cellio: (avatar)
Monica ([personal profile] cellio) wrote2007-08-14 04:08 pm
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MBTI at work

Not long ago someone at my company listed his Meyers-Briggs type on his wiki page. And then someone else did, and, well, once three people do it it's a movement, so while I was on vacation someone created a page listing people by type (when known).

Of 35 people currently listed, 8 are INTJs -- seven software developers (including one of my favorite colleagues) and a hard-core designer. Yeah, these are my people. :-) According to Wikipedia, INTJs are about 2% of the general (US) population.

Granted, most of these types are being obtained by test toys found on the internet, but I don't imagine that would bias the results in a particular way, especially as people are using different tests. A few people have had more real tests in the past.

(Next-biggest group is ISTJ at 6, but that's a big group in the general population so not surprising. Ours apparently took some flack for alphabetizing the names within each section of the page; it's an ISTJ thing to do, apparently. :-) )

I just noticed something odd in the groupings. There are 16 types, grouped into four groups: NT, NF, SJ, and SP. Given the first two, I expected the other two to be ST and SF, but they're not. (That is, the first two suggested the pattern of "middle letters dominate".) I wonder what that means. (The I/E dimension gets no primary grouping at all?)

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[identity profile] starmalachite.livejournal.com 2007-08-14 11:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, I think it's a little more useful than you give it credit for. It's a heuristic, not a caliper, but it's given me insights into other people's thought processes that I might not have gotten otherwise -- or only after much frustration for both them and me.

For that matter, realizing just how rare my "type" is was actually rather liberating -- knowing that very few people are going to "get" me no matter what I do meant I could put the same effort into "getting" them instead.

You don't have to be a Jungian to consider MBTI a sometimes useful shorthand. Sure, it can be abused ("I'm sorry, we're only hiring ESTJs for sales positions"), but so can any psych tool.
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