A field guide to understanding yourself
The Big Six-Seven
Big Five personality + work interests + personal values
Creating value and communicating value are different skills. You can spend a week untangling an incident, making a confusing system understandable, or quietly helping a teammate ship. Then a louder story about a smaller contribution takes up more space in the room. That gap matters, especially when you are early in your career and still learning what good work looks like.
Visibility is not merit.
I run a Discord community, and I have spent years as a hiring manager. Effort and follow-through matter. So does getting better at seeing the people already doing serious work. When opportunities feel scarce and applications disappear into a crowded queue, “try harder” is not always a useful diagnosis. Sometimes the work is there, and the path to being noticed is not.
The answer cannot simply be “be more visible.” Sometimes visibility means making useful work legible: documenting a decision, showing a prototype, explaining a tradeoff, or asking for feedback before you disappear into another week of implementation. Sometimes it rewards confidence, proximity, and a performance of certainty. Those are different things. Sustained work still matters, and the ways organizations recognize it are not always fair.
The conversation that prompted this reflection is a useful starting point. This tool is my response to that tension, rather than a transcript or a set of claims about the clip. Before deciding how to present yourself, it helps to understand what is already there: how you tend to act, which kinds of work draw you in, and what you want your decisions to stand for.
A quieter engineer does not need a louder personality
You might enjoy deep technical investigation and dread improvising a status update. You might love talking to users and find a day of solitary implementation draining. You might be conscientious about promises while still struggling with a badly structured project. None of those observations, alone, tells us how capable you are.
Early-career advice often flattens this complexity into a desirable character: proactive, confident, collaborative, resilient, endlessly curious. Useful words become a costume. The person wearing it then has to guess which parts are strengths to develop, which are preferences to accommodate, and which are responses to an environment that is not working for them.
I wanted a more specific conversation for the engineers, product people, and designers in our community. Something you can use before a one-to-one, when choosing a project, or while deciding why a seemingly good job feels wrong. Something that leaves you with questions worth testing in daily life.
Meet The Big Six-Seven
The name is a joke. The measurement should be taken seriously. This is a combination of Big Five personality, work interests, and personal values. It is not a newly validated theory of seven independent personality traits, and it is not the HEXACO six-factor personality model.
The five personality domains describe broad patterns in how people tend to feel, think, and behave. The sixth lens asks which work activities you would enjoy. The seventh asks which guiding priorities matter to you. These constructs can correlate; “different questions” does not mean “statistically independent.”
| Lens | The question it helps you ask | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| Big Five personality | How do I usually approach situations? | My ability, worth, diagnosis, or destiny |
| Work interests | Which kinds of activities would I like to do? | What I am already skilled at, or which job I must choose |
| Personal values | What do I want my choices to express? | Whether I am a good person, or how I always behave |
Together, these lenses give you more ways to describe an experience without turning yourself into a type.
Five familiar dimensions, with room for variation
The personality section uses the 120-item IPIP-NEO inventory, with five broad domains and 30 narrower facets. These are public-domain items; this application preserves their wording, response anchors, and scoring keys. The inventory was developed and evaluated as a shorter representation of the longer IPIP-NEO. You can read the IPIP source and scoring material and the development paper by John A. Johnson.
Openness concerns imagination, ideas, aesthetics, and receptiveness to experience. Conscientiousness concerns organization, persistence, deliberation, and following through. Extraversion includes sociability, assertiveness, energy, and positive emotion. Agreeableness concerns cooperation, trust, compassion, and interpersonal style. Neuroticism describes a tendency to experience distress and emotional reactivity; the label is a research term, not a clinical diagnosis.
None of these is a ladder with a universally better end. A habit that helps in one setting may cost you in another. Deliberation can improve a difficult decision and slow an easy one. Directness can surface a risk and strain a conversation. A quieter working style can support concentration while making contributions harder for others to notice.
The report shows response-scale scores and facets. It does not invent population percentiles or claim to rank you against other engineers. A raw mean of 4 out of 5 is a position on this questionnaire's response scale, not the 80th percentile. The particular combination of measures in this application has not itself been validated as a predictor of tech career success.
The sixth lens: work you are drawn toward
The O*NET Mini Interest Profiler contributes 30 activity ratings across six RIASEC interest areas: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. In everyday language, these include practical work, inquiry, creative work, helping others, influencing or leading, and organizing information. The instrument asks about enjoyment, rather than confidence or current qualifications.
This matters in tech because the same job title can contain very different days. An engineer may love investigating an ambiguous failure, designing an interaction, teaching a teammate, or building a reliable operational process. A product role can combine research, persuasion, coordination, analysis, and creative exploration. Interest in one activity does not exclude interest in another.
We keep the original activity wording, including activities outside technology. Rewriting every prompt into engineering language would change what the instrument samples. The tech examples belong in the reflection that follows, where they are clearly examples rather than validated occupation matches. Read the O*NET Interest Profiler documentation and technical research for the source instrument and its evidence.
The seventh lens: what matters when priorities compete
The Twenty Item Values Inventory (TwIVI) uses 20 short portraits to assess ten personal values from Schwartz's framework: conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism, self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, and security. These are broad personal priorities, not a custom scale of workplace preferences. The authors provide administration, scoring instructions, and permission to use the measure.
Two people may enjoy the same work for different reasons. One wants room to choose an approach; another wants the stability of being deeply competent at something dependable. Two people may both value helping others yet differ in how much novelty, status, or predictability they want around that work. A difficult career decision can involve a conflict between two things you value, rather than a failure to discover your one true preference.
The report preserves raw value means and shows relative priorities by subtracting your mean response across all 20 items. A positive centered score means you rated that value above your own overall average. It does not mean you value it more than other people do, and a negative centered score does not mean the value is absent.
This short measure uses only two items per value. That makes it convenient and limits precision; the published validation found that reliability varied substantially across values. Small differences are weak grounds for a firm conclusion. Use the validation study as evidence for the measure, while treating an individual's close scores and ties with appropriate restraint.
What to do with your report
Start with a result that feels recognizable. Write down one recent example and one exception. Then choose a result that surprises you. Consider whether your answer reflects your usual pattern, your current environment, or how the last few weeks have felt. Self-report is useful, and it remains a report from one perspective at one moment.
Turn that reflection into a small experiment. If you enjoy investigation but avoid sharing unfinished work, try a short written investigation log that a teammate can respond to. If helping people energizes you, schedule a pairing session and notice whether the activity itself is rewarding. If self-direction matters to you, ask for a clearer outcome and more choice about the method. These are hypotheses to try, not prescriptions generated by a score.
A result should never become a reason to dismiss somebody: “low conscientiousness,” “not a people person,” or “the wrong values.” This experience is for voluntary self-understanding. It is not a hiring screen, a promotion credential, a clinical assessment, or proof that somebody is suited to a particular role. You do not owe your manager, community, or prospective employer a copy.
Your pace, your device, your choice
The full experience contains 170 ratings: 120 personality items, 30 work-interest items, and 20 personal-values portraits. The extension sections are optional. You can pause, resume, skip a question, and review answers before producing a report; incomplete sections are identified rather than silently filled in. Use your usual patterns as a reference rather than trying to supply a desirable answer.
Your answers and saved reports are held locally in this browser. Scoring happens on the device. There is no account and no answer-submission endpoint. Browser storage can still be cleared, so download an export if you want a copy you control. A shared computer also shares access to its browser storage.
Sharing is a separate choice. A private report stays on your device until you export it or create a link. Preview exactly which scores will be included. Anyone who receives a readable report link or PDF can keep or forward it; a link is not authentication or a revocable permission system. Social previews describe this tool generically rather than broadcasting your scores.
You do not need to finish with a new identity. A more useful outcome might be one clearer sentence: “This is how I tend to work, this is the work I want more of, and this is why it matters to me.” From there, you can decide what to practice, what to communicate, and what conditions to ask for.