[HN Gopher] I applied for a software role at FedEx and was asked...
___________________________________________________________________
I applied for a software role at FedEx and was asked to take a
personality test
Author : wk_end
Score : 231 points
Date : 2024-02-12 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| billy99k wrote:
| I once had a SW interview with a job that had a 2-hour long
| personality test. No tech questions. Just random questions to
| test my personality. It started out simple, like 'what was the
| last book you read' to more in-depth situations that had nothing
| to do with the job.
|
| The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started
| managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on
| management' and wanted to 'try this out'. I passed the first
| interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote
| codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the
| second interview.
|
| I ended up choosing the job that had no whiteboard interview or
| personality test. It was just a simple conversation with the tech
| lead about my previous experience and if I had the experience to
| work on their current system.
|
| It was the best job I ever had and they are still my client
| almost 5 years later.
| ejb999 wrote:
| Yep - companies will continue to use these bizarre hiring
| criteria/tests unless or until enough people refuse to
| participate; but as long as their is a line of people behind
| you willing to do 'whatever' for the chance at the job, not
| much will change.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Unfortunately companies have found a loophole: They just say
| "we couldn't find anyone who is acceptable for the role
| locally so instead we'll hire overseas for a fraction of the
| cost, darn"
|
| Almost like the unnecessarily complex hiring processes are
| built that way on purpose.
| neuromanser wrote:
| Rest assured that a company that'll have domestic
| candidates jump through ill-advised hoops subjects the off-
| shore ones to the same bullshit.
| shitlord wrote:
| In this thought experiment the domestic candidates aren't
| putting up with it, which is the only reason why the
| offshore ones are even candidates.
| Clubber wrote:
| "we'll hire overseas for a fraction of the cost, darn"
|
| The ones at a fraction of the cost aren't very good. Talk
| about shooting yourself in the foot.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not.
|
| I've worked with great offshore teams and terrible ones,
| I think the great ones were more expensive but still less
| than a local salary.
|
| But the theoretical hiring manager here doesn't care
| anyways. All they want is to come under budget so they
| can max their bonus for being so cleverly frugal.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| That's a naive argument.
|
| Intelligence / Competence more or less has the same
| distribution curve. With the access of knowledge now
| widely available, A country with 1.5B people will always
| have more competent people than countries that have 50
| Million in population.
|
| And these countries have cheap labor. US has always poo-
| pooed Japanese, Chinese and Indian workers as low
| quality. That's only because you didn't filter well
| Clubber wrote:
| >That's a naive argument.
|
| No, it's an experienced one.
|
| >Intelligence / Competence more or less has the same
| distribution curve. With the access of knowledge now
| widely available, A country with 1.5B people will always
| have more competent people than countries that have 50
| Million in population.
|
| That is only a fraction of what it takes to produce good
| software developers. You have to include quality of the
| educational systems, living conditions and all that. Any
| offshore developer worth their salt gets paid market
| rates or near market rates.
|
| >And these countries have cheap labor. US has always poo-
| pooed Japanese, Chinese and Indian workers as low
| quality. That's only because you didn't filter well
|
| It's not their nationality, it's the price they are
| charging for. I bet you can't find a quality US worker
| for $30K a year either.
| jakupovic wrote:
| I work with IDC folks a lot and just like you said there
| is no difference in quality but the time difference and
| being US centric makes a difference. The US side makes
| the decisions and the ither sides has to follow. I
| personally try to give as much independence as possible
| but it's just how it is based on where the money comes
| from.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I did my part: refused a job because of these kind of
| mandatory weird tests.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Every job/client I've acquired has been a 10-15min informal
| chat with a stakeholder and a technical peer, and then an
| offer.
|
| I don't really see the value in going through hiring gauntlets
| and opt out of any process that looks like it might waste time
| like that.
| Maro wrote:
| Interviews are for weeding out poor candidates; what you have
| left are the good ones. Weeding out poor candidates is not
| possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15
| minutes informal chats.
|
| You do realize you're replying to a comment showing it _is_
| possible right?
| plugin-baby wrote:
| The previous comment doesn't show that - it just shows
| that there are companies without arduous interview
| processes.
| recursive wrote:
| I don't realize that. We know that there was a short
| chat, and that it resulted in filling a position. We
| don't know whether it's an effective way to filter out
| poor candidates. Have you done it? What's your success
| rate?
| Clubber wrote:
| If you can't figure out someone is a dud in 60 minutes
| you are doing it wrong. If you can't figure out someone
| is a dud in 60 minutes, 360 minutes isn't going to make a
| difference. Why waste the extra 300 minutes?
| recursive wrote:
| Merely knowing I'm doing it wrong isn't actionable. In
| addition, I need to know what to change to do it right.
| rvnx wrote:
| You can ask for precise details about the implementation
| or the weirdest bug they had encountered.
|
| Great tech guys are able to explain to you complex
| systems quite easily; not by making them overly complex,
| but quite the opposite, to keep them simple, and
| regarding the bug you can understand the depth of
| troubleshooting the person went through.
| NickC25 wrote:
| It most certainly IS possible.
|
| That's the whole point of resumes and LinkedIn...especially
| in technical fields. You self-select for the hiring
| criteria you're looking for. You then speak to the
| candidate to understand a bit more about their experience
| as it relates to the job you're seeking a candidate for.
| That's why it often makes sense for such roles, for
| technical people to interview other technical people.
|
| _" Oh, you have experience with XYZ technology stack, and
| you worked with it for a few years, awesome. That's what we
| use here, but could you please talk about some of the
| projects you worked on with said technology?"_
|
| But no, tell me how that's not possible to do quickly.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| People lie about what they personally did as part of a
| larger team. They claim to have skills and expertise they
| don't actually have.
|
| I'm not saying you need a gauntlet of tests. I liked the
| approach mentioned elsewhere of a technical discussion
| about what they did. But it takes, like, an hour or two
| to make sure they're not BSing and that they're actually
| as much of an expert as they claim to be.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > But no, tell me how that's not possible to do quickly.
|
| I mean your low ball easy to answer question gives you
| exactly zero information other then yes they in fact
| worked on a team that did stuff. They just talk about
| what their peers did you've got such a short interview
| your not going to figure out they didn't actually do that
| shit.
| kube-system wrote:
| Depends on the role, applicant pool, experience, and risk
| tolerance.
| agrippanux wrote:
| You can definitely weed out poor candidates in 10-15
| minutes of informal chats.
|
| What you can't do is weed them _all_ out, and you usually
| can 't tell if someone is a good fit yet.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Employement is not the same as contracting job
| intelVISA wrote:
| Some were FTE roles
| georgel wrote:
| This has been my experience as well. The more hoops a company
| made me jump through the less they were offering to begin with,
| and the culture was not great.
|
| My last gig was great in that aspect. My client found my
| LinkedIn, we had a quick 15 minute call to discuss the project
| and I was working for them the next day.
| frfl wrote:
| Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had a
| 15 minute (okay 15 is a bit short unless someone vouches for
| you or you're a well known open source contributor etc, maybe
| 1 hour or 1.5 hour, hell even 2 hour) technical conversation
| and the other engineer is like, yeah this person's worth
| bringing onboard.
|
| Might not work in all cases, but really, if you're trying to
| sniff out a pretender vs someone who can write software,
| would not having a heavily technical conversation about
| details, challenges and other things not make it clearly
| evident after 15-30-45 minutes if this person is who you
| need? Rest of the time can be spent napkin designing
| something or peer programming to check off those to be sure.
|
| I had a interview in 2021 where I had to do a 1.5 hour timed
| exercise, that apparently isn't sufficient, so their
| interview pipeline has 3x1hour additional live coding
| sessions with engineers. Over 4 hours of coding just to prove
| I can write code up to their standards. Then another 3+ hours
| of behavioral interviews, meeting the team. Multiply that by
| the ~5 candidates you interview per position multiplied by
| each position you hire for in a given year.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Indeed, while it might not work in all cases you'd probably
| save enough time/money to make up for those cases where it
| didn't work out. I've often seen jobs posted that stay open
| for 6 months or more because some hiring manager and their
| team can't make up their minds on who to hire. Meanwhile,
| the project they want to bring someone in to work on
| languishes, or people who are already stretched thin burn
| out and go elsewhere. There's such an emphasis now on
| hiring the perfect candidate that it's the enemy of
| actually getting things done.
| zahllos wrote:
| This is very common where I am (Switzerland) and I agree
| entirely with your conclusion. It's not uncommon to see
| posts open for over 6 months and it often seems like this
| is because no candidate is good enough.
|
| In the intervening time, a candidate not quite ticking
| all the boxes but with motivation and energy could have
| learned what they needed to and moved whatever the
| project is forward.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had
| a 15 minute technical conversation and the other engineer
| is like, yeah this person's worth bringing onboard.
|
| When I was interviewing for both junior and senior
| positions, my typical tack was to look through their resume
| and look for something interesting that I have some kind of
| background knowledge of. Or, alternatively, just ask them
| "what's the coolest project you've worked on?" From there
| I'd just let it be a pretty organic conversation where I'd
| just keep asking for more details until we've either gotten
| to the bottom of the tech implementation or have gotten to
| the point where they can say "I don't know, someone else
| worked on that".
|
| So far I haven't been disappointed with any of the outcomes
| from that process; there was one where my conclusion was
| "no hire" and then down the road they were hired anyway...
| and it turned out pretty much how I figured it would. Good
| surface technical knowledge with a super scattered
| implementation.
| Clubber wrote:
| >"what's the coolest project you've worked on?"
|
| This is the first question I ask followed by, "What's the
| worst project you've worked on?" The answers are pretty
| insightful.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 100% yes. The reaction to _that_ question will tell you a
| ton about a candidate.
| lex-lightning wrote:
| I had a great manager who was a coding genius, always
| available to pair even if it took hours to explain
| something, and has been a friend for years after we both
| left that company.
|
| But before that company I had a manager at a very small
| company who absolutely had no ability to do the work -- and
| would have failed a personality test on top of that.
| vidarh wrote:
| Most 'pretenders' I've come across over they years have
| outed themselves by cheating in the most idiotic ways on
| screening questions and failed to answer the most trivial
| coding questions because they've been so bad that they
| didn't understand even the level that was expected.
|
| So I'm inclined to think your 15 minute intuition is nearly
| enough - the worst people reveal themselves very quickly.
| And so does the best people. Where a little bit more time
| might be needed is sometimes in the middle, but it's _rare_
| for more conversation to change the initial judgement.
|
| Over nearly 30 years, there have been borderline cases
| where we might have overpaid someone, and a couple I'd have
| preferred not to have hired, but who still could deliver,
| but I don't think we've ended up with anyone who were bad
| enough to justify these kinds of extensive hiring
| processes.
|
| I tend to see these complex hiring processes more as tests
| to determine which candidates are willing to jump through
| hoops and prove their eagerness and loyalty. E.g. when a
| FAANG sent me a reading list.... I declined, pointing out
| that if I needed to study for their interviews they weren't
| testing my skills, but how desperate I was to work for the.
| Their recruiters called me back a couple of times to try to
| convince me again.
|
| I can understand them doing so, because they can, and
| getting people to who will see it as an achievement to get
| past these barriers might be worth it to them, but to me it
| just felt like I didn't want to work in an environment
| where people were so eager work there that they'd put up
| with that.
| foofie wrote:
| > I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be
| a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I
| declined the second interview.
|
| Last year I interviewed for MongoDB. They proudly boasted that
| their hiring process consisted of a 7 interview marathon. I
| asked if that wasn't too many interviews, and the interviewer
| boasted that they already managed to streamline their process
| down from 12 interviews.
|
| They also proceeded to point out that all FANGs follow the same
| process, except they really don't.
|
| I respectfully dropped from the hiring process there and then.
| The extremes to which they take their cargo cult mentality is
| out of this world.
| ohthatsnotright wrote:
| > The extremes to which they take their cargo cult mentality
| is out of this world.
|
| Nah, just "webscale" like everything else Mongo.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Ha, I had a phone interview with MDB for a (contract!)
| technical writing gig, and they told me the next steps
| include (1) a one-hour critical thinking test, whatever that
| means, and (2) a one-hour writing interview.
|
| Not a take-home writing assignment, which would be pretty
| standard, but a live writing interview via Zoom screen share.
| Very unusual, but I don't have too many other things on the
| horizon right now, so I'll see where it goes...
| smcin wrote:
| Doing the writing assignment live and on-screen is simply
| to verify you didn't cheat/impersonate/get help/use
| AI/plagiarize.
| testless wrote:
| Contract implies they hire a service, thus should not
| care how it was created, right?
| rvba wrote:
| Well, after their interviewing process they end up with
| things like this:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16833100/why-does-the-
| mo...
| awo34oaw4u wrote:
| I got asked "what was the last book you read" in a SW startup
| interview once. I told them and then the interviewers started
| arguing amongst themselves about whether or not they liked the
| book, based on what I had told them about it, instead of asking
| me what I thought about it and what I learned from it. That was
| one of about thirty red flags. I left without completing the
| interview.
| neilv wrote:
| In imagination-land, it could've been a higher echelon of
| test.
|
| Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-
| teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring
| the interview back on track, with subtle grace?
|
| At the end of a series of "bad interview loop" tests, you
| learn that they secretly weren't interviewing you to be a
| coder, and now you are the next chosen-one CEO of Lego.
| lukas099 wrote:
| "Sorry, you failed to walk out on us. We don't think you're
| right for the team."
| htrp wrote:
| > Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-
| teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring
| the interview back on track, with subtle grace?
|
| Said no company ever....
| drewcoo wrote:
| In my experience, tag-team or tribunal-style interviews are
| themselves a red flag. Usually it's a sign that the company
| doesn't know how to interview or whose opinions to trust,
| so they're just throwing everyone into the meeting.
|
| And any company being so openly dishonest as to set up fake
| arguments for candidates react to . . . if discovered,
| that's the mother of all red flags.
|
| This is not the case with new interviewers shadowing a
| single interviewer. That's actually a positive sign, that
| they know some of their people have skills and are actively
| trying to train their staff.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I've been part of a three-person panel for interviews at
| multiple companies. I think the idea of panels is first,
| to train people to be good interviewers. Second, to get
| the opinion of multiple people regarding the viability of
| candidate. Third, I bet there's a liability thing at a
| company level where they don't want a candidate who fails
| to be able to claim bias of one person.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > That was one of about thirty red flags. I left without
| completing the interview.
|
| It sounds like an extremely effective question;)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I had a high school literature teacher that asked me what I
| thought about the assigned reading, and then told I was
| wrong. After arguing that the question was not "what did it
| mean" vs what I thought. I think think whatever the hell I
| want to think. This was pretty much the death knell of my
| desire to participate in literature, and freed me up to spend
| my time in math/sciences. yes, it was just an excuse for
| something I was going to do anyways, but still a total lack
| of bedside manner from a teacher can have devastating
| results.
| dookahku wrote:
| Canonical made me do a personality test.
|
| From what I understand, Canonical culture isn't great, either.
| The whole process sounds a lot like what you are talking about
| -- just hoops to winnow out people for the sake of winnowing.
| zen928 wrote:
| After that personality test, they ask you to complete a timed
| IQ test. After that, you'll reach a behavioral interview
| after which you get assigned a "take home" technical
| assessment, which then after submitting you can schedule to
| have technical interviews (potentially multiple). You can
| fail at any step along the way.
|
| It was one of the more laughably ridiculous interviewing
| processes I've seen, and thankfully the only one I've seen
| recently that was so egregious.
| Macha wrote:
| Having seen Canonical's personality test, while it's
| impossible to verify without their marking methodology, it
| feels explicitly classist (which in the US probably means it
| produces racist outcomes too)
| Alupis wrote:
| > it feels explicitly classist (which in the US probably
| means it produces racist outcomes too)
|
| Please elaborate...
| shermantanktop wrote:
| You'll probably get better answers to questions about
| polo, golf, opera, and croquet on Martha's Vineyard than
| you will in South Compton.
| Alupis wrote:
| There are wealthy and poor people all across the country
| that do or do not participate or relate to any of those
| named things.
|
| You have identified a very specific type of economic
| class, which has nothing to do with "race" and/or
| ethnicity. I also doubt Canonical is only seeking people
| who "summer" in Martha's Vineyard, regardless of their
| skin color.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > I ended up choosing the job that had no whiteboard interview
| or personality test. It was just a simple conversation with the
| tech lead about my previous experience and if I had the
| experience to work on their current system
|
| I miss interviews like this. We need to compile a list of
| companies that still do this. In fact, getting on that list
| could really help a company's recruiting efforts - which in
| turn could influence other companies to adopt this interview
| style.
| PsylentKnight wrote:
| https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
| pimlottc wrote:
| Good lord, I can't think of anything I would want to be on a 5
| hour remote session for.
| doublebind wrote:
| Two years ago, I had a similar experience with Chainlink. I
| underwent hours of interviews and completed an extensive work
| assignment, only to be offered the job _after a personality
| test_. Simultaneously, I interviewed at a startup. There, I
| spent about an hour discussing my experience and providing
| feedback on their current system with the person who would
| become my manager.
|
| I chose the startup, and it has been the best job decision I've
| ever made.
|
| Personality tests can disclose a lot of personal information.
| It's unclear where this data might end up or who might have
| access to it. I detest this practice and consider it a major
| red flag.
|
| (edit: typos)
| Beijinger wrote:
| This reminds me when I tried incredibly hard to get a tiny
| scholarship to study abroad in country X and got rejected. In
| fact, there were several rounds and I didn't even make the
| first one. My Prof. told me to go to country Y and I
| hesitated because of the immense administrative burden to
| apply again and since I was de facto not qualified for a
| postgraduate scholarship. But application was easy, I got it,
| and they stuffed me with money.
|
| I always remember the words of my Professor: "Don't you know
| that everything where you have to invest a lot (I assume
| effort, time, money, energy) nothing ever comes out?
|
| So if your IT job requires a letter of recommendation from
| the pope and even if you are able to get the letter, you are
| unlikely to get the job. :-)
| jstarfish wrote:
| Corollary experience: the more effort/time/money/energy you
| expend in a successful transaction, the more likely it is
| they'll impose a shitty condition at the end of it,
| expecting you to be too invested to challenge it.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Weaponizing the sunk cost fallacy, once again. Just like
| a time-share condo pitch.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > Personality tests can disclose a lot of personal
| information
|
| In my experience the only thing personality tests disclose is
| how good the testee is at guessing which answers will be
| viewed most favorably
| pbae wrote:
| IQ test with extra steps.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| Just random questions to test my personality.
|
| "You're not turning the tortoise over, Billy. Why is that?" :P
| kmac_ wrote:
| Short whiteboard interviews have become LeetCode/take-home
| assignment/one vs whole-team-from-every-department interview
| marathons. So instead of those funny pictures, we'll have
| Rorschach tests followed by polygraphs soon.
| Angostura wrote:
| "why are you calling me Billy" -- Leon
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > the second was going to be a 5-hour remote
| codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team
|
| I had a similar experience with Cisco. The recruiter, who
| seemed pretty inexperienced, said she wouldn't reveal the
| compensation range until after the 5-hour interview. I declined
| the 5-hour interview day and that was the last time I even
| considered a job that didn't post the compensation range up
| front.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That was the way that I interviewed. I never gave a coding test
| in my life.
|
| I never made a _technical_ error, but I think that I did hire a
| couple of folks, over the years, that didn 't integrate into
| the team that well. Not sure the personality test would have
| made a difference.
|
| Sometimes, the only way that you can tell how someone will do,
| is start working with them.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the first time I saw a pressure-interview for high skill
| coders was on campus at Apple, and the interviewing team was
| from Microsoft HQ. The project was audio-related and required
| excellent coding skills and knowledge of digital sound and
| associated mathematics. This was in the early 1990s IIR.
|
| After complete astonishment at the focus on "performance
| coding" also known as obey my commands now.. by tech-bros
| from MSFT, the immediate thought was "this is a new style of
| engineering management that emphasizes the authority of the
| interviewer over talent and skill fitting"
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, when I was younger, I would have been more responsive
| to that.
|
| Not anymore.
|
| I've been _shipping_ (as opposed to "writing") software,
| for my entire adult life. That means start-to-finish, and
| continuing support, afterwards. In the last dozen years,
| I've had over 20 apps in the Apple App Store (but I
| deprecate them, so it's probably only five or six, now),
| done alone.
|
| I can do the stuff, and I can prove it. I have a gigantic
| library of code, out there, along with a great deal of blog
| posts, teaching courses, and whatnot.
|
| If someone wants to find out about me, they could get a
| good idea, in about fifteen minutes of searching.
|
| But it surprises me, that they are more interested in
| 50-line academic exercises. I've actually been told that "I
| probably faked" my portfolio.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Personality tests are stupid but I don't know if I'd be willing
| to join a company that didn't do any-kind of whiteboarding/live
| coding exercise.
|
| I've interviewed way too many people who can't write a for
| loop. Fizzbuzz is supposed to be a joke not something people
| legitimately fail but it happens all the time.
| kemayo wrote:
| I'm fine with a coding test, and okay with whiteboarding /
| live-coding so long as people are accepting of it just being
| roughing-out the code rather than expecting to produce
| something polished... but _5 hours_ of it? That 's
| ridiculious unless you're paying people for the interview.
| lebean wrote:
| Wow, someone got paid to make that.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I have never seen "software" abbreviated to SW before. Let's not
| do that.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| It's pretty common
| foolofat00k wrote:
| It's very common. Kind of fascinating that you've never seen
| it.
| Maro wrote:
| SWE is a common abbreviation for Software Engineer. Others: PM,
| DE, PE, DS, UX, QA, etc.
| acheron wrote:
| > SWE is a common abbreviation for Software Engineer
|
| This only started in the past 10 years or so, and I don't
| think I've ever actually seen it in real life. I don't live
| in SF though -- I assumed it was something Google did and all
| the SF types slavishly copied.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think I started seeing it about 25 years ago, and I'm
| nowhere near SF/SV.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's very common. Ever hear of SWE or SWET? Based on the
| context of this site, what did you think they were applying
| for?
| toast0 wrote:
| > Ever hear of SWE or SWET?
|
| Yeah, the Society of Women Engineers is a pretty big deal.
| I'm not too familiar with their org, so I dunno what SWET
| would be.
| kurthr wrote:
| Wait till you see HW (hardware) and FW (firmware).
|
| People who regularly have to work with a mixture of these will
| abbreviate them. You'll see them everywhere now.
| halfcat wrote:
| Wait until they hear about upgrading the FW on the FW! [1]
|
| [1] firewall
| sevagh wrote:
| OK, sorry boss.
| dailyplanet wrote:
| SE is probably the better choice, instead of SWE.
| lxe wrote:
| Nice to see Reboot is back!
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| My weirdest experience is still the one where 6 people in a room
| have me go through my entire education starting with grade
| school.
|
| For a senior SWE role. Even the body shop recruiter was agast.
| jmholla wrote:
| (Mostly jokingly) Paranoia tells me they were trying to get
| more of your personal information to crack security questions
| on your accounts.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| It was weird enough I wondered the same (or if they were
| scientologists or something) but it was a multinational over
| 100 years old at the time...
|
| Besides, jokes on them, childhood is repressed from trauma.
| pierat wrote:
| "Well, I went to school with [interviewer, one of], and damn
| can you believe the amount of paste he ate? And he loved eating
| and flinging boogers. And there was this time when he got.....
| lice!"
|
| Just start making shit up cause there's no fucking way you're
| going to be there.
| zippergz wrote:
| I was in an interview process for a job where the next step
| sounded like something like that, and I went ahead and withdrew
| before I got to it.
| SebFender wrote:
| Job interviews should be about fit in the team and projects - not
| tests and ridiculous whiteboards where you start solving their
| problems for free...
| mypgovroom wrote:
| Dang. This corporate nonsense at it's best.
|
| Personality test are completely bogus.
|
| Marston's was a master con and even expressed it in later life.
| claytn wrote:
| I received a three question geometry quiz inside of a google form
| as a screening for a backend nodejs a couple weeks ago.
| Apparently it was critical for the role that I know the
| relationship between the circumference and the radius of a
| circle.
| vundercind wrote:
| Yikes. I mean, on the one hand that's literally elementary--as
| in elementary school, if only just barely--knowledge. On the
| other, I've not needed to find the circumference of a circle
| given the radius _ever_ in adult life, and I'm quite sure I've
| forgotten more than a handful of "elementary" things due to
| lack of practice, over the years, especially in math (for which
| needing to reach for knowledge or techniques beyond about 6th
| grade is very rare, at least in my life).
|
| ... I am pretty sure I'd be fine on that particular example,
| but there are surely others about as "easy" that I'd flub
| because I've not used that knowledge in 20+ years.
| isawczuk wrote:
| Glad to see feedback from real users. My company was pitched by
| Paradox [1] to use their chatbot and this bizarre questionnaire
| to hire SW. Their solution target mostly McDonalds workers and
| other bluecollar, where I believe it's "okeish to put human
| beings thru the mud first". They claim [2] there is science
| behind it, but me and my partner's feedback was it will never
| work for IT workers.
|
| [1] - https://www.traitify.com/ [2] -
| https://www.traitify.com/science
| neon_electro wrote:
| What does "putting humans through the mud" achieve?
| oskarw85 wrote:
| Negative selection
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I took such a test at my first ever job, and it was only two
| topics repeated 15 times:
|
| 1. what is the value of these coins
|
| 2. is it ok to steal
|
| If you can't count money or think it is ok to steal then you
| cannot work in retail.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I took a more general test at a job agency, as there was
| warehouse work, cleaning, assembly line and so on
| available.
|
| I argued at the end that I had 100%, since 295 x 3 (or
| something) could not possibly be the answer given on the
| answer sheet, as the last digit wasn't 5.
|
| They eventually found a calculator and found their answer
| sheet was wrong. Supposedly, no-one had noticed before,
| though now I wonder if it's possible it was a test of
| personality.
|
| Probably not, as many people probably would find that
| question difficult on a test with questions like "Put
| Smith, Jones and Patel in alphabetical order".
| robocat wrote:
| Money is becoming uncommon in New Zealand for payment. Some
| shops don't accept cash or otherwise make it more difficult
| to use.
|
| Employees can steal other things, but the opportunity to
| steal money has been significantly reduced.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| pack dominance
| 0x457 wrote:
| Selecting people with low self-worth that can be easily
| broken. You don't want a free thinker with vocal opinions and
| entitlement (warranted or not) working at your McDonalds -
| you want a drone that is just good enough to do the job.
|
| Hiring process often is a reflection of work culture. Shitty
| process will remove candidates that won't fit the culture.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I think most of the jobs that use this kind of filtering
| are also low wage / low prestige where churn and training
| represent a significant fraction of the labor cost. So they
| are probably simply selecting for a certain degree of
| precarity & economic desperation, trying to exclude people
| who are looking for a little extra money to meet personal
| goals or fill periods between better paid work.
|
| I'm trying to phrase this neutrally but IMO this motive is
| just as bad.
| gamepsys wrote:
| It's legal for companies to make hiring decisions based on the
| results of personality tests. It's legal for them to make other
| personal decisions, such as promoting, firing, giving raises etc.
| It's legal to make these kinds of decisions based on personality
| tests that have poor scientific evidence in their efficiency.
| It's legal to ignore the tests and not make decisions based on
| them. Largely companies use this as a cover-your-ass tactic. The
| employer is buying ammunition for future legal fights over
| employment.
|
| There's really only one set of personality traits (The Big 5)
| that has a strong scientific backing. Of those only being high in
| conscientiousness is a signal for being a good employee.
| Employers screen for that all the time via proxy, such as having
| a college degree. They don't need to test for it directly. There
| are however many not-big-5 popular personality tests that are
| sold to companies. I don't want to call out any specific one, but
| you should be highly skeptical of their validity.
|
| At best these tests are management by covering your ass. At worst
| these tests are actively filtering against populations that it is
| illegal to filter for. For example, the IQ test was once given as
| part of the immigration process for the United States.
| Considering that the tests were administered in English they were
| mostly used as legal justification to turn away non-English
| speakers.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Slavery was also legal one day. And I bet there was also some
| "science" (if only political) to back it up.
|
| Just sayin)
| gamepsys wrote:
| I'm confused, I thought I was very critical of these tests in
| my comment.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I 'm confused, I thought I was very critical of these
| tests in my comment._
|
| It wasn't until the last sentence of your 2nd paragraph
| where you make any negative remark about them. Up until
| that point, your comment reads like it is justifying the
| tests because they are legal. At least that's how I read
| it.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| I read it as a critical comment. Perhaps read it in my
| mind as "it's legal but not ethical..."
| jahewson wrote:
| Ok so you're partly right and partly wrong. In California it's
| flat-out illegal (Tit. 2, SS 11071) and attempts to perform
| more diluted assessments have been found to infringe upon
| California's right to privacy.
|
| As for other states, the ADA is likely the biggest threat to
| these practices and it's not hard to imagine that a lawsuit
| will eventually find aspects of many of the current practices
| to already be illegal. But you're right that for the "average"
| person there are generally no protections.
|
| > the IQ test was once given as part of the immigration process
| for the United States.
|
| This is a myth. There were some attempts at IQ testing in the
| 1920s but they failed due to language barriers. What was
| adopted was a trivial wooden puzzle to screen for severe
| cognitive impairment. That said, the purpose of this test was
| eugenicist, aligning with the politics of its day.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| I fucking bet. Hiring is broken
| brink wrote:
| It's also a very hard thing to solve.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| It's a big five test which is a real personality test but in the
| same category to Myers Briggs as far management pseudoscience and
| ability to predict performance/career outcomes.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| "I detect you are a type F person..... the type who says no
| thanks to personality tests"
|
| Personality tests in my opinion are what happens when companies
| want ever more certainty that they are hiring the right person.
|
| I don't think they're helpful, and throw a spanner in the works
| of the hiring process.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Well when a company has problems with retention, "HR, go fix
| it!"
|
| What can HR do except add stuff like this to the hiring
| process? They're not allowed to actually fix teams with
| problems. Or "culture." Or bad execs.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Bizarre really don't capture how other-worldly (other than the
| lets-not-be-racist purple people) this test is.
|
| Take the fourth image, of the person (or two people) with two
| emotions on the couch. How are you supposed to identify if that
| image as a whole is "me" or not? I would be baffled at how to
| respond to that. Some of the images I can kind of understand
| (watching TV while you have laundry to fold? LAZY!), but how am I
| supposed to respond to "generic image of puzzle"?
| pimlottc wrote:
| I believe there's supposed to be a picture at the start of
| "your character" so you know which one it is when there are
| multiple people.
| ooterness wrote:
| You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the
| sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling
| toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its
| back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the
| hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it
| can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is
| that?
| strictnein wrote:
| Not sure why, but this scenario and question makes me
| anxious. Maybe that's the point?
| robocat wrote:
| It's a reference to the Voight-Kampff test.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| What was the question? I'm sorry I wasn't concentrating. I
| was just wondering how your cigarette looks so unbelievably
| juicy and tasty. Mind giving me a cig?
|
| For real though, why does the cigarette look so...comforting?
| vessenes wrote:
| I took the test for fun (link is above here).
|
| You are instructed as to who you are and what you look like at
| the beginning of the test, and there is a title disambiguating
| (mostly) the scenario at the top of every image.
| jacamera wrote:
| The pictures are strange but the OP neglected to notice the
| captions which make the intent much more clear:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1ap1345/...
| JaggedJax wrote:
| This is great context. Unfortunately I don't think the test
| taker had the neglect here. The instructions for this test do
| not mention the captions, and they clearly don't fit on the
| screen and are hidden by default on their phone!
|
| To me the neglect here is on the developers of the test for
| only half supporting mobile, and on FedEx for using such
| terribly designed test.
|
| This is setting aside whether or not someone thinks personality
| tests are good or valid tests in the first place.
| mouzogu wrote:
| curious who makes these tests...seems like these hiring manager
| and dev leads have a deranged god complex
|
| i'm convinced 95% of the people giving dev tests (leetcode)
| wouldn't be able to solve it themselves
| niceice wrote:
| You can take it here:
| https://fedexdataworksprod.traitify.com/assessment/31449c4a-...
|
| Each one has a title like "Starter Not a Finisher", "Frequently
| Change My Mind", "Always Wonder Why", "Easily Offended", "Art
| Isn't My Thing", "Unstoppable", "Make Friends Everywhere", "Good
| Enough", "Not My Job", "Tend to Feel Sad", "Volunteering",
| "Believe the Best of People", "Hard to Start a New Task", "Loves
| the Social Scene", "Chats in Elevators", "Natural Leader",
| "Sometimes Thoughtless"
| vundercind wrote:
| I'm convinced most use of these is actually testing for:
|
| 1) bright enough to answer to achieve just about any desired
| outcome (usually not a high bar),
|
| 2) socially/politically aware enough to realize which outcomes
| will be good, and which will be bad; and,
|
| 3) agreeable/compliant enough to go ahead and game the quiz to
| achieve a good outcome without raising a fuss.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It seems to me that what you are getting is people who are
| both decently clever and fairly dishonest.
|
| Which is an awful combination to select for, imo
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Not clever honest people are taken advantage of
|
| Not clever dishonest people can do ok sometimes
|
| Clever honest people can be moderately successful, but can
| always be out-maneuvered by the clever dishonest people,
| thereby limiting how high they can climb,
|
| Clever dishonest people rule the world.
| glitchc wrote:
| So true. How does one become dishonest?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't
| dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the
| rules isn't dishonest.
|
| You'd rather clever enough but defiant employees?
|
| Or not clever and some other combo?
|
| Being honest is realizing your situation and making
| tradeoffs to prioritize what's important. Pretending that
| your ability to call out weaknesses in the interview
| process makes you the best candidate is dishonest. If you
| feel that's more important you are forgetting why you are
| part of this process in the first place. If the outcome is
| they get a better interview process because of your
| feedback but you don't get the role, you failed in your
| original purpose. You need to be honest with yourself why
| you even applied in the first place.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire
| isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game
| by the rules isn't dishonest.
|
| Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you
| truly feel or believe _is_ dishonest. I don 't think it's
| an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to
| play this dumb game. There are many cases where being
| untruthful is not morally wrong.
|
| > Being honest is realizing your situation and making
| tradeoffs to prioritize what's important.
|
| I wouldn't say that's 'being honest', it's being
| pragmatic.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you
| truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an
| amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play
| this dumb game. There are many cases where being
| untruthful is not morally wrong
|
| Thank you for this reply, I couldn't have said it better.
| It's important that people realize
|
| 1) Representing yourself falsely is dishonest
|
| 2) Dishonesty isn't an especially bad thing in many
| cases. In fact it's socially expected in many cases, such
| as in interviews.
|
| That doesn't make it less dishonest. It means that a lot
| of our society is an engine that basically runs on
| dishonesty.
| vundercind wrote:
| It took me _a while_ to get that interviewers aren't
| really looking for honesty when they ask stuff like "why
| do you want to work here?"
|
| I mean maybe they are, but they're gonna be very unhappy
| with the most-honest answer from 95+% of candidates for
| the vast majority of employers and jobs.
|
| So of course, you're supposed to be... quite a bit less
| honest. And I guess maybe there's some value in filtering
| out people who don't get that? Or who refuse to "play
| ball" on principle? IDK the reasons, I didn't make the
| rules.
|
| I was raised with and internalized honesty as very
| important, and adjusting to an adult world (mostly--
| almost entirely, actually--the business world) in which
| that needed to be _judiciously tempered_ and certain
| kinds of dishonesty were _expected_ and failure to play
| along punished, was quite a damn shock. I adjusted
| eventually but I've never really been happy about it.
| petsfed wrote:
| The classic example of requiring dishonesty to pass the
| test is one I've seen a few times:
|
| "Is it ever ok to steal?" If you answer anything but
| "NEVER, and thieves should be publicly drawn and
| quartered", you won't get the job, even if you have no
| particular foibles with e.g. inmates in death camps
| stealing from their captors, etc.
|
| Either you're too stupid to recognize the difficulty in
| expressing complete and coherent moral directives in 10
| words or less, or you're sufficiently coerced by your
| economic circumstances to bend some of your own ethics.
|
| Obviously, what they want is for you to infer "is it ever
| ok to steal from your employer?", but again, this is
| complicated, because every single company that I've taken
| one of these tests for had robust anti-union rhetoric as
| part of their onboarding "training, and "be completely
| ready to work when you clock in", "your whole checklist
| must be complete before leaving" and "you must clock in
| and out _only_ at the designated time " in their stated
| expectations for all workers. In other words, making any
| attempt to receive all the wages you are entitled to
| under the law is considered "theft" by the company, and
| they'll frequently have such rhetoric in the same
| training packet as the anti-union rhetoric.
|
| These personality tests are perverse-incentive city, and
| clearly nobody requiring them has a high enough opinion
| of the people expected to take them to recognize that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You're conflating honesty with humility.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for moderately
| or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the median. I
| think you'd have to be extremely honest to think huh, this
| is an absolutely bullshit test that if I answer honestly on
| just this part here means I won't get the job I want
| (assuming that you are only bad on a single metric) but I
| am going to answer honestly no matter what.
|
| Hmm, but maybe they have that baked into the test!? If you
| slightly fail one of the bad metrics and none of the others
| they rate you super honest and hire you immediately!
| Science says we should definitely try to figure this out.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for
| moderately or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the
| median
|
| I feel like that's accurate. After all, I did describe it
| as "fairly" dishonest, not "very" or "extremely"
| dishonest.
|
| Lying on personality tests is definitely an average,
| socially expected amount of dishonesty.
| silisili wrote:
| I've thought this of every personality test a job has
| offered. And in my experience it was never even a good job
| giving it - the last one I took was for a beer delivery
| driver 20 years ago.
|
| The tests are usually so obvious, too. Like three awful
| traits and one good one. Coincidentally(or not?) I was
| rejected for that job for scoring too high overall - they
| said there's no way I'd stick around long, and they were
| absolutely right.
| kube-system wrote:
| Does social filtering constitute dishonesty or
| professionalism?
|
| This question itself might be a good interview question.
| Brananarchy wrote:
| Both. The entire concept of "professionalism" is based
| around the idea that certain people should be dishonest
| about themselves in public, for the sake of others'
| comfort.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I entirely disagree with that being what the concept of
| "professionalism" is based on, but I'm also not entirely
| sure what you're alluding to here, so grain of salt.
| kube-system wrote:
| If someone isn't capable of being honest without making
| their coworkers socially uncomfortable, I don't think the
| honesty is a redeeming quality.
| duped wrote:
| I really think in the best case, it's someone in charge of
| adding criteria to hiring decisions and they pick a
| personality test as a way to measure and fit a candidate into
| some box they've arbitrarily chosen for a role. In the worst
| case they're filtering out neurodivergent people but can't
| say that because it's illegal. They'll make up reasons like
| you're listing, but there's not much evidence to the efficacy
| of these test at evaluating those criteria.
|
| Like 20 years ago, a company was taken to the cleaners
| because they used a test used by psychologists to evaluate
| mental health as a personality test in hiring. Now, people
| who make/use these tests are careful to only use them in ways
| that healthcare professionals don't. A side effect of that is
| that any test that would be useful for reliably measuring a
| candidate's personality/mental fitness would also be illegal.
| So a lot of these tests are bunk to begin with.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I interviewed at Burger King in college, the manager told me
| I was the only applicant in their system to get above 80% on
| the personality test. It was incredibly easy things like,
| "How many minutes are acceptable to show up late for your
| shift? 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, being late is
| unacceptable". Or "If you knew there were no cameras able to
| see you, and no other employees around, how much money is
| okay to take from the register? $1, $5, $20, any amount is
| unacceptable"
|
| He said something along the lines of "I know some employees
| are going to try to steal from the register, but why would
| they admit that in an interview?
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Did you ask to see which questions you supposedly got
| wrong?
| itronitron wrote:
| "How many questions is it acceptable to lie on when taking
| a personality test? 10 lies, 5 lies, 2 lies, lying on a
| personality test is unacceptable."
| dboreham wrote:
| Reminds me of the narcissistic personality disorder test
| which consists of one question: "are you a narcissist?"
| H8crilA wrote:
| A nobody such as yourself should not be asking me this
| question! Where's the manager?
| layer8 wrote:
| > why would they admit that in an interview?
|
| To demonstrate their honesty. ;)
| strictnein wrote:
| In college I worked at Circuit City selling computers. Lots
| of similar questions. "Is it okay to take display
| merchandise if others are doing it?" type stuff. Definitely
| weeds out some people I guess.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Seems like it'd weed out people who are caught easily..
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I applied for a software development job at a regional bank
| and had to take a similar test. Questions along the lines
| of "When is it appropriate to sell drugs to your
| coworkers?" I get the feeling it was intended more for
| tellers and other low level employees given the nature of a
| lot of the questions, but it had one or two ambiguous
| questions that tripped me up because neither extreme of the
| multiple choice options seemed moral.
|
| They never asked me to interview and I wonder if my "wrong"
| answers to the ambiguous questions disqualified me.
| kemayo wrote:
| I took one once (at iZod, I think), which included some
| tripwire questions. The manager said afterwards that e.g.
| if you saw "a customer left $0.02 in change on the counter
| when they left the store, what do you do?" and you picked
| "I chase them down the block to give it back", that's a
| sign that you're bullshitting the questions too hard.
| jahewson wrote:
| I know what you're getting at but you'll need to define
| "bright", "good", and "bad" first. The whole undertaking
| seems ill-conceived.
| afandian wrote:
| You missed "gullible". They're selecting for the kind of people
| who wouldn't immediately bail when they see this nonsense. Or
| don't have much choice.
| schmookeeg wrote:
| I get an ASMR-like response from taking tests/quizzes, even
| these sorta pop-psych nonsense ones.
|
| Apparently I'm a "mentor" at FedEx. It resonates. :)
|
| My current client had me sit one of these after 2 years on the
| job. That one labeled me "Debater". I argued with them out of
| principle. I think that if their HR people used it to screen me
| before I started, I would not have gotten the gig at all. :D
| dave333 wrote:
| The test is pretty easy to game just by giving answers you
| think make you a good prospect - traits you would aspire to
| but don't necessarily achieve. I too got a Mentor rating
| whereas in reality I am retired and much closer to a lazy shy
| procrastinating individual contributor who never gets
| anything done!
| jerf wrote:
| This is a well-known problem with self-assessments in
| psychology in general. It isn't that hard for most people
| to choose to use a persona to provide answers to some quiz,
| even one quite divergent from their "real" personality
| (skipping the discussion on what that even is), and for
| some people with certain conditions it's almost impossible
| for them _not_ to do this (e.g., the "Cluster B"
| disorders). Getting past this problem is the major task of
| creating a standardized assessment that has any value at
| all. You obviously can't just ask "Hey, are you a homicidal
| maniac who is unfit to stand trial?" but you also can't ask
| questions that are really quite obviously just that
| question in disguise like "If someone flips you off in
| public, do you think you're justified in immediately
| murdering them?"... and I exaggerate for effect, but the
| principle holds true.
|
| I'd expect even in the case of this quiz if you told people
| to affect certain personas you'd find the results
| statistically-significantly shifted, even if the people
| involved couldn't tell you any rational reason why they
| changed their answers based on the persona they affected.
| vundercind wrote:
| They tend to be not much past a slightly-more-
| sophisticated version of those idiotic ethics tests
| prospects for low-wage jobs sometimes have to go through.
|
| "Gee, I wonder if 'C. Let your friend have the goods for
| free, since they're really struggling financially' is the
| answer this retail store is looking for?"
| staticman2 wrote:
| I haven't looked at a corporate personality test since
| 2008, so this could be way out of date, but sometimes these
| tests have a trick question to catch people lying on the
| test. I'm not familiar with this test but some tests will
| ask something like "sometimes I feel tired" and if you
| answer "never" the test maker will conclude you are a liar
| since everyone is sometimes tired.
| schmookeeg wrote:
| Yeah you'd think everyone would save some time and treasure
| by just reducing the thing down to "Are you a jerk? Y/N"
|
| ...until I saw my boss's THREE HUNDRED page manual on how
| to interpret the results of these tests. There is
| apparently some entire industry behind these "tools". I've
| learned to limit my criticism of what is very clearly, to
| me, a load of weak-signal hogwash. They may as well throw
| chicken bones or read tea leaves from where I sit, but then
| again, I sit from a place of certainly smaller net worth
| than whoever is peddling this stuff, so round and round we
| go? :)
| carabiner wrote:
| Asking "Are you a good/bad person?" in 10 different ways...
| Does this test have much value?
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Seems like a fairly standard personality test. I just ran
| through it and got the same kind of answer I usually get on
| these tests.
|
| I don't really see the value in these tests but, apart from the
| weird avatars, this one seems to be just Myers-Briggs with
| different words (for me, "thinker" instead of "INTP").
| neilv wrote:
| Those titles help a lot. I wonder whether the Reddit poster saw
| titles.
|
| With titles, some people will be dim or troubled enough to give
| the wrong answer on obvious ones, like "Starter Not a
| Finisher".
|
| The right answer on other questions are trickier. Like maybe
| the company wants a handler of packages to be willing to toss
| the packages around "Good Enough", and some manager thought
| some people are a natural at that, and asked for a test to tell
| them. (Like when a non-technical executive was suggesting that
| I should give coding exams to senior software engineer
| candidates, and the strongest point in the argument was "This
| will tell us whether they do unit tests!")
|
| Could titles be tricky, like if "Loves the Social Scene" is
| paired with image of someone partying hard, so the company
| might think they'll have hangover absenteeism, OUI, or other
| risks?
|
| Or risk of insubordination, or disruption to the hierarchy? A
| self-image of "Natural Leader" in a worker-bee role could be
| seen as problematic by a simple-minded company.
|
| Maybe Fedex is gathering data on which combinations of answers
| predict a unionizing troublemaker. Or, in the scenario that a
| shop floor employee is injured, which employees are going to be
| murmuring about it with others, speaking with investigator,
| etc.
|
| If a company wants to be especially evil about it, some of
| these questions might be good for weeding out candidates with
| depression. Or for arguing pre-existing condition, if an
| employee later claims that working conditions caused mental
| anguish.
|
| Then there's the meta of filtering out people who are alienated
| by this test, or who are not captive. Especially with the odd
| images in this test, I think many candidates with self-respect
| and other options will simply walk away. It's not like Leetcode
| hazings, where they've been conditioned since school that this
| is just the ritual you do to get that very-well-paying FAANG
| job. This is some different thing, to which you're submitting
| for a chance to work at FedEx.
|
| What other possibilities?
|
| Some of that could be useful to a company, if not very
| ethically. Also, maybe this was sold to the company as more
| than it is, based on flawed or fabricated psychological
| research.
| ezfe wrote:
| They did NOT see the titles, as shown in the screenshot and
| mentioned in the comments on the Reddit post. They weren't
| visible on their phone.
| corobo wrote:
| I swear Firefox (iOS, so could be a WebKit thing?) starts
| tabs scrolled down below the page header recently. Definitely
| happens on HN now and then (although typically I can't
| recreate it right now..) pretty sure I've seen it elsewhere
| too.
|
| I wonder if that is a) actually true browser behaviour and
| not something the site itself is doing (or something I've
| managed to make up)
|
| b) if a is true, the reason it hid the kinda-header-looking
| text representation of the images from OP
|
| Unfortunately I'm at a loss for the keywords to search to
| confirm this behaviour, I'm only able to find unrelated
| scroll/header results
| ezfe wrote:
| Yup, seems like either their browser or the apps CSS is causing
| those not to show up for them. Without those titles the test is
| nonsense.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Each one has a title
|
| The OP of the Reddit thread didn't see the titles, and was
| instructed to "look at the images and go with your gut".
|
| For the record, I don't have blue skin and hair, so I'd be
| inclined to answer "not me" for all of them.
| cebert wrote:
| I thought this was ridiculous as an interview screening
| process. However, since you shared the test, I took it and I'm
| not sure it's too unreasonable. I felt like it's determination
| of me as a mentor was quite accurate.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Needs a login at the moment though?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| So, guessing:
|
| Two Drinks - Frequently Change My Mind
|
| Laptop Screen - "Hard to Start a New Task"
|
| Painting - Easily Offended
|
| Couch Happy/Sad - "Tend to Feel Sad"
|
| Sculpture Yawn - Art Isnt My Thing
|
| Four Stars - "Good Enough"
|
| Puzzle - Starter Not a Finisher
|
| Flower - Unstoppable
|
| Clock - "Always Wonder Why"
|
| Gift - "Make Friends Everywhere"
|
| Superhero - Natural Leader
|
| Talking during Party - Chats in Elevators
|
| Tweezers - "attention to detail" type of thing
|
| Couch Laundry Basket - "Not My Job"
|
| Hands in the Air - "Loves the Social Scene"
|
| Pizza Glutton - Sometimes Thoughtless
|
| Hike/Cook/Skydive - ... probably "adventurous" or fearless or
| like that
|
| Fruit vs Donut - "Volunteering"
|
| Close park - "Believe the Best of People
| rvba wrote:
| > Superhero - Natural Leader
|
| Management and HR claims to want those, until they actually
| get one
| user_7832 wrote:
| Am I missing something, or is it geolocked outside the US? I
| just get a login page.
| xeromal wrote:
| I think someone caught the issue and blocked it. It opened
| for me earlier today.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Ah, thanks. Anyway I've done those tests myself too so no
| great loss.
| m463 wrote:
| "Easily Offended" -> posts on reddit
|
| on the other hand, there could be a reverse personality test
| for the company
|
| "Sociopath", "Perfectionist", "All about me", "Unrealistic
| Expectations", "Rude to the waiter", "Excessive Bureaucracy",
| "Easily Offends"...
| jimjimjim wrote:
| I know which answers they want but more then half of those are
| not me. How should I answer? I'm surprised they don't have
| tests with "Prone to stabbing people" or "Likes doing work".
| John23832 wrote:
| I had a major vector db startup require a take home leetcode (4
| questions in an hour and a half), as well as a in person leetcode
| (hour and who knows how many questions)... and I thought that was
| bad because it had nothing to do with the job.
|
| This isn't even in the same realm as the job.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Those pictures remind me of the TV show on cartoon network
| toonami ReBoot.
|
| Talk about a blast from the past.
| throwaway49849 wrote:
| Aside from it being supremely strange, it's just stupid enough
| that you risk overthinking each image to the point of answering
| it inaccurately. The person who approved these images has no
| business assessing personality types if they cannot understand
| the multiple ambiguous ways that many of these images can be
| interpreted. You have to try to infer what they _probably_ meant
| by the image, and discard other valid interpretations.
|
| The tragedy is that the test giver's job is communication and
| handing complex and subtle interactions, and they're already
| failing at it.
| vandyswa wrote:
| To be a Regal Cinemas usher (i.e., minimum wage entry level) you
| have to take this sprawling personality test during your online
| application. My daughter took a pass on'em.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I once took an IQ test(?), I think it was called Wonderlic or
| something. I was desperate and it was my first engineering
| (unpaid) internship. Somehow I was a "genius" and they kept my
| test record as an example for the next couple years after my
| internship. I would probably walk out of an interview if someone
| handed me one today.
| dgfitz wrote:
| This one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test
|
| ?
| syntaxing wrote:
| Yup, the manager mentioned something about the NFL using it?
| lizknope wrote:
| It's an IQ test but does it help evaluate NFL players?
|
| Ryan Fitzpatrick went to Harvard and was said to have
| gotten a perfect socre of 50. It turns out he might have
| only got 48 which is still really high. He bounced around 9
| teams and threw tons of interceptions. He would go from
| amazing to horrible "Fitz-Magic" to "Fitz-Tragic"
|
| In contrast Lamar Jackson is said to have scored a 6 which
| is laughably bad. He just won his second Most Valuable
| Player award last week.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of it is snake oil. Like how does a mental
| test access how someone does on a physical task like
| sports?
| lmz wrote:
| Surely some part of sports is in your head. Not saying
| those tests measure it.
| gorkempacaci wrote:
| I took one of those (Alva labs) multiple times for different
| companies. My "intelligence" (or whatever they call it) score
| was 7/10 first, then 8/10, and then 9/10 I think in the last
| one. Just got better each time I took it. And the results for
| the personality test kept changing dramatically for each take
| too. Total pseudoscience.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| These quasi-IQ tests have to be designed to carefully
| maneuver around _Griggs v. Duke Power_ to be eligible for use
| in hiring decisions, but the more you mess with them the more
| you degrade their usefulness. Actual IQ tests have very high
| test-retest reliability.
| devops_palmer wrote:
| Before Covid I went for an interview at a remote-only company,
| which was a huge plus. We had the first interview over zoom (or
| zoom equivalent at the time) and everything went well - Then I
| get a follow-up email about github access and they send me a huge
| github repo where they want me to complete an example web
| application that can do x,y and z based on some of the example
| models included, and want it done in a week to be eligible for
| hiring. I kindly declined the offer to code for free - and then
| was messaged a few months later that they had removed this whole
| section of the interview process and invited me to re-apply.
| Needless to say I did not apply agin.
| codingdave wrote:
| I find it so rare for a company's leadership to actually listen
| to feedback and be willing to improve based on it... I'd
| absolutely talk again to someone who had the wisdom and
| humility to correct the errors of their ways.
| pc2slow4webpack wrote:
| Similar experience with a company this year for a new grad
| position, they wanted me to come to 30hr unpaid hackathon
| hosted in the evenings.
|
| I'm sure the signal they get is pretty good, but I'm also sure
| they filter outany candidates that don't want to put up with BS
| like this.
| kvonhorn wrote:
| Maybe we should be giving these tests as part of college
| admissions. I'd like to know if I can't pass these tests before
| taking out a six figure loan only to find I have the wrong
| personality for employment.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| I had one company spring this health screener on my with zero
| warning, which included such questions as whether I had ever been
| pregnant or made anyone pregnant, and whether I had ever been
| depressed and how so. Very weird stuff, so I challenged it and HR
| responded that it was a required test for health and safety at
| work.
|
| It wasn't, it was some corporate type doing massive overreach
| into areas where they had no right to even ask.
| Clubber wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the pregnant question is illegal in the US.
| It's an obvious discriminatory question. If we had a regulatory
| body worth a shit, they would get punished for it.
| doubled112 wrote:
| That seems insane to me. Making somebody else pregnant doesn't
| affect my health, so it doesn't make sense that way either.
|
| I would be tempted to look for a wedding ring, and answer with
| "your mother/wife one time, you should ask her about it"
| accordingly.
|
| I probably wouldn't take the job anyway.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Making somebody else pregnant doesn't affect my health, so
| it doesn't make sense that way either
|
| But it might affect health insurance claims, and I'm guessing
| cheaper underwriting is the reason HR went along with it.
| jldugger wrote:
| That sounds pretty bad as you present it. I have seen a state
| uni do a similar sounding kind of employee survey -- the point
| of which was not to violate individual privacy but to produce
| an aggregated survey to present to health insurance companies
| bidding on providing employees that benefit. I imagine there's
| a pretty huge incumbent bias there; the current provider has
| exact data on claims and they aren't sharing with the
| competition. And especially in the insurance industry, there's
| a concern about adverse selection and asymmetric information
| that I imagine could be cured or at least reduced with
| additional data.
| eschneider wrote:
| These sorts of Voight-Kampff tests are definitely a red flag. But
| like leetcode questions, they're just one more think you need to
| learn the correct answers to for today's interview environment.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I'm fine with it. It's their crappy process; if it weeds me out
| because it's crappy, they're the ones losing out. I'll just go
| get a job at a different, less crappy place.
|
| A lot of the time stupid hiring requirements are due to the
| company having government (or other) contracts, and those
| contracts stipulating certain hiring requirements. For example,
| drug testing is basically mandatory if the company has government
| contracts.
| yandrypozo wrote:
| This's the worse way I've seen to do a Big 5 personality test, I
| highly recommend this real assessment Understand Myself
| https://www.understandmyself.com/ the accuracy of it truly helped
| me to understand my own personality.
| FpUser wrote:
| I have my own company, have my own products and also develop
| products for clients. Maybe this explains the difference.
| Obviously before any clients use my services we have some kind of
| interview / negotiations. Normally I am being asked what kind of
| stuff I have developed and how did I solve such and such
| problems. I do not remember ever being asked to pass any tests. I
| do know that if they ever do I will simply refuse. I have very
| good decades spanning portfolio along with references from my
| client companies. If potential client is not interested in
| checking my real work and would rather switch to some bullshit
| test we are better off without each other.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| It's fine. They are just looking for the A players.
| medion wrote:
| I had a 1.5hr personality test for a tech job back in 1998 - the
| only question I remember was "if you were walking on the beach
| and saw a dead whale, would you cry?"
| throw310822 wrote:
| Clearly to check whether you're a replicant. It's the Voight-
| Kampff test.
|
| "The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot
| sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't.
| Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
| getpokedagain wrote:
| I interviewed for a role at FedEx about two years ago. It was
| absolutely the most confusing and just junk process although
| blessedly I did not have to take this personality test. I ended
| up bailing out of the process mostly in confusion.
| bluGill wrote:
| Whenever interviews come up here I always ask: What makes your
| interview technique good? What if instead of whatever you do, you
| just grabbed a resume at random and hire that person - are you
| really use that you did better? How about enough better as to be
| worth however much time you spent.
|
| Note that my random resume is easily resistant to all claims of
| discrimination - you didn't know anything about any candidate
| until you opened the random envelope, so you clearly didn't
| discriminate against anyone. When you say your system is better,
| is it enough better as to be worth the potential discrimination
| lawsuit if you don't interview or hire a minority? (some
| interview systems have scores that if you can prove are
| objective, but many of you are proposing something that doesn't
| seem to be)
| mihaaly wrote:
| I completed interviews with my intended manager and HR about work
| conditions and salary, we had agreement on the particulars
| including dates, then the organization (multinational corporation
| purchased a Europan unit I applied to) mandated aptitude test,
| composed of some sort of mental abilities test and a personality
| test. "All employee must take the same test and reach a
| threshold". All from some external party sold their aptitude test
| services, used by the company for about 2 years as I understood
| (being a recently researched and perfected technique as I
| recall). I had a chance to see a practice test before completing
| the real one. The mental abilities test had generic IQ test like
| 'complete the sequence' but about half was 'calculate the sales
| figures of the hypothetical organization based on given
| situation' kind of tasks, in overall way too much for the
| allocated time, impossible to complete (testing the endurance
| against stress, ability to balance accuracy and pace I take, but
| I only reached about 1/4 being unpracticed in the topic). What?!
| Engineering position is tested by fast financial calculation?
| Then came the personality test, similarly with quicker than
| comfortable pace selecting most relevant answer of the three
| choices. But all were important depending on the circumstances
| (which was unspecified) and actually could, and in most cases
| should coexist (like what is more important to you, choose one:
| honesty, completing allocated tasks, client satisfaction).
|
| I contacted HR saying that this is not a test that could measure
| me reliablty considering I have no practice in very fast
| financial calculations (can do slowly, but they emphasized the
| importance of pace with accuracy) and that I am forced to give
| random answers in the personality part, depending on what is my
| mood at the moment (basicaly mad about these idiotic tests). They
| told I must complete it and this is 'the base of allocating
| responsibilities and determining advancements in the company'.
|
| I chose to withdraw my application instead (despite being without
| job for some months and the position looked promising). I do not
| want to work somewhere where they make this kind of across the
| board uniform and abstract tests the base of my evaluation (even
| if they just claim they do, since it is very difficult to imagine
| they could reliably do so).
| bitwize wrote:
| Personality tests like this are par for the course in domains
| like retail. They have right/wrong answers, no matter what the
| test administrators tell you. When given the option, always
| Strongly Disagree with anything that might worry your boss and
| Strongly Agree with anything that would make your boss happy. A
| single wrong answer could mean you're a risky hire; two or more
| may disqualify you on the spot. Don't mess with Mr. Inbetween;
| Agree, Disagree, and Not Sure are wrong answers.
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| I recently withdrew an application for the first time, after a
| recruiter connected me w Fidelity, bc their initial "interview"
| was a 1-way video screen that expected me to devote an hour of my
| time and gave me 24 hours to do that.
|
| Normally an interview is supposed to enable _you_ to find out
| more about how _the company_ operates, but honestly that alone
| was pretty telling.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, I'd have withdrawn too.
|
| Job interviews must go both ways. When I'm the applicant, I'm
| interviewing the company just as much as the company is
| interviewing me. If the communication is so one-way that I
| can't do that, then I have no basis on which I could decide to
| accept any offer, so going further with the process is just a
| waste of everyone's time.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Since I think personality tests are just dangerous snake oil, my
| personal policy is that I don't take them. Companies that use
| them are companies that I would not likely fit into, so the
| policy serves me well and it serves those companies well because
| I'm not wasting their time.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| The company behind this nonsense - https://www.paradox.ai
| ano-ther wrote:
| That's a really weird test in the linked article.
|
| When done right though, this can be quite helpful. As a hiring
| manager I had very good experience with a test that tried to
| identify behavioural patterns.
|
| At that company, we used it to have a discussion with the
| candidates, not as a hiring criterion --- moderated by an
| experienced HR colleague who was trained in how to interpret the
| results.
|
| Gave much more insightful discussions than the usual "describe a
| conflict" type of questions.
| dboreham wrote:
| As a FedEx stock owner, this alarms me.
| thadt wrote:
| Coincidentally, was listening to the latest episode of 'You are
| not so Smart'[1], interviewing Charles Duhigg on his new book.
| One of the anecdotes brought up was how NASA changed their
| astronaut interviewing approach in the 80's when they wanted to
| start vetting candidates to stay on a space station. Turns out
| that screening for personalities becomes a rather important
| aspect when you're going to trap people together for an extended
| period of time, and occasionally put them into high pressure
| situations.
|
| It seems like similar considerations might apply to a number of
| team based jobs, even if the team isn't locked in a pressurized
| tube miles above the earth.
|
| [1] https://youarenotsosmart.com/2024/02/05/yanss-280-the-
| scienc...
| vidarh wrote:
| Not had to deal with the crap in these images, but got a
| personality test sent over for a position last time I applied for
| a job. Already was unsure if the company was for me, got two
| questioned in before I sent the recruiter an e-mail to point that
| 1) it was bullshit, not based in any science, 2) I could not
| possibly answer the questions honestly because the multiple-
| choice contained answers with more than one assertion per choice
| and none of the combinations applied, 3) I had no interest in the
| position if I had to take the test.
|
| Got a message back telling me the tests had been "imposed" by
| some VP in the US and to disregard it because everyone hated
| them.
|
| In the end the company kept proving me right to be skeptical
| because while maybe the hiring manager was trying to change
| thing, he was surrounded by a dystopian accretion disk of the
| output of worthless management self-help books and 1970's-style
| management doctrine.
|
| Which made me really appreciate how lucky I am to have
| consistently been in a position to be picky.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world,
| give the most conventional, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer
| possible
|
| (2) To settle on the most beneficial answer to any question,
| repeat to yourself:
|
| a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit
| more
|
| b) I like this pretty well the way they are
|
| c) I never worry much about anything
|
| d) I don't care for books or music much
|
| e) I love my wife and children
|
| f) I don't let them get in the way of company work
|
| from William H. Whyte Jr.'s _The Organization Man_ , Appendix:
| How To Cheat On Personality Tests
| bhk wrote:
| It appears they want to know whether the applicant identifies as
| someone with blue hair.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Long ago, when searching for my first swe job, I was invited to
| this group interview things, when they put us all in a room and
| asked us to complete tasks like building a spaceship out of
| LEGOs.
|
| After the first task, we were asked "what do you think about the
| task?". I raised my hand: "it's humiliating", and left the room.
|
| I didn't had any other offer at that time, and got a call from
| them a day later, telling me they'd like to talk with me. Replied
| that I don't think it'd be a good match.
|
| I later learned that role was for the infamous "binary options",
| a gray market betting website.
| marcrosoft wrote:
| If their latest "REST" API is an indication of their tech you
| don't want to work there anyways.
| JaggedJax wrote:
| Oh dear, I haven't used any FedEx APIs in a while. but when I
| did it was XML based (maybe SOAP) and the ordering of some of
| the fields mattered!! This was of course not documented
| anywhere.
|
| Ahh, here's a great example of the mess it was:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/40315400/137695
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| FedEx has always been really weird for me.
|
| When I was first getting into tech, I interviewed at FedEx. The
| first interview went really well, but I totally bombed the second
| interview--some remote coding challenge.
|
| After my poor performance, I didn't really pursue the position
| further because I knew I hadn't done well. You win some, you lose
| some.
|
| 8 months later I received an email with an offer letter.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| That's the kind of nonsense most non-tech workers need to deal
| with in large corporations. Welcome to their world.
| devmor wrote:
| I've interviewed for a couple roles recently that had me undergo
| both a personality test and a general intelligence test. Was a
| very odd experience to say the least.
|
| I especially find the general intelligence tests confusing as my
| roles over the past decade have all been senior level - I have a
| hard time imagining someone could have my resume without
| demonstrating the same problem solving skills that were tested.
|
| It makes me wonder what the motive for both types of tests are,
| and if they are quite different than what us non-HR people would
| think.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| certain vc groups love pushing this garbage on their investments.
| helps identify those that would be a good fit. for the
| mothership.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Yeah I'm calling out that "personality assessment" as 100% snake
| oil because the responses are based on the individual's
| interpretation of the images but are scored as the test
| designer's interpretation. It might as well be an ink blot test.
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| Personality testing in applications is hardly a new phenomenon.
| It was first popularized in the 50s, and has been resurging in
| lower paying or less technical industries for years to decades.
| William H Whyte's opus "The Organization Man" (1956) will be very
| informative to anyone looking to learn about why these tests are
| appearing in our jobs (especially with the current market),
| especially I think the fifth section, "The Organization
| Scientist", which is about research and technical workers
| interfacing with the broader corporate bureaucracy, even though
| in the context of the time it focuses on chemical and engineering
| researchers. This interview summarizes the broad strokes of the
| book: https://www.thirteen.org/openmind-archive/sociology/the-
| orga...
|
| The Appendix, "How to Cheat on Personality Tests", should also be
| required reading for anyone entering the career hunt. This is one
| of its opening paragraphs to see its usefulness:
|
| >By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score
| between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you
| should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is
| supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of
| course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some
| detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of
| questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules
| you can follow: (1) When asked about the world, give the most
| conventional, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To
| settle on the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to
| yourself: a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a
| little more. b) I like things pretty well the way they are. c) I
| never worry much about anything. d) I don't care for books or
| music much. e) I love my wife and children. f) I don't let them
| get in the way of company work.
|
| It could be updated a bit for the culture of 70 years later, but
| the general pattern is clear and easy to follow. Looking at the
| book and interview again, it's striking just how simultaneously
| insightful and down-to-earth Whyte was; the universal appeal
| comes from his investigation being both concretely practical "to
| the nth" and humanistically aspirational "to the nth". He didn't
| allow his important work to become either a watered-down
| compromise _or_ an off-kilter harangue, and was too exacting to
| be unduly impressed either by the "death-rattle" sloganeering of
| his time's protestors ("Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" to
| "The Ascent of Stan","Love is all you need", etc) or by the
| benevolent assurances of the time's testers ("The Pipe Line",
| "The Fight Against Genius", "Society as Hero"). His prose is also
| excellent. They just don't make social scientists like they used
| to, and the field is worse off for it. Physics envy and/or the
| paper mill may have distracted from an old societal good that
| could be a huge boon today.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| maybe they should contact their union rep ... oh its fedex.
| nevermind.
| squirrel6 wrote:
| These kinds of things that are basically substitutes for an IQ
| test (versus tests that purport to measure a specific type of
| specific technical aptitude) should be banned for employment
| screening, IMO. Where do we draw the line?
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| these MBTI tests are basically astrology for people who think
| they're too smart for astrology.
|
| I recall losing one of my most gifted colleagues once over such a
| test. they brought in an outside company specializing in "HR
| solutions" and for some reason the results demanded that there
| can't be another individual with the same indicator as the CEO.
| so they sacked him and another guy who also was a poor social fit
| to the rest.
|
| the absolute damage these people do.
| testless wrote:
| IQ tests are forbidden in Germany during job application
| processes, afaik. So I am surprised this is legal.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| This is fascinating and terrifying all at once!
| LanceH wrote:
| I've gone down the interview process on a couple of these just to
| see where it went. I was fortunate enough to not need a job at
| the time, so I wasn't worried about it.
|
| There was one test with 18 statements and I was asked to sort
| them from like to dislike or good to bad. It was obvious that the
| statements were paired up somehow like "Nuclear war is a good
| thing" and "world wide peace is a good thing" (yes, some of the
| statements were that extreme).
|
| I answered reasonable as possible, with the extreme statements
| closer to 1 or 18, and the pairings equally distant from the
| middle. The mild statements also mirroring each other toward the
| middle.
|
| There was another part to that round, but it was more along the
| lines of that 4 quadrant personality test (can't remember the
| name for it) -- nothing crazy, or at least it was more
| mainstream.
|
| I did not make it to the next round. There was no way in hell I
| was going to work for them, but I was still disappointed to miss
| the chance to look over their brand of craziness a little.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-12 23:01 UTC)