This essay is amusing, but 180 degrees wrong. The MBTI is nothing like Astrology. In fact, it is about as opposite to astrology as anything can be. As you point out (correctly) Astrology uses an external aspect of your life - the time and place of your birth - to make decisions about your personality. The MBTI DOES NOT DO THIS. The MBTI uses your personality - your actual preferences and choices and behaviours - to help you understand (duh) your personality. Your preferences and choices and behaviours. Astrology is like saying "because you have red hair, therefore you have a volitile temper". The MBTI says "Because you prefer X, you prefer X. Because you think like this, that means you think like this". Yes, your answers can change over time. Some people's do. Most people's _do not_. It's also VERY important to look at the final profile because, for some people (for some personality types 🙂 the questions are more ambiguous. Yes, some of us would prefer "neither" or "both" as a response. As is often the case with learning abut yourself, you have to understand your personality to truly understand your personality. The MBTI is a learning tool. It's true that Katherine and Isabel didn't have psychological degrees. However, they did collect a LOT of data and the MBTI has been refined over the years using DATA. (A lot of programmers don't have CmpSci degrees; shall we tell them they can't program?) > Creating a team is hard work. Self improvement is hard work. Communicating with others is hard work. Becoming part of a Cargo Cult is no substitute for deeply examining yourself and your working environment - and then making changes to both. > You can't simply shortcut it by find your secret, magic code. Absolutely true. Managers and HR teams should never use just one thing to build teams. Especially if they don;t truly understand how that thing works. Personalities are as important as skill sets -- and just as unique. While there are only 16 general MBTI type codes, there are (of course!) an infinite number of people. I don't exactly match every other INTJ (and the MBTI states this if you read further). So, you are correct that the MBTI is not a magic bullet. It isn't meant to be. It's meant to be a means of understanding yourself and perhaps understanding how to interact with other people -- to understand why some family members or co-workers, managers, peers, or subordinates seem so vary different. Using it in forming a team, without being TRAINED in how MBTI is just one small aspect of how people work, is as bad as interviewing and choosing employees based on what tree they would be or whether they can guess how M&Ms are made. So, your general summary is correct. I just wish you'd done enough research before writing this to understand that your starting analogy is so offbase that the rest of the article is undermined by that analogy.