[DavidChouinard]

This is a very strong feeling of mine and early reviewers of the essay railed at that frustration. It's striking how much the hiring dance feels full of misplaced energy.

There's no doubt hiring for product engineers is horribly broken, and in a way that holds back the entire ecosystem.

The essay is not about interviewing, because I don't have strong alternatives to suggest.

First we need vocabulary, then we'll need process. I'm in a quest to understand how to hire for this role: I'll write a new essay once I understand it.

[tokipin]

When it comes to these things people are going to reinvent a vocabulary that already exists: Jung's psychological functions.

What Jung called extraverted intuition (Ne) is going to be the main "product" function in tech, with extraverted sensing not as common in the industry. Ne appears in Ti-Ne/Fi-Ne/Ne-Ti/Ne-Fi (what MBTI calls resp. INTP/INFP/ENTP/ENFP). In other words, the xxxP types are going to correlate with being product people. Steve Jobs was practically raw Ne.

The stereotyped "Silicon Valley Programmer" that every company wants to hire is introverted intuition primary and extraverted thinking secondary (Ni-Te, what MBTI calls INTJ). This archetype is quick-witted and naturally good at verbal/logic challenges.

To really, really, really simplify things, with xxxJ vs xxxP, you essentially have a dichotomy between speed on the one hand and (external) depth on the other. External depth being advantageous because the world itself is external. The current standard for interviews is essentially to judge speed, so of course this has the appropriate consequences. Which, by the nature of the particular elements involved, rapidly runaway.

Speed is quite easy to see and understand. Depth on the other hand is harder to pin down. But it is depth, and the vision that often carries it, that can render fine details onto a product. Those details can be so small that most people don't see them, so general appreciation of this power is rarer, and by its nature harder to test on top of it requiring a longer time horizon to work in.

Many people will think that you can get both qualities in a single person, but it doesn't work that way. Evolution would have done that long ago if it was possible. Instead, what we're dealing with are fundamentally different brain topologies/strategies, essentially characteristics that species can min-max in individuals because of the survivability allowances afforded by their ancestors having been social. Or who knows. Regardless, these are the same types of trade offs you have in data structures/algorithms.

[hosh]

I remember reading that stuff as a teenager -- and afterwards, I was able to make the MBTI tests say anything I want it to say.

My later experiences with vipassana/insight meditation showed me just how much hot air those personality indicators are. You can switch among them if you know how. These are not as hardwired as people would like to think they are.

Nice try, it's a good framework, but it is fairly limited when it comes to describing the spectrum of human consciousness. Jung is interesting in that, he was a scientist having mystical experiences that he tried to scientifically analyze. Was he successful? I don't know, but I doubt he was able to capture all that he experienced.

[derefr]

Personality factors aren't like IQ, in that they don't try to be measures of extent, but rather tendency. Saying someone is "Thinking-primary" doesn't mean they always think, or never feel; it doesn't even mean they enjoy thinking more than they enjoy feeling. It means they fall back on thinking; or, more precisely, they think of themselves as being the kind of person who falls back on thinking rather than feeling. (Which usually amounts to the same thing; the box you slot yourself into circumscribes the habits you'll form, and then things that become habitual feel more "natural.")

Everyone on HN is pretty familiar with the introvert/extrovert distinction, and also how carefully it has to be explained lest it be confused with "outgoing" vs. "shy." The real distinction, as the 'common wisdom' goes, is about how you "recharge."

I personally think it's clearer to phrase it in terms of the contrapositive: introversion/extroversion is about what you reject when you're out of willpower. Whatever comes more naturally to you—whatever's more habitual—will "cost" less to keep on with.

And, I would say, other "personality factors" can best be described similarly. They're not how people are on average; they're what people tend toward when not awake/aware/energized enough to be engaging both complementary faculties at 100% as needed (as mindfulness meditation, or a zeroed-out sleep debt, can allow.)

And do note that most of the MBTI factors do occur separately in other personality-trait assessments, that were not created by mystics. :)

[hosh]

>It means they fall back on thinking; or, more precisely, they think of themselves as being the kind of person who falls back on thinking rather than feeling.

Yes, and that tendency is mutable too.

> the box you slot yourself into circumscribes the habits you'll form, and then things that become habitual feel more "natural."

You mean they feel more comfortable, and sometimes that will be conflated with feeling "natural". Habits of the mind are just that: ruts and tracks that have deepened over time with repeated actions. They can be changed, like anything else in the phenomenal universe.

> Everyone on HN is pretty familiar with the introvert/extrovert distinction, and also how carefully it has to be explained lest it be confused with "outgoing" vs. "shy." The real distinction, as the 'common wisdom' goes, is about how you "recharge."

That might be the common wisdom, but that was not how Jung or even MBTI defines introversion and extroversion.

> I personally think it's clearer to phrase it in terms of the contrapositive: introversion/extroversion is about what you reject when you're out of willpower. Whatever comes more naturally to you—whatever's more habitual—will "cost" less to keep on with.

I've been talking with my meditation buddies about this on and off for the past year. Some of them are (or were) software engineers and some of them are not. Over the past year, I've been finding that idea of introversion and extroversion is BS, but I have not looked into it deeply enough to find any good insight.

It smells like BS to me because it seems like a truism that hasn't been thoroughly examined.

> And do note that most of the MBTI factors do occur separately in other personality-trait assessments, that were not created by mystics. :)

They appear in other personality-trait assessments because Jung and the mother-daughter team of Meyers and Briggs were credible enough scientists/speakers that people forgot where it came from. I didn't say Jung was a mystic. I said Jung had mystical experiences. He had been trained as a scientist, then out of the blue, he started having experiences for ten years. He went with it and started observing it, making theories about it, much like a cultural anthropologist would when they immerse themselves into a different culture. Where did you think Jung got his ideas of archetypes and collective unconscious from? He observed them directly and called them such. It's really funny to me how "mysticism" has become such a dirty word and used for name calling :-D

[tacon]

This is a really interesting analysis. Has it been expanded into more detail anywhere? Can you suggest references that map onto programmers, founders, product engineers, etc.?

[tokipin]

Not to my knowledge. It's very easy to fall into twisted Escher boxes and ego traps when talking about these things so I try to only entertain them lightly (says my ego), and I don't know if this kind of thing is discussed in "official" psychology/sociology.

At its core it is about raw physical "existential modes" and not the more superficial label of "personalities", and it's very hard to appreciate what that means even in the case where you think you know what it means. Like if you're a trained psychologist. Certain drugs might be windows into our fellow humans' worlds. Other than that, strokes and other forms of brain damage are the only cases I know of people that have experienced multiple "existential modes". For example[1].

I think in terms of hiring, the broad strokes are useful but I wouldn't dilly dally with the specifics too much since they can be misused easily, nevermind all of the other variables in play. And as far as I know there isn't really a central place on the internet that describes the scheme as a whole. Dilly dallying through MBTI forums was one of my pastimes in ages long past and that might be the way to make sense of it today, keeping in mind how slippery things get when everyone's self is involved.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...