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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Oh god, I am shocked and horrified to hear that these sorts of tests may now be making their way into the tech industry.

I've never encountered one of these personally, but my then-girlfriend who was a recent nursing school graduate looking for her first job ran into them and failed the first few of them. After reading about them online I'm convinced the only way for you to "pass" these tests is to be slightly psychopathic or to simply know the very flawed theory behind the tests and train yourself to take them in which case they of course test nothing but how good you are at adapting to flawed tests.

The specific test she kept running into was the "Unicru" one:

http://melbel.hubpages.com/hub/Unicru

I highly recommend anyone running into this problem with HR in their tech companies do what they can to FIRE HR. This kind of bullshit needs to be nipped in the bud if it threatens to take hold in our industry.

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I know that it's hard when you want a job, but personality tests should be declined the same way polygraphs should be (if they were legal to administer). Developers have an advantage right now in the supply and demand department, and this is exactly the way that power should be used.

Talented developers are in short supply in the core tech industry. Outside that, the world is filled with "programmers" and "analysts" struggling to find jobs in enterprise IT and niche-market product development. Post a job to craigslist and you'll be drowned in resumes.

My suspicion (never having seen one of these tests) is that it's being used in these situations. I doubt Apple or Google are going to start using them any time soon. My guess is your advice is pretty bad for the people facing a personality test.

>> ... now be making their way into the tech industry.

I remember to fail one such test somewhere around 2001, the reason being: "... lack of a status-driven momentum ..." and " ... lack of aggressivity in pursuing career goals ... " or something to that effect.

Not that I walked out smiling, but they explained me in two sentences why I would not have liked to work there. So, addressing your quote above, I'm astonished that these tests are still around. Basically this company (and others) are putting their culture into the hands of an external service (Mercury Urval if I remember correctly in this case) and they can lose big by handing off influence on the choice.

Wow. That test looks like an excellent way to select for a combination of mindless corporate drones and skilled liars.

I'm confident I would ace this test. All I'd have to do is pick the exact opposite of what my honest answer would be.

Dude, your girlfriend may have been too immature at that point to realize what the right answers to Unicru were, but it's really obvious what the interviewer wants to hear after getting some life experience with assholes: bend over, don't complain, smile, etc...

I never got such a test, but if I did, I would try really hard to score 0% just because fuck you. Funny thing is that the capable guy being exemplified in this article probably did just that, after all, if you answer randomly the score will be higher than 1%.

I think if you haven't worked in a 'real' professional job for several years (your first job) then it can be harder to understand the psychology behind the test implicitly. Or if you just worked in small businesses with very low amounts of politics.

I would think an engineers personality should be different from a sales person's personality.

Ironically, if you did that then the score would probably be accurate.

Well yes, looking at the link above, I'm actually agreeing with many points from the "strong disagreement" list.

lolo I like:

"It is maddening when the court lets guilty criminals go free >> SA"

Yeah, what is the point of having a court of law anyway, because the test taker knows all.

There are much worse ones. I seriously hope that the key is fake. You are supposed to Strongly Disagree with:

  "When you are annoyed with something, you say so"
  "When people make mistakes, you correct them"
  "You are not afraid to tell someone off"

... and Strongly Agree with:

  "Any trouble you have is your own fault"
  "You avoid arguments as much as possible"
  "You finish your work no matter what"

This is what the wicked stepmother would ask the candidate for a Cinderella, with the added benefit of being too insecure to leave her for Prince Charming.

The key is correct. Remember you are a mindless drone, as such you are not expected to take charge. Them above, they know best.

Anyone remember that case when a prank caller called a McDonalds, telling them that they were management and that they should strip-search a female employee? McDonalds has an employee handbook with all the procedures for the robot, and if you can make it appear that what you ask is in the handbook you have hacked the robot. This is the background to that story. Excellent robots they have at McDonalds.

The reason for this procedure is that they want to pick up people from the streets and train them in a week. This is how you do it.

I think the caller pretended to be a cop. Pretty sure they made a movie about it recently...

One would think they changed the line in the manual about cooperating with law enforcement to something more detailed.

Note: I'm saying "something more detailed", not "something more appropiate to situation". The robot must not be required to think ever.

Not sure about a movie, but it was the lede case in a Law & Order SVU episode: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1015439/

This is disturbing on many levels to me. Someone who is "maddened" when a guilty criminal goes free demonstrates clear ignorance of the justice system as well as a tendency to be instigated by demagogues.

On the other hand, this test as a whole seems to be selecting for someone who is pliant and believes whatever he is told to believe, the sort of person who actually believes the HR indoctrination and the like. In this regard, I think the question is very revealing - someone who would answer "Disagree" to this question reveals that he understands that our judicial system is not perfect and reacts with skepticism whenever he is told by the media not to value human rights. Such a person would be more likely to stand up for himself in the workplace when his rights or the rights of others are violated.

It's actually rather clever if you're looking at it through the eyes of an asshole.

By the way, your username cracks me up.

Or they could be modestly conversant with the basics of criminal law.

The courts are designed to let some portion of the guilty go free: E.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation

For example, in any case where the evidence was obtained illegally, a person who is provably guilty may not be convicted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

> in any case where the evidence was obtained illegally

It does make sense. Who's to say that the evidence in question wasn't planted?

I feel like this validates my comment? The two notions regarding criminal law you post are not maddening, but thoroughly reassuring.

They are reassuring from a systemic design perspective, or from the perspective of someone who is accused but innocent.

But in the individual case of an obviously guilty person going free, it is legitimately maddening.

I think with more perspective, there is nothing maddening about it.

It's like a pool filter. Any one particle of feces can float around the pool forever, but in aggregate the feces level is reduced.

I think that's a valid perspective, but that's not the only one.

If you have been a victim of a crime and the perp walks, it's reasonable to say something besides, "Thanks goodness our system works to protect the innocent!"

I also think prosecutors should always be a little maddened by it. It's they're job to keep the guilty-but-free error as low as possible.

Or to put it differently, aggregate feces reduction is great, but you are unlikely to say that if you discover a bit of somebody's poop in your mouth. And you never want the person in charge of cleaning the pool to say, "Fuck it, a little poop never killed anybody."

Yes, that one surprised me. I would think the personality type they want is never maddened.

I worked IT at a bank and they administered a test like this (Meyers-Briggs). Not during the hiring process, it was intended to be used by managers to build teams based on personality quadrant. I'm pretty sure the results were ignored though.

Myers-Briggs test isn't recognised as being scientifically valid so is largely ignored by the field of psychology

just saying ...

http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/1...

I don't think they're "making their way", I think they're already here in some tech segments. I've only been subjected to a test such as this once, administered by a certain mega-grocery-wholesaler in southern New Hampshire, and I thought it was hilarious. My answers reflected my "take charge, get sh*t done, &etc" startup mentality. They clearly wanted corporate drones who would quietly go about their assigned duties and submit to whatever authoritarianism was in the air at that location. I hope I bent the needle on their personality-o-meter as I sure tried to.

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