5 ms·

I can't comment on the rest of the post but this bit stood out to me: > Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a person

I can't comment on the rest of the post but this bit stood out to me: > Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score). Just for reference, if an employer ever asks me to perform an IQ test I'm definitely walking away.

sascha_sl 5y ago
Or a personality test, which will likely be based on the MBTI - complete BS. Just because there's an entire consulting industry behind convincing you that to build the perfect team you must have "complementary personality types", does not mean it's true. Not like the IT industry has the luxury of choice based on such a lot of the time either.
- delusional 5y ago
  I can kinda respect a personality test. It doesn't really mean anything, but they do stress that there's no "good" personality. IQ tests are different, because a higher number means better. That leads to superiority complexes.
  - smugglerFlynn 5y ago
    MBTI (or other non-scientific test) stressing that there’s no “good” personality behave just like tobacco companies prior to regulations, trying to whitewash downsides of the product. People rely on these things to make hiring decisions. I personally know people who hire based on reported personality that closely matches their own. I’ve seen people making biased opinions after being coached on these tests. “No scientific backing, Makes people rely on confirmation bias” should be plastered all over these things, just the way we label cigarettes with photos of smoking consequences.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    There's a difference between personality test taken because you're curious, and one taken as a filter on the way to get a job. Usually you can guess where the authors of the test are going with the questions and which answers are "a better fit". And then it becomes a test of "how much you want this job" vs "how strongly you feel about being honest". Also even if people answer honestly the science behind it is very shaky and when applied to real world situations it seems about as useful as astrology.
  - gumby 5y ago
    For IQ tests, a higher number is supposed to mean better. The accuracy of such tests is dubious.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  I don't understand the hate towards MB. It does what any theory should do: predict behavior. And it does it pretty well, actually. I'm 52. I learned about it when I was 16, and my mother filled in some questionnaire in a computer program, and it nailed my internal thought processing to a T. Ever since, I've paid passive attention to it, and people seem to fit the archetypes pretty well, though I find the category division names to be utterly useless. Why do you say it's BS? What's the thinking behind the "anti" side?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    It's a recurring debate here.[1] Wikipedia has a summary of the criticisms.[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288772 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I've been in development for way too long (still am). Every time I've spoken to a potential client I would only talk about what I do, how I do it and how I can solve client's problem. Also present list of completed projects with the references. Anything beyond I consider as infringement of my private life / BS and flat out refuse to participate. I might have lost few opportunities because of this but that was my choice.
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    Aside from the link already posted, MBTI testing provides an interesting slight of hand where it abuses nonspecificity. I can read myself into about 3 of the 16 archeotypes pretty easily, and I bet if you read descriptions of adjacent types you can too. The test has to be like that if it aims to categorize humans into just 16 categories anyway. The results, especially on 16personalities, is more about stroking your ego than anything else. It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility.
    - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      > It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility. Well, I guess there's the issue. You think there's very little value in it. I think there's much more than you do, though I agree it's certainly a subjective measure. I say that any of the 3 archetypes that you might "test out" as would give a potential manager some measure of useful context in predicting how you will respond/react to various situations and people, despite criticism of the accuracy of the system.
PokemonNoGo 5y ago
I had an interviewer use a test they printed from the internet. I had done that test before and knew all the answers. Came off as a full blown genius! Declined the position though, they didn't offer a genius salary.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Ahaha, you should have left saying you found a better job after staying in a Holiday Inn last night.
elric 5y ago
Yup. IQ tests, personality tests, psychological profiles, not happening. It's a load of pseudoscientific hogwash which hiring managers use to justify their own biases.
- OJFord 5y ago
  What bias would they have that would be reliably backed up by them? ('Scandanavians are the best employees' perhaps, based on this thread..! But that aside.)
  - elric 5y ago
    "Another INTP wouldn't fit in the team" is a great excuse for "I don't like this person". "This woman only has an IQ of 103" replaces "I don't want to hire her because she wants babies". Hiring is hard. People are complicated. Trying to reduce them a couple of letters or a number is hogwash.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      To be clear I agree with 'hogwash', I just think it's such random unreliable nonsense that you couldn't rely on it to 'objectively' (so you might claim) show the same correct outcome as your beliefs. Because it would just be all over the place.
nordicengineer 5y ago
I hope you'll understand I'm not arguing against you. I can totally understand the adversity, and by all means people can easily use it as a bias, but it merely gauges how good at "if X then Y" one is, which in turn reflects on how clear the job at hand should be. It's not about being smart/er than others, it should be just one datapoint in a sea of tens of datapoints in the search for "a good fit". And all you're looking for are red-flags, not as many checked checkboxes. Then again, any tool can be misused. Point taken.
- toolz 5y ago
  Bad data is worse than no data. I would suggest using those data points make ones decisions less reliable.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  IQ in particular is a measure of very specific trainable skills. Particularly the harder part of IQ tests are extremely prone to cognitive bias by the authors though, where they start measuring neurotypicality rather than problem solving ability. The problem is that these tests do not sell themselves as "just one data point", and even if they did, you'd have to do so many other things to compensate for the shortcomings of standardized IQ tests, they're really not worth doing in the first place. IMO the best way to assess fit is to ask someone to handle a hypothetical, or to ask for previous experiences fitting a problem or situation.
  - ponow 5y ago
    Of course get to know the candidate as much as possible before hiring, but if you had to pick your candidate based on a single number, you truly don't think IQ isn't way up there as one of the more usefully discriminating ones?
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      Absolutely not. (And I would refuse to pick a candidate based on one number. No good can come of this.)
robin_reala 5y ago
They’re the norm in Scandinavia, unfortunately.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  This is one of the ickiest things I've ever read about Scandinavia
  - randomNumber7 5y ago
    Wtf. Would be good for me but i still find it pretty scary...
- me_me_me 5y ago
  thats mad, you'd get better idea how 'smart' someone is by having 20min conversation. I guess thats one of those local idiosyncrasies
  - samhw 5y ago
    Hmm, I don't think that's true. I score incredibly highly on the 'verbal IQ' segment of the test, and anecdotally I seem to give people the impression of intelligence, but in the mathematical segment of the test I score about as highly as a potted plant. Unless you've ever independently (non-circularly) corroborated your 'idea of how smart someone is', my guess is that it just serves as a proxy for qualities like academic education (which != intelligence), social class, similarity to yourself, &c.
  - johanneskanybal 5y ago
    It's a small market with a few big very successful companies leading the way and then the smaller companies imitating as many of their practices as possible. In Sweden the biggest one of them would be Spotify and Klarna both have had IQ tests as part of standard hiring for some time, not so sure Spotify still do but definitely a few years back and there's a lag before the medium sized companies pick up on the changes. For the record, hiring is hard, no company seems to have got it right. Think IQ tests probably says more than someone being forced to nervously scribble down bubble sort on blackboard or estimating how many water melons there are in pakistan. None of these obviously says anything compared to working with someone for a week. edit: People are different, if it was as simple as evaluating a conversation it wouldn't be a very hard problem.
locuscoeruleus 5y ago
A friend absolutely bombed his IQ test (mostly on purposes, because he couldn't be bothered). He was a few standard deviations under the average person. When they asked him how he felt about it he excitedly said he was happy with the result. He later got the job.
randomNumber7 5y ago
Would be even illegal in germany...
radu_floricica 5y ago
Why? It's a pretty valuable piece of information.
- distracted_boy 5y ago
  Why is it valuable if you can practice doing those type of tests and then get a good score on the real test? What's the purpose then? I mean if the job is writing code, wouldn't you be interested in finding out if the interviewee can code, instead of checking if the person can figure how a certain geometric form unfolds?
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    If it can be cheating on, that's the problem of that particular test. IQ itself is still pretty useful for a programmer. Depending on position and career level, possibly more important than current knowledge.

sascha_sl 5y ago

Or a personality test, which will likely be based on the MBTI - complete BS. Just because there's an entire consulting industry behind convincing you that to build the perfect team you must have "complementary personality types", does not mean it's true. Not like the IT industry has the luxury of choice based on such a lot of the time either.

delusional 5y ago
I can kinda respect a personality test. It doesn't really mean anything, but they do stress that there's no "good" personality. IQ tests are different, because a higher number means better. That leads to superiority complexes.
- smugglerFlynn 5y ago
  MBTI (or other non-scientific test) stressing that there’s no “good” personality behave just like tobacco companies prior to regulations, trying to whitewash downsides of the product. People rely on these things to make hiring decisions. I personally know people who hire based on reported personality that closely matches their own. I’ve seen people making biased opinions after being coached on these tests. “No scientific backing, Makes people rely on confirmation bias” should be plastered all over these things, just the way we label cigarettes with photos of smoking consequences.
- ajuc 5y ago
  There's a difference between personality test taken because you're curious, and one taken as a filter on the way to get a job. Usually you can guess where the authors of the test are going with the questions and which answers are "a better fit". And then it becomes a test of "how much you want this job" vs "how strongly you feel about being honest". Also even if people answer honestly the science behind it is very shaky and when applied to real world situations it seems about as useful as astrology.
- gumby 5y ago
  For IQ tests, a higher number is supposed to mean better. The accuracy of such tests is dubious.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
I don't understand the hate towards MB. It does what any theory should do: predict behavior. And it does it pretty well, actually. I'm 52. I learned about it when I was 16, and my mother filled in some questionnaire in a computer program, and it nailed my internal thought processing to a T. Ever since, I've paid passive attention to it, and people seem to fit the archetypes pretty well, though I find the category division names to be utterly useless. Why do you say it's BS? What's the thinking behind the "anti" side?
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  It's a recurring debate here.[1] Wikipedia has a summary of the criticisms.[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288772 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
- FpUser 5y ago
  I've been in development for way too long (still am). Every time I've spoken to a potential client I would only talk about what I do, how I do it and how I can solve client's problem. Also present list of completed projects with the references. Anything beyond I consider as infringement of my private life / BS and flat out refuse to participate. I might have lost few opportunities because of this but that was my choice.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  Aside from the link already posted, MBTI testing provides an interesting slight of hand where it abuses nonspecificity. I can read myself into about 3 of the 16 archeotypes pretty easily, and I bet if you read descriptions of adjacent types you can too. The test has to be like that if it aims to categorize humans into just 16 categories anyway. The results, especially on 16personalities, is more about stroking your ego than anything else. It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    > It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility. Well, I guess there's the issue. You think there's very little value in it. I think there's much more than you do, though I agree it's certainly a subjective measure. I say that any of the 3 archetypes that you might "test out" as would give a potential manager some measure of useful context in predicting how you will respond/react to various situations and people, despite criticism of the accuracy of the system.

PokemonNoGo 5y ago

I had an interviewer use a test they printed from the internet. I had done that test before and knew all the answers. Came off as a full blown genius! Declined the position though, they didn't offer a genius salary.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Ahaha, you should have left saying you found a better job after staying in a Holiday Inn last night.

elric 5y ago

Yup. IQ tests, personality tests, psychological profiles, not happening. It's a load of pseudoscientific hogwash which hiring managers use to justify their own biases.

OJFord 5y ago
What bias would they have that would be reliably backed up by them? ('Scandanavians are the best employees' perhaps, based on this thread..! But that aside.)
- elric 5y ago
  "Another INTP wouldn't fit in the team" is a great excuse for "I don't like this person". "This woman only has an IQ of 103" replaces "I don't want to hire her because she wants babies". Hiring is hard. People are complicated. Trying to reduce them a couple of letters or a number is hogwash.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    To be clear I agree with 'hogwash', I just think it's such random unreliable nonsense that you couldn't rely on it to 'objectively' (so you might claim) show the same correct outcome as your beliefs. Because it would just be all over the place.

nordicengineer 5y ago

I hope you'll understand I'm not arguing against you. I can totally understand the adversity, and by all means people can easily use it as a bias, but it merely gauges how good at "if X then Y" one is, which in turn reflects on how clear the job at hand should be. It's not about being smart/er than others, it should be just one datapoint in a sea of tens of datapoints in the search for "a good fit". And all you're looking for are red-flags, not as many checked checkboxes. Then again, any tool can be misused. Point taken.

toolz 5y ago
Bad data is worse than no data. I would suggest using those data points make ones decisions less reliable.
sascha_sl 5y ago
IQ in particular is a measure of very specific trainable skills. Particularly the harder part of IQ tests are extremely prone to cognitive bias by the authors though, where they start measuring neurotypicality rather than problem solving ability. The problem is that these tests do not sell themselves as "just one data point", and even if they did, you'd have to do so many other things to compensate for the shortcomings of standardized IQ tests, they're really not worth doing in the first place. IMO the best way to assess fit is to ask someone to handle a hypothetical, or to ask for previous experiences fitting a problem or situation.
- ponow 5y ago
  Of course get to know the candidate as much as possible before hiring, but if you had to pick your candidate based on a single number, you truly don't think IQ isn't way up there as one of the more usefully discriminating ones?
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    Absolutely not. (And I would refuse to pick a candidate based on one number. No good can come of this.)

robin_reala 5y ago

They’re the norm in Scandinavia, unfortunately.

cushychicken 5y ago
This is one of the ickiest things I've ever read about Scandinavia
- randomNumber7 5y ago
  Wtf. Would be good for me but i still find it pretty scary...
me_me_me 5y ago
thats mad, you'd get better idea how 'smart' someone is by having 20min conversation. I guess thats one of those local idiosyncrasies
- samhw 5y ago
  Hmm, I don't think that's true. I score incredibly highly on the 'verbal IQ' segment of the test, and anecdotally I seem to give people the impression of intelligence, but in the mathematical segment of the test I score about as highly as a potted plant. Unless you've ever independently (non-circularly) corroborated your 'idea of how smart someone is', my guess is that it just serves as a proxy for qualities like academic education (which != intelligence), social class, similarity to yourself, &c.
- johanneskanybal 5y ago
  It's a small market with a few big very successful companies leading the way and then the smaller companies imitating as many of their practices as possible. In Sweden the biggest one of them would be Spotify and Klarna both have had IQ tests as part of standard hiring for some time, not so sure Spotify still do but definitely a few years back and there's a lag before the medium sized companies pick up on the changes. For the record, hiring is hard, no company seems to have got it right. Think IQ tests probably says more than someone being forced to nervously scribble down bubble sort on blackboard or estimating how many water melons there are in pakistan. None of these obviously says anything compared to working with someone for a week. edit: People are different, if it was as simple as evaluating a conversation it wouldn't be a very hard problem.

locuscoeruleus 5y ago

A friend absolutely bombed his IQ test (mostly on purposes, because he couldn't be bothered). He was a few standard deviations under the average person. When they asked him how he felt about it he excitedly said he was happy with the result. He later got the job.

randomNumber7 5y ago

Would be even illegal in germany...

radu_floricica 5y ago

Why? It's a pretty valuable piece of information.

distracted_boy 5y ago
Why is it valuable if you can practice doing those type of tests and then get a good score on the real test? What's the purpose then? I mean if the job is writing code, wouldn't you be interested in finding out if the interviewee can code, instead of checking if the person can figure how a certain geometric form unfolds?
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  If it can be cheating on, that's the problem of that particular test. IQ itself is still pretty useful for a programmer. Depending on position and career level, possibly more important than current knowledge.