious psychometry. It can only be safely said that the Meyers-Briggs describes what people THINK they are like, rather than being a good indicator of any true nature. (This being said, while people are frequently unreliable self-reporters, they often get it right.) Likewise, the simple fact that it's based on the work of Carl Jung causes a hail of red flags as well.

    The Meyers-Briggs gives you four attributes with polar axes. If your boss is keen to discriminate against you because you're an ESTJ or an INFP, you have bigger problems than personality tests. Take the test for the sole purpose of humoring your boss. If you don't like the process, wrench the data. If you think you're going to be reassigned based on the results of the test, do yourself a favor and reassign yourself to another employer.

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