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Have a professional psychologist participate. Personality profiling is a moral and legal slippery slope, and not something random interviewers should be doing.

Have a professional psychologist participate. Personality profiling is a moral and legal slippery slope, and not something random interviewers should be doing. Good luck with the ADA and discrimination lawsuits. It’s bad enough that the nonsense Myers-Brigg profiling “test” is used seriously in professional settings. Can you even define “low ego personality?” Seems like a subjective assessment, as colored by your perceptions as the candidate’s performance. Can you show with data that “low ego” correlates significantly to job performance? That the people you hire are clearly lower in ego than those you don’t? If you’re not referring to clinical categories from the DSM you’re just judging people with no objective or scientific criteria in an artificial and stressful situation.

throwawaysleep 5y ago
I took to mean how to avoid jerks that are difficult to work with as they think they are always right.
- gregjor 5y ago
  I would probably interpret an amateur psychologist trying to analyze my level of ego in an interview as a jerk. The best way to filter out jerks is to look at their job history and talk to references, learn to read between the lines of a resume rather than focusing solely on programming languages and tools and “stacks.” Engineers with such poor people skills that they can’t pick up clues from a resume, references, and interviews should not be trying to come up with probing questions to measure “low ego,” any more than psychologists should be writing code. My practical advice is to get people who aren’t engineers to participate in interviews. Ask a sales or marketing person, or an effective non-technical manager who is good with people to sit in and get their take. Make sure your interviewers are more diverse than a typical programming team. I don’t think the OP was referring to “ego” the way a psychologist would. Ego has a specific meaning in psychology. It doesn’t mean “capacity for jerk-like behavior.” This particular problem — ego and investment in work among programmers — was explored decades ago by Gerald Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming. Tom Demarco wrote a good practical book called Peopleware. Study of this topic dates back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming
- beardyw 5y ago
  That would be easier to address. There are obviously issues that the submitter wants to tease out. I am not sure "ego" is a good place to start.

throwawaysleep 5y ago

I took to mean how to avoid jerks that are difficult to work with as they think they are always right.

gregjor 5y ago
I would probably interpret an amateur psychologist trying to analyze my level of ego in an interview as a jerk. The best way to filter out jerks is to look at their job history and talk to references, learn to read between the lines of a resume rather than focusing solely on programming languages and tools and “stacks.” Engineers with such poor people skills that they can’t pick up clues from a resume, references, and interviews should not be trying to come up with probing questions to measure “low ego,” any more than psychologists should be writing code. My practical advice is to get people who aren’t engineers to participate in interviews. Ask a sales or marketing person, or an effective non-technical manager who is good with people to sit in and get their take. Make sure your interviewers are more diverse than a typical programming team. I don’t think the OP was referring to “ego” the way a psychologist would. Ego has a specific meaning in psychology. It doesn’t mean “capacity for jerk-like behavior.” This particular problem — ego and investment in work among programmers — was explored decades ago by Gerald Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming. Tom Demarco wrote a good practical book called Peopleware. Study of this topic dates back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming
beardyw 5y ago
That would be easier to address. There are obviously issues that the submitter wants to tease out. I am not sure "ego" is a good place to start.