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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> The personality test was a disturbing experience powered by Traitify.com where we were asked if phrases like “enjoys overtime” are either Me or Not Me. It was simple to guess that we should probably select Me for the pro-employer questions and Not Me for questions referencing being argumentative or aggressive, but it was still quite strange.

Offtopic from the security issue, but I wonder if they really get any value out of this "Personality test." It seems like it's just a CAPTCHA that makes sure the applicant knows when to lie correctly.

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Similar tests have been standard for over 20 years. When I worked at McDonald's (late 90's), they didn't do the personality test, but when I applied across the street at Arby's a few years later, they did.

The one that I just got annoyed with and decided it wasn't worth switching from McD's to Arby's was "would you rather read a book or talk to a person?". I mean, I get it, they want people-focused-people, but being introverted and/or just liking books doesn't mean you can't give excellent customer service.

Sure, it's easy to guess what want most of the time, but the fact that personality tests are as widespread as they are in employment is maddening.

Many years later I worked at Chevron (upstream as an exploration geologist -- not a gas station). While they didn't do it as part of the application process, you were required to take a personality/communication style test when you started (ecolors). That's all well and good (it _is_ very useful to understand personalities for communication styles), but in a lot of roles you literally had to wear the colors on your badge. If you wanted to go into management, you essentially had to score "red over yellow". "Greens" and "blues" were considered to be limited to technical roles and were explicitly not given opportunities to advance, though it took a long time to realize that. I started out thinking "hey, this is actually practical" and then over a few years went to "oh, they're using this to decide who moves up... That's a problem". I asked folks and was told by my manager's manager that ecolors were explicitly used in advancement criteria and who got opportunities to lead projects/etc. That's around the time I left. I hear they've dialed that particular bit back a lot, but it's still very weird to me that it's considered a normal and acceptable practice.

Wow, talk about unintended consequences. I guarantee that at some early stage some non-sociopath genuinely thought that program would help people communicate. They underestimated the degree to which humans are willing to let tribalism supplant empathy.

This is a classic of "a metric becomes a target" which turns into "so the way to get ahead is to lie about the metrics". It's an inefficient way of telling people what personality they need to fake in order to get ahead.

Corporate Stakhanovism. It's funny how very large employers can end up with a culture which replicates some of the pathologies of Soviet life.

Makes me think of Trek uniform colours.

Working in retail is 99% lying that you care about your job, so might as well start it out on the right footing.

What about working as a SWE at Google? Apparently they recently implemented a personality test as an initial screener (they call it a Googleyness test).

It doesn’t necessarily need to be beneficial for the company.

Game theoretically there’s an advantage as an employee of a successful company to artificially reduce the number of people who can be employed to raise your own relative value to the company. If Google can only select from left handed employees suddenly they need to pay higher wages and existing employees are facing less competition as new employees are selected from a smaller applicant pool and thus worse.

Probably not the actual answer, but it’s worth considering such indirect motivations.

That's called wrong-think.

If one were to do that, you would be imposing costs to the point where demand drops to 0, and supply in the near term would follow that to 0.

From there you have a short march to economic collapse.

Management and workers extracting more money from companies isn’t a new thing, that’s the point of unions for example which didn’t collapse the economy.

Various interests try to get other people to behave in specific ways, but what actually happens isn’t necessarily as clean as often described.

That may have been the point of union's initially, but the reason the economy didn't collapse when no production occurred is because this never actually happened and was never tested fully.

When it came close to being tested, a legal playbook was provided for crushing unions, negating their intended benefit. This playbook was provided by none other than President Regan, with the 1981 PATCO strike.

The government took the side of the companies because they required the services to continue, and so any strike that exceeds a certain point has this bulldozer held in reserve; allowing the companies involved to not negotiate in good faith. The playbook has been used multiple times since to crush union power.

Google is screening for compliant, fungible engineers. Especially those swayed by the need to be told they’re the best of the best. Tests like that make sense in an ugly sort of way.

Googlers told me that appearing obsessed with climbing the career ladder is an expectation of SWEs, though not a strict requirement. Being a good liar seems like a huge plus.

I had a manager at a part time job at _Blockbuster_ say surprised in review “You make it sound like you are only working here for the money”.

I mean, lol, yes?

My retail managers were mostly pretty chill “this is all bullshit so let’s get through it with minimal hassle” types. The workers were mostly teenagers, and teenagers haven’t learned how to quiet their bullshit detectors yet, so externalizing the bullshit generation seemed to work pretty well.

I can’t really understand the mindset that gets really on-mission for that sort of thing, like somebody has a life goal of selling clothes or renting videos out.

Well if you love clothes or loved movies before the internet was a thing, why not. Of course not at the soulless corporate shitholes we are talking about here. Oh wait, isn't that the exact way of doing business ycombinator is promoting? What are we doing here? Venture capital was the enemy all along.

For the employer, the question is self fulfilling. Either way they get what they want. Even if someone knows enough to lie, the lie betrays that they’re desperate enough to be unable to resist anything management demands.

While also providing evidence that you do indeed love overtime based on your answer. Ugh… the only way to win is not to play.

Or it shows that you put a very low value on your honesty, and will happily say or do anything other people want to hear as long as it's to your advantage.

This Traitify the product makes me immediately suspicious. It asks candidates a few brief questions with images and assigns them personality and trait scores. Surely employers can’t think tools like this are good or accurate signals, right?

Most positions at McDonalds are entry-level and minimum wage. It’s not like they’re applying to NASA.

(https://www.traitify.com/)

A very large part of the population treats “minimum wage” as “maximum wage”.

Once you understand that, many behaviors make a lot of sense.

Well, as bee_rider pointed out somewhere in this thread, the new employees learn what personality they are suppose to fake. So maybe these tests are working better than we think. The lying might even psychologically trick these employees to actually behave that way, out of guilt.

It's a personality test, just not for what it says on the tin. It's a way of determining how beaten down by the system you are. Have you been taught yet that your corporate masters expect you to cheerily tell them how much you love being fry cook drone 732-b926? It's a measure of docility - they are seeing if you have been 'broken' yet. Everyone wants the workhorse, nobody wants to break him.

From talking to people who invigilate these tests, you'd be surprised by how people answer. For example, someone answers Yes to "It is ok to steal from my employer."

I think these tests optimize for multiple things. Part of the test is designed to weed out people who are hostile and violent. Plus it's an IQ test with a floor of around 80, which seems reasonable. And it judges how well you can follow orders and "play the game".

McDonald's has dealt with tens of millions of job applicants. Many of these people arrive with complex challenges. There's a reason why McDonald's uses tests like these.

It might make more sense if you take the perspective of a McDonald's worker. Imagine you're a typical McDonald's employee - maybe you're a mom with two kids. Let's say you get a new coworker. Wouldn't you feel a little safer to know that they passed this test?

I get more and more exhausted every time I see the, to give a hyperbolic comparison, "The momentum generated by our economy of scale means we really have no choice but to keep the orphan-crushing machine going."

I may be an old man yelling at the clouds here, but I just wish "Maybe the fact that they're trying to be so big that problems like this become inevitable" were rhetorically explored more.

Overtime can be enjoyable if you get paid overtime rates.

Is it simple to guess? I always assumed if you went too hard with those answers they'd assume you were lying and reject you.

Maybe this is why I never got the mcdonalds call back last time I was layed off.

I too was rejected from McDonald's.

My wife is incredibly intelligent. She has a master’s degree and is working on her doctorate (definitely smarter than me). I still laugh about how, 12 years ago, she got rejected from a summer clerk job at a grocery store because she failed the online personality test. If anything, she was wildly overqualified. That store definitely missed out.

Apologies for the nitpick, but being rejected for personality is (essentially) mutually exclusive from (over)qualification.

Pedants unite!

I’m surprised at your comment. I really doubt a person with a high level of intelligence is a good match for a grocery clerk job. That is one of the reasons the personality tests exist.

I was a cashier once. I caught a lot of scams that I feel like my coworkers would not have. I was second in the nation one month in this chain at upselling at the register. My cash drawer was balanced within a few cents each shift. I checked out more customers per shift than my coworkers. I worked there for about 8 months until I got a job that I was much more qualified for. I lasted longer than others, but not longer than my team leads.

Maybe people with higher levels of intelligence don't last as long until they get a better job, but I think they're pretty valuable for the time they are there. I think that most entry-level stores are shortsighted for ignoring those applicants.

Best Buy for me.

Where's the line between "lying to pass a test" and "fitting in to a community?" Is there not some element of functioning well with other people as a group that requires us to repress certain individual desires and traits for the good of achieving a common goal? Nobody actually likes working fast food, but customers feel better when employees act less surly and more complacent.

Maybe the goal isn't knowing when the lie as much as being willing to tolerate the bullshit they'll want to throw your way away the job. Presumably anyone not willing to say they like overtime (or unable to determine that's what the employer wants them to say) would not be compliant to demands to actually work overtime. If you don't give the answers they expect you to know you're supposed to give, they can likely rule out you as as an employee who will keep your head down and not rock the boat.

It works as a reading comprehension test. Semi-literates giving random responses will stand out from the compliant ones who know how to play the game.

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