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Comment by mdcds | Hacker News Reader

Myers-Briggs and Big 5 aren't the same thing.

Knowing my MB category was amusing but not useful.

Knowing my Big 5 percentiles - very useful. Understanding where I land on disagreeableness and openness to ideas made my life a lot easier (both at home and work). At least because I have a framework to understand personality differences when dealing with teammates and what frustrates me (like people being close-minded or indecisive, or both).

My current company doesn't do it, but I would support mixing and matching people with complementary strengths. Like match someone with high openness to ideas to explore various angles on a particular problem and someone with high conscientiousness to get the project across the finish line.

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That's funny. One of the biggest complaints about Big 5 is that it's too wishy-washy and doesn't have much to offer behind the scenes in soft theory.

For example the "generally people flip all their letters at the end of the work day" principle with four-letter type, or the way you can extract cognitive functionality from the four letters to explore potential cognitive gifts and blind spots.

I've arranged groups like you stated and found some interesting takeaways. Like one of the partners can perceive an annoyance with the work requirement and they become an effective interference machine team rather than a results-team. It's tricky because they are never really working in isolation and one partner will also be looking for outside opportunities and so on.

There is some interesting theory on this, which expresses that not only do some kinds of people work effectively together really well, but when they are also matched with the right project or field, they will carry the project out in a way that exceeds normal expectations. By definition they have more energy to spend and it replenishes quickly.

I can share personal experiences.

My MB letters tentatively are INTJ. I say tentatively because I took a couple of free online tests. Those might not be very accurate. Knowing those letters never aided me in anything. The only interesting that has come out of it is that I discovered a weird subculture of people who wish their MB letter were exactly those. Some kind of a weird obsession.

Big 5 - I took Jordan Peterson's paid test. Discovering that I was more disagreeable and more open to ideas than roughly 90% of population was helpful with self awareness and managing expectations when dealing with others. For example, I don't expect most of my colleagues to be as critical of the company leadership or company policies as I am. And I fully expect some of my colleagues to shut down my ideas for deviating too much from existing patterns.

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