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Comment by LordGrey | Hacker News Reader

Apple went through the Myers-Briggs phase in the 90's, along with a lot of the other tech giants.

It was a half-day seminar. "Professionals" gave the tests and told everyone their type. That took only an hour. The rest of the time was spent doing role-playing, where you were supposed to use your coworkers' MB types to adjust your interaction with them in various settings.

It was a waste of time then and I bet it still is.

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We had a similar event.

HR was so patronizing, like, "I bet you wouldn't have known that about yourself if it wasn't for us!"

"Uhhmm... yeah I would. ENTJ every weekend and INTJ most other days."

I never worked for Apple, but I went through a similar exercise in the late 1980's. I found the role-playing useful, and I found the techniques we were trained on to be enlightening. Not everybody thinks the same way, and even though it's not valid to categorize people into 16 personality groups, it's useful to understand that people prioritize things and think differently from each other. Here's a great example of that:

https://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-pr...

Do you need to spend $2000 plus $49.99 a head plus travel, catering and room hire to be told "It's useful to understand that people priorities things and think differently from each other?" If the specifics don't matter, what are you actually paying these consultants to do?

Is it worth $2k (or $20k) to communicate to a bunch of new managers that "we, as a company, feel that thinking about how your team of individuals thinks is worth spending money and time on"? The specifics aren't the point -- the demonstration that this is a priority, and part of your job that you're expected to spend time on, is the key. An e-mail saying "hey you're a manager now think about people!" doesn't have the same impact, inherently, and you end up with "managers" that think their job is still to be a tech lead.

> to communicate to a bunch of new managers that "we, as a company, feel that thinking about how your team of individuals thinks is worth spending money and time on"?

Interesting. It wouldn't have occurred to me that was the message at all until you said this. My takeaway would be "a really good salesman caught the ear of some executive somewhere."

Dear god I am glad they stopped this by the time I got there. I probably wouldn't have quit on the spot or anything, but I do not think that there exists a universe where it wouldn't taint the job in my eyes.

Though Apple did a pretty good job of doing that already.

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