[mdaniel]

For my frame of reference, do you think the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are psycho-bullshit, too? Because I had characterized personas as a very similar "of course it's a generalization" and OP even said themselves "every engineer is a mix" but if you're coming from stance that bucketing people is disrespectful, then your perspective on MBTI would help me digest your stance

[NeutralForest]

I've seen those kinds of tests described as astrology for business guys. Sounds about right.

[wiseowise]

Both are made up bollocks for idiots to label people. Just write fucking code, solve business problems and go home.

[fragmede]

Everything is made up. How do you organize people into being able to solve problems?

[wiseowise]

> How do you organize people into being able to solve problems?

By not putting reductionist labels on them.

[fragmede]

I don't see how that helps if the number of people you need to solve a problem exceeds the ability of a single human to know all of the people involved.

[whatevertrevor]

MBTI is absolutely bullshit, it's like one level above horoscopes and astrology, but very similar type of BS. There's also the Gallup crap that many corps were doing to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each employee so they could fit them into neat buckets such as "Leader" vs "Follower", as if these aren't skills people develop over time but actual personality traits.

[cm2012]

Its kind of a common thing to say Myers-Briggs typing is useless because its pseudo-science. I dont think this is supported by the data in the way people think.

For one, many studies of identical twins raised in separate households show they have the same personality type at a much higher rate than chance.

Two, there are incredibly strong correlations in the data. In different surveys of 100k+ people, the highest earning type has twice the salary of the lowest type. This is basically impossible by chance.

The letters (like ENTJ) correlate highly to the variables of Big 5, the personality system used by scientists. Its just that it's bucketed into 16 categories vs being 5 sliding scales.

Scientific studies are looking for variables that can be tracked over time reliably, so Big 5 is a better measure for that.

But for personal or organizational use, the category approach is a feature, not a bug. It is much more help as a mental toolkit than just getting a personality score on each of the 5 categories.

[BlarfMcFlarf]

You can pick any set of axis you feel like and get similar results. “Do you like X? Wow you are an X person!”. So yeah, technically better than horoscopes, more like a “warm” reading where you tell a person what they told you earlier. But it’s entirely unclear why these axis are the right ones over a million other possible ones, if these are particularly stable categories in time and context, or if the harm of encouraging people to box themselves or others into specific stereotypes has any possible benefit to outweigh the obvious harms of simplifying stereotypes.

[cm2012]

It's good questions. Here's why this axis is the right one in my opinion:

1) As I mentioned, it has a lot of statistically significant correlations, including to all the variables of the Big 5. Example: Surveys show that % of the overall population that is each type (like INFJ) is very consistent across time and populations.

2) Beyond that, youre right, there are a lot of personality systems with pros and cons. But Myers-Briggs has by far the must supporting materials, tools, ease of use, and so on. I think its the quickest to make useful to the average person.

3) I've found it really helpful as a lens for self analysis in my own life.

[tptacek]

I briefly flagged the preceding comment for "psycho-bullshit" before concluding that it was just a really forceful way to say the developer personas were pseudoscientific (of course they are, nobody is claiming otherwise) but I think it's worth calling out that MBTI is also pseudoscientific; it has no real validity, or even test-test reliability.

[mdaniel]

I would guess that lack of repeatability happens a lot with any self-reporting scheme, but I am sorry that I accidentally picked such a polarizing "people generalization" scheme to use as contrast. Maybe I should have used "introvert versus extrovert" or something

Anyway, their sibling comment told me what I wanted to know, so in that way I'm wasting more of my time contributing to this

[tptacek]

I thought the Microsoft developer persona thing was cute. I didn't think anybody was claiming it was science!

[Zarathruster]

I'll leave it to others to make the argument for why Jungian psychology (and by extension, MBTI) is/isn't bullshit.

But since nobody has mentioned the alternative yet, the framework used by anyone in any scientific capacity is the Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

The link between programming and conscientiousness seems fairly straightforward. To fully translate Mort/Elvis/Einstein into some kind of OCEAN vector would take a little more effort.

[cm2012]

Big 5 correlates to MBTI very closely in any case. With the exception of neuroticism.