MBTI at work

[cellio]

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?)

Comments

[cellio]

I've seen minor changes over time, but nothing like your total change. Doesn't surprise me, though; different aspects can develop at different rates, I would think. My T has always pegged the meter (completely at one end) and my J is pretty close to that; I has moved around in strength (always I, though), and I've had everything from moderate S to moderate N on the S/N scale (N more recently). This might say more about test construction or administration than about me, though, as the INTJ profile is pretty darn close.

[kayre]

Oh, I was Repressed, big time. Youngest in a household full of strong people with very different personalities, I had to learn to make decisions that they would accept. I used the N part of me to do that, but I answered all those questions based on how I had to react to survive, not on my true preferences, which I hardly know. And why would I react like an extravert while living with a bunch of incompatible people? I'm lucky I stayed sane, and somehow managed to maintain amicable relationships with most of them.