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Comment by compiler-guy | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate it when a company asks about or tests my Myers-Briggs type early in the hiring process, because then I know that I don't want to work for them, and they wouldn't be happy with me either.

Win/win.

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Love this answer, I was thinking the same thing.

I remember in college I applied to over 100 internships and my friend said “I don’t understand how you wrote over 100 cover letters.” My response was “I didn’t. If they ask for a cover letter I don’t want to work for them.”

And if you believe you're best represented as a bullet list of educational and professional accomplishments, I assure you that the feeling is mutual.

I agree. I'm not interested in software that will screen resumes for keywords or that kind of thing. Instead we ask a simple question right in our job postings, asking that an answer be included in the application, and that filters out 90% of applicants who don't bother. If someone additionally includes a decent cover letter, they go to the top of the pile. We want people who took the time to read our posting and want to work here, not those who are just spamming resumes everywhere.

Yeah. Filling a perfectly developer-shaped hole in your team? Sure... Sort a stack of resumes by experience and education and contact the top n applicants. Want more than dense pull requests, snide code reviews, and lots of "well actually" interjections even when discussing things outside their expertise? You might be disappointed with your options if you're only booking interviews based on resumes.

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.

I never said you couldn't get a very prestigious job without a cover letter. In fact, I'm positive top 5 companies are far less likely to care about cover letters than many organizations. They want to hire people who are mostly excited about the code and solving exciting problems that come up while the company does its thing. Get a stack of resumes, sort by pedigree and experience, put them in front of a whiteboard to make sure they weren't lying, get them in some interviews to make sure they aren't total jerks, and you're off to the races.

If you want to work with a think tank, a nonprofit doing exciting and important work, a startup with an amazing idea that really captures your imagination, or any other org where the big picture needs to matter as much or more to everybody involved than the content of the PRs, then the cover letter likely matters more than the resume.

No judgement. I use those top 5 products. It's just pretty myopic to deem cover letters as unnecessary when that's only true for people with very specific goals and ideas about what matters in a job, even if they happen to be very common.

The only reliable component about getting a job is being a desirable candidate. That's it. Maybe you write some great cover letters. I have worked for both startup and non-profit without writing a cover letter. Sometimes a resume and a glass of whiskey with the CEO is enough to get these jobs. I could probably get a job just as easily with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses as I could with a cover letter. Although the whiskey is the only one of the two I've any experience with.

Well of course being a desirable candidate is a prerequisite-- this thread is about cover letters as a means of conveying that. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for dozens of positions-- from internships to regular staff developers to post-doc roles-- in an organization that drew ambitious candidates that shared our specific interests from around the globe. Our organization, at large, immediately rejected resumes with search-and-replace template or missing cover letters, by the hundreds, because people's hard skills and experience weren't the primary factors in determining whether or not they would thrive in this organization. As I've repeatedly acknowledged, there are many jobs, candidates, and job searching scenarios where that's not the case. Surely, the glass of whiskey scenario makes sense in many contexts, but in ours, it's wholly inapplicable. I'm not really sure why you insistently present your own use case for job application materials as an argument against what I said, but I've stopped caring and I'm done engaging you about it.

> I never said you couldn't get a very prestigious job without a cover letter.

I didn't suggest this, at all. I suggested the value of a cover letter is not some constant across the tech sector, from startups (sample size = 2) to the big 5 (sample size = 2).

I agree with you, but people have strong opinions on this on HN. See past discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934135

I wish I could find the golden comment of an HN user realizing that he has used cover letters to exclude candidates, but he can't do that for those who didn't supply one - putting the latter at an advantage.

I hate cover letters so much. They're utterly ridiculous.. imagine applying for a lawnmower technician position or something and needing a cover letter. You'd have to write how you're great because ever since you were little you would read lawnmower catalogs to bed.

I feel the exact opposite. At least they are measuring something vaguely objectively. Interviewing with most potential employers, at least in software, is like when children guess at picking players for sports teams while wearing a blindfold. Everything always seems to come down to biases applied non uniformly.

Changing jobs is a big life investment. I would prefer it not be a blind date with one-way conversations from somebody likely abusive and neglectful looking for a surf to abuse. If the potential employer is instead interested in potential they are sending a signal they are willing to invest in you.

Myers Briggs gets a lot of hate due to low precision but it’s a cheap and fast assessment. There are much better assessments of personality but they take more time and are more invasive.

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.

Yes, Bridgewater.

So far as I know Bridgewater has never published numbers on their traders based on the part of the year they were born in.

Do you have a citation?

It wouldn't be exactly the same. The difference is lazy AND ignorant instead of just lazy.

"It doesn't work and is junk science, but at least it doesn't work for everyone equally" is an interesting methodology.

I'd rather take the intuition of some interviewer because at least that's based on something real. I mean if objectivity is the only criterion you simply may want to roll a set of dice for the applicants because those are cheaper than Myers-Briggs consultants.

the attitude of replacing useful human judgements with useless metrics in the name of eliminating bias is one of the worst trends in modern hiring.

> 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 former is perceived as impersonal.

How do you prove human intuition is a better qualifier?

I wouldn't work for someone who felt me up either, but by just walking out I'm not doing much to prevent that behavior from being normalized.

Worse, it's the Market for Lemons. The jobs nobody takes get seen by more people because they stay on the market, and so they are over-represented amongst observers. Then the horrible people at your company start saying things like, "everybody is doing it". Everybody does a lot of things that nobody should be doing.

Same for any "personality test" you find in the hiring process. Huge red flag.

Yep. Here in California it’s illegal for companies to use such tests in hiring.

MBTI isn't scientific, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

If someone says a particular type fits them well, that helps you understand them quickly. And if they say the type they get doesn't describe them, then you don't need to use that information.

I remain skeptical. One example:

"McCarley and Carskadon (1983) replicated these findings and demonstrated that across a 5-week test-retest interval, 50% of the participants received a different classification on one or more of the scales."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232494957_Cautionar...

Each of the few times I've taken a Myers-Briggs test, I've gotten a completely different score each time. I don't think these tests measure any immutable attributes of personality, they measure preferences which can change with time and social circumstance. And getting a new job is obviously a change of social circumstance..

Agree. And people also tend to answer in different ways (how I am, how people think I am, how I want people to perceive me, how I want to be, etc), depending on the circumstances and environment of the test.

I don't think it has much value beyond some sort of throwaway catalyst for conversation.

I don't, because it means people in less fortunate industries that can't be pickers, but also programmers if a downturn comes, would have more companies pulling this shit to deal with...

This.

... it's the same when someone asks what my horoscope is. Thanks for the red flag.

100%

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