> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.
I was once part of an accelerator that used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which basically seemed like MBTI except with more fees. And it got very similar results for the engineers in the room. Introverted analysts.
And anecdotally, I know very few non INTJ engineers and the few that aren't are INTP (among those of us that have taken the test for career planning or personality testing for the workplace).
I get how it may not be a rigorous way to sort people, but I want some research on whether it at least clusters them.
Does that make the information actionable? Does being an INTJ allow a prediction on anything else other than being an INTJ?
What is the point in clustering them? If your team is 75% ravenclaw, 20% Hufflepuff and 5% other, how does that help? Are you going to go out and try to recruit a Slytherin?
What if your team is 45% Rachel, 15% Chandler, 20% Joey?
What benefit do you get from clustering people in this way?
You are spot on. I would suspect that everyone that I work with falling this cluster. You could sum us up as a bunch of nerdy engineers, and I don't think anyone would really take exception with that.
But it captures almost nothing except a very small range of behavior. We are very different people. 'Sally' lights up whenever she talks of her children, but mostly pines to be a librarian one day. we have cluster b people, we have Jokers and humorous people, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, adventurers and the meek, storytellers, partiers, tea totalers. One seems to live for firing people, another I'm pretty sure I cannot model another human mind. some of us paint, play music, others disdain that stuff. Jocks and couch potatoes.
Those that say they use the mtbi for self-understanding puzzle me, because it tells you nothing of any of these very human traits. knowing somebody has one of the cluster b traits for example tells you a lot about how you might need to modify your behavior to interact with them successfully in a work environment, and MB days nothing. I could go on and on on what it is not measuring.
Yeah we're engineers. I knew that. I didn't need the test.
I was once part of an accelerator that used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which basically seemed like MBTI except with more fees. And it got very similar results for the engineers in the room. Introverted analysts.
And anecdotally, I know very few non INTJ engineers and the few that aren't are INTP (among those of us that have taken the test for career planning or personality testing for the workplace).
I get how it may not be a rigorous way to sort people, but I want some research on whether it at least clusters them.