Ask around on Blind, the anonymous app where tech employees vent without their real names attached, and you'll find a familiar argument on repeat: does your company actually use MBTI to make hiring or team decisions, and should it? One widely read thread put the question directly — do FAANG-style companies lean on personality indicators like MBTI before hiring — and the replies split almost evenly between outright mockery and quiet defense, with nobody actually confirming their employer uses it to decide who gets hired.
The Thread That Won't Die
"Horoscopes for Nerds"
The sharpest line in the thread came from a self-identified Facebook employee, who dismissed the whole idea of MBTI-based hiring as "horoscopes for nerds" — a comment that picked up more upvotes than almost anything else in the discussion. A Salesforce commenter piled on with a different angle, joking that testing engineers for introversion was redundant, since most of them already fit that mold without a questionnaire.
The Quiet Defenders
Not everyone in the thread was dismissive. One Amazon employee pushed back, arguing MBTI still has value as a tool for self-reflection — a way to understand your own tendencies and communicate better with coworkers, even if it has no business deciding who gets an offer. That's the split in miniature: nobody in the thread claimed MBTI should gate hiring decisions, but plenty disagreed about whether it's worth anything at all once you're already employed.
Why Scientists Keep Reaching for the Astrology Comparison
Born Pseudoscientific, Never Fully Fixed
The "corporate astrology" jab isn't just internet snark — it echoes a critique that's been building in psychology circles for years. Writing on Substack, health researcher Gideon M-K argues the MBTI is "broadly speaking, useless," tracing the problem back to its origins: the original test, built in the 1940s, was "straightforwardly pseudoscientific," and the versions sold today haven't meaningfully closed that gap. His point isn't that personality psychology as a field is bunk — legitimate tools exist that measure real, stable traits — it's that MBTI specifically was never built on that kind of foundation to begin with.
A $60 Test, Millions of Believers
That hasn't stopped the test from becoming a fixture of corporate life. According to the Myers-Briggs Company itself, millions of businesses worldwide administer the assessment every year, at roughly $60 per test taker. Scale like that is exactly why the Blind thread struck a nerve — a tool multiple critics consider scientifically hollow is still something plenty of workers suspect is quietly shaping how they're evaluated.
When Getting "Typed" Has Real Consequences
Rejected for Criticizing the Test
Organizational psychologist Paul Moxness, writing in a separate Substack piece, offers a case study in what happens when personality testing moves from icebreaker to gatekeeper. Decades after researching the weaknesses of tests like MBTI and DISC in Norway, he walked into a corporate job interview and voiced his skepticism about personality testing out loud — only to be handed one on the spot. He didn't get the job.
Labeled a "Cold, Insensitive Fish"
Years later, in a different job as a hotel security guard, Moxness says he was excluded from a team-building exercise after a personality assessment tagged him as a "cold, insensitive fish." The twist: he went on to spend roughly three decades at that same hotel company, eventually earning its top leadership honors and, by 2018, recognition as a leading global influencer in his field. A four-letter code — or in this case, a single unflattering label — hadn't predicted much of anything.
So What Is MBTI Actually Good For?
Line up the Blind thread against the research critiques and a pattern emerges: almost nobody defends MBTI as a hiring tool, including the people who like it. The Amazon commenter's framing — useful for self-reflection, useless as a gate — lines up with what the critics are really objecting to: not that people enjoy learning a four-letter label about themselves, but that companies keep treating a test with shaky scientific footing as if it can forecast who'll succeed on the job.
- As a prompt for self-reflection or a conversation-starter about work styles: low-stakes and arguably fine.
- As a factor in who gets hired, promoted, or placed on a team: exactly what both the Blind skeptics and the psychology critiques say it was never built to do.
As long as companies keep running personality assessments during hiring season, expect threads like this one to keep resurfacing on Blind — restating the same divide between employees who find MBTI harmlessly fun and those who think it's being asked to do a job it was never qualified for.
-EditorZ
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