> What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess.

I'm an Amazon employee and I can confirm that I didn't have to take any kind of personality test when I applied here.

I was also encouraged to apply to IBM via a friend of a friend, and while I didn't have to take a personality test for them, I did have to fill out a questionnaire asking me about my years of experience in various topics. I was automatically rejected by their system for not having X years of experience in language/framework Y. I didn't find this quite as bizarre as rejecting a brilliant candidate due to some personality test, but I definitely found it a similarly poor experience. It was weird to run into an issue that seems to be brought up every time developers talk about poor interview/recruiting practices.

The only time I can remember actually filling out any kind of personality test when applying for a job was when I applied to McDonalds as a kid, which echoes the GP's point.

When I was younger I applied a few places that had those McDonalds type tests, they are so completely trivial to subvert.

The questions basically where a thinly veiled attempt to figure out how pliable and compliant you where.

They should have just had one question "Do you like having a roof over your head?" because lets be honest you don't work those kinds of jobs because you enjoy them.

All this psychometric stuff is just a lot of crap.

To be fair, they likely get a lot of applictions, and some portion of those applicants may be mentally ill in some way, possibly on drugs, or may otherwise be truly abysmal employees who don't care about anything. Tests like those can weed out people who clearly shouldn't be considered.

They have no place at a serious company hiring for a technical position, though. Usually 10 or so minutes of face-to-face talking is more than enough to tell you if your candidate is mentally ill, on drugs, or a major asshole.

Well, that's the thing. I happily stipulate that anyone that doesn't recognize that answering "strongly disagree" to "I think it is okay to steal office supplies" probably will not perform well on the job. Not so much due to the minor stealing issue, but more due to the inability to recognize this answer will never, ever get you hired (this is of course confounded with the people that decided the test and job is BS and they are willfully answering 'wrong').

We were all subjected to a test like this recently here. I'm talking most people have been here 5+ years. And suddenly my boss needs a test like this to figure out that I am introverted, that Bob likes to take charge, and so on??!!?!? Really? Fire that manager, if they are that incompetent. I refused to take the test, and fortunately my boss felt the same way and backed me 100%.

It's outrageous. You've observed my capabilities, you know I am great (or poor, or whatever), and suddenly I have to take a test where I am supposed to tell you if I am lonely, if I make friends, and so on. No. No. No.

the problem is discrimination lawsuits.

an old person contests a no-hire decision with "I wasn't hired because I was old"

option A: Hiring manager says "well I just thought you were a jerk"

option B: An objective and universally applied test scores the applicant as being 95% jerk, which is above the 60% cutoff that the company uses globally

which would you rather defend yourself with?

You might be correct about the reasoning. But those records are likely to work against if a suit ever hit full speed, because those scores could easily support the plaintiffs. "Gee, everyone over 55 ever hired has a 75%+ score. But your 25-54s range wildly from 56% and up."

Once the company asserts this defense, the plaintiffs ask for demographic details on every employee in the company, and what the scores were at time of hiring.

Think of them this way: they don't test your personality, they test whether you know what the obviously correct answers are for a personality screening test.

Now imagine what must be going through someone's head when they answer "never/strongly disagree" to the question "How often do you try to treat customers and coworkers with respect?" and the tests start to make a little more sense as a screening mechanism.

And whether you can lie for them.

I took a PHP test for a recruiter once. Half the questions were "what would you get if you typed this into the intrepeter?", which you weren't allowed to do. It seemed to come down to an honesty test.

An anecdote, for sure, but a friend of mine just failed a Google interview for not knowing 'Dalvik' was the name of the Android VM, despite knowing it was stack-based and used, among other things, to avoid licensing fees. The non-technical interviewer saw that his answer to the trivia question was wrong, and that concluded the interview.

It's possible that trivia question was the straw that broke the camel's back, but since she wasn't sure whether or not his additional information was correct and/or sufficient, he 'lost out'.

But isn't Dalvik register-based, not stack-based? Missing the name could be excusable, while getting the architecture wrong might have been a relevant factor.

Yeah, mistype on my end. He answered it correctly :-)

Facebook has 5,000 employees. Target has 350,000. So when I say "Big Corp" mean the latter. The primary users of these tests are companies like Target, Starbucks, etc, who hire large numbers of relatively unskilled people for jobs where personality factors are more important than anything else.

Fair enough. In that case, my last 'paragraph' is definitely what the takeaway from my comment should be.

I read "Big Corp" as "non-technical Big Corp" in this sense. I think it's pretty well known that the major tech players have difficult technical interviews, but that the people ultimately making the decision are engineers.

IBM uses a test called IPAT for hiring. It's more of an IQ test than personality.