Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

Part of OPs problem may be that it's hard to differentiate yourself in that kind of position. Full stack web development is not easy to get right, but the competition pool is huge. It helps to find even the smallest little angle to differentiate yourself.

The personality tests can fuck right off, though. Agree with that.

View on HN

I once aced an interview before and been told they'd make an offer after this one little Big Five personality test, I think it was called. Fail with no feedback. That's not constructive or actionable. Is that test any better than phrenology or palmistry in practice?

Probably the big 5 personality matrix/dimensions. It's based on statistics to cluster personality questions and answers that tend to cluster together. The acronym most used to remember those dimensions is OCEAN.

Openness - how easily you are willing to accept new ideas

Conscientiousness - how careful and how hard working you are

Extraversion - how quickly you are to engage with the outside world

Agreeableness - how quickly you are to agree versus disagree

Neuroticism - easily experienced negative emotions

Most people aren't a point on the spectrums, they have a range. For example a lawyer might be very disagreeable at work when talking with opposing counsel, but very agreeable when dealing with their children.

Myers Briggs has been largely discredited because most people don't score consistently when retested over time.

This isn't Meyers Briggs.

In fact stability is the strength of Big5. People's personalities seem to be stable over their lifetime. See the 3rd paragraph [0].

The weakness of Big5 is it may/probably does not capture everything. It seems to completely miss abnormal personality traits. Which in a job interview... I hope has been ruled out with initial screening.

[0] https://archive.org/details/psychology0000scha/page/475

Most people, without practice, are not a range as wide as "very disagreeable" to "very agreeable", most people are flexible around a point, to a lesser extent if they've never paid attention to how they behave and never tried to directly practice behaving differently.

Sure, though I certainly see pretty wide variances in myself based on my environment. If I’m happy and in a good environment then I tend to be very agreeable. As my stress and unhappiness go up, I tend to get pretty disagreeable.

I had one job that was absolutely awful, and to be brutally honest my attitude sucked. I wasn’t as nice to my coworkers as I wish I had been. I wasn’t a complete asshole or anything, and my behavior was never raised with me as being problematic, but I’m not proud of how I acted through that time.

But over the course of a fairly long career I’ve gotten a lot of comments about how laid back and friendly I am, and how I tend to go out of my way help people. I like to think that’s who I really am, but I can definitely be unpleasant if I’m miserable.

This is my question about tests.

First, the trait examined is a range and is also situational. Second, your self knowledge of your ranges and situations is also variable and introduces more error. Third, the test introduces more error, it seems. Nobody on this thread has given any evidence this is a useful hiring tool.

My impression is hiring is difficult and there's no shortage of companies pretending to solve it with science, but it's not solved and it's not science.

This test addresses some of those problems by not only posing the personality questions to just the person you're trying to study the personality of but also friends and co-workers that know them. You can capture that range there. If you're always a jerk at work but nice at home this would capture that You just have to dig into the details.

Agreed. I was just trying to raise the point that people reading my comment should consider their range and the range of others.

I wonder why personality tests are not illegal? This is essentially screening for neurodivergent people and facilitation of discrimination based on disabilities.

My guess would be not enough lawsuits yet.

Until risk to the business increases, a possibly worthless speedbump on the hiring path doesn't hurt hiring and effectively makes more work for the HR manager's team, which means team growth - HR win!

Complicated issue, you also want a diverse, balanced team with different personalities.

Don't forget to Strongly Agree with everything your boss would want to hear and Strongly Disagree with anything that suggests you're a functional human being with goals outside the company's.

"I was let go due to resisting a workaholic intervention by my old team."

I love those tests. Any company that administers them automatically fails.

Here in Norway they seem endemic. That ship has sailed, unfortunately.

> Is that test any better than phrenology or palmistry in practice?

As a rule of thumb, if it involves psychology, the answer is always no. Humans do not have the ability to do valid experiments to verify claims, so it is all BS.

The competition pool is huge but also the number of jobs. I'm not sure he would have it easier if he specialized in some esoteric think Erlang. Yes he would compete against less people but also have barely any openings to apply to.

I meant even within the world of being a full stack dev, having an "angle" on your experience or resume. Full stack dev with lots of experience in Pandas. Heavy database optimization background, etc etc. Nothing quite as esoteric as Erlang, but I think in a pool that big you need to find something to stand out a bit.

Most full stack roles aren't that specialized (by definition). So if someone has a heavy database optimization background he probably wasn't a full stack dev. It's just a different role. Sure you can maybe pick up on some of those skills on your job while troubleshooting some performance issue, but those issues are quite rare and far between. And again, I'm not sure a database optimization guy would find the current market any better than a full stack developer who specialized in Node and React. How many companies need a heavy database optimization background guy? Why does it make you more attractive if you have that on your resume than someone who worked only on Node and React for 8 years?

At the moment the number of open jobs is not huge. The majority of companies that haven't had lay offs have simply closed their open positions. Combined with a ton of layed off developers, most job postings get hundred of applicants within a few hours.

At the moment the number of open jobs is not huge.

As someone else mentioned here, Walmart apparently has over 1000 software related openings right now. I know a few companies outside the traditional 'Silicon Valley' company ecosystem trying to hire developers and I can promise you they're not getting 100s of applications within a few hours. The jobs are definitely out there, they're just not where most people are looking and perhaps not in a field, company or geographic location that are most people's first choice.

I agree. So the situation for niche tech / specialization will be even worse, that was my point.

Personality tests are IQ tests that don't want to admit to being IQ tests, at least the ones I've taken.

Only if the person taking the test is willing to lie. I imagine most people understand that you are supposed to lie on these tests, but I could imagine some extremely honest people failing them even if they were smart enough to figure out what the employer wants to hear.

What about the ones with questions like:

When I see an error, it bothers me.

Mostly agree

Somewhat agree

Neither agree or disagree

Somewhat disagree

Mostly disagree

For me this is not answerable question because it is lacking context. If it was not possible to go to the next question, it would be where I would end the interview.

Context is everything, and why these fail. When I did one, the process included the narrative version of the results. I had a question that was something like "It's important to support your organization", which I agree with. In the narrative form of the results, it concluded that I "may not tell the truth to superiors if something is wrong" from that.

Of course I support the organization, and I think being honest with superiors is the best way to do that.

In the end, these things are so imprecise that you have to get to know somebody to know which parts are accurate (some were) and which aren't. By †he time you know how accurate it was, you know the person well enough to not need the test.

That's just an emotional IQ ("EQ") test for figuring if you can detect what they want to hear.

Exactly. A neurodivergence filter. Because it's illegal to discriminate against that protected class directly.

  > The personality tests can fuck right off, though.

Disagree. I can train you to do your job but can't train you to have a better personality. If someone has a toxic personality I would like to screen them out before sinking time into them.

I suspect OP was referring to myers-briggs questionarres or similarly borderline-pseudoscience survey based means of answering "are you a $a or a $b?".

I agree that personality is an important thing to consider in interviews. But trying to gauge it with tools like that is at best a waste of time and at worst actively misleading.

The problem is that the most common "personality test", the "Myers-Briggs" has nothing to do with "personality", let alone "toxic personality", so an argument about "personality" is not an argument for that particular personality test. This is a bait-and-switch dishonest argument - the gap between them is exactly the problem.

This is because the "Myers-Briggs" is hogwash, with as much predictive power of personality as astrology. i.e. none.

If the people administering them are using them for the intended purpose, they're rejecting candidates on nothing more than a roll of the dice. If not, then as others suggest, they are covert way of "screening for neurodivergent people""

So: This _personality test_ can fuck right off.

I doubt that any other quick multiple choice questionnaires are much better. If anyone wants to claim that they're worth anything, show the proof please.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjv8y5/the-myers-briggs-pers...

https://amanda-obryan.medium.com/9-reasons-the-myers-briggs-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/most-personality-tests-junk-...

Then you would need to screen them for personality disorders such as narcicism, not for how introverted they are or how much they appreciate art.

No, neuroticism isn't what you are looking for either, neither is conscientiousness. It can be argued that for an academic position you would want high conscientiousness, but I think many would argue that you want some of your professors to have disorganized, messy offices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com