MBTI has been an on-and-off fascination of mine and I think it has some very useful aspects, but it also has a way of being misused, even to potentially harmful effect. To a certain degree, I’ll even agree that it can be like a horoscope, particularly the way it’s used on the internet. It’s not something that can be meaningfully assessed by some silly 12 question Facebook test. Also, it’s something that, to really be useful, requires one to be as honest as possible in the test; you can’t answer how you WISH you were, but rather how you ACTUALLY are. For example, a question like “I keep my home and workspace tidy” or “I enjoy socializing at parties”, if you aren’t actually tidy and you don’t actually love glad-handing people, don’t answer true to those questions respectively.
The part that’s bad, though, is that people often misinterpret what it means and/or they look at it as prescriptive rather than descriptive. As an example, people will look at the first letter and think " he is an introvert, therefore he behaves in a certain way" or “she’s a feeler so she behaves in this way”. It’s important to realize it’s about cognitive functions and how they relate to eachother and to realize that even if our primary function is introverted, that still means our auxilary is extroverted, or vice-versa. If you pigeonhole yourself based on that, you can end up missing the whole point of getting the functional preferences. Think of it as saying one prefers chocolate, but that doesn’t mean one ALWAYS chooses chocolate, maybe one will choose a different flavor for a little variety from time to time or even if that’s their favorite flavor in general, certain types of deserts might be better with vanilla or strawberry or cinnamon or whatever.
So, personally, I find it useful in just helping me understand my strengths and weaknesses and how to work with them, as generalities, and also in gaining some understanding into the motivations of other people. Regardless of what one’s type is, whether it’s fairly common or not, there’s going to be certain aspects of other people’s personalities, thought processes, motivations, or perspectives that are going to be a little difficult to understand, particularly as they become more and more different from our own. Sometimes it can get frustrating trying to understand others or explain things to them, especially if they rely on functions that I don’t tend to use. In fact, I’ve come to realize that I more or less sort of had mental maps for how people work not too different from this so that I can relate to them, this mostly just gives me some established language so I can actually articulate some aspects of those to others.
And as far as corporate stuff goes, their use is largely BS. You can find virtually any type in virtually any profession. Yes, certain professions self-select for certain types, but I think that’s intuitively obvious. It shouldn’t be surprising that people who have a primary or secondary Extroverted Feeling function would be drawn to work that involves helping people or that engineers are more likely to have a primary Introverted function and have a Thinking function as primary or secondary. And yet, even knowing that speaking for myself, I don’t fit that mold and I know many who don’t, but without going into unnecessary detail, I understand why. Instead of trying to use it to figure out what one’s ideal job or mate or whatever should be, I see it more as “this person seems to rely on this or that function, how can I use that to help me understand and relate to him?” And, really, how is that much different from going “That person seems highly motivated by processes or values or logic or sentiment or new experience or theory or harmony or stimulation, how can I use that to relate to or work well with them?” In fact, that more or less breaks down the various functions and it’s just a matter of ordering them.
