[puredemo]

"Hire anyone with decent standardized test scores," would be my baseline after managing a large, technical support callcenter where many new hires were simply not able to learn the (imho fairly rudimentary) modem troubleshooting steps after weeks and months of on-the-job training and support.

The people who seemed the sharpest in the first two weeks of training usually excelled, most others didn't. Some were simply unable to learn fairly basic concepts. It mostly came down to raw intellect. I'm sure the same would be true for aspiring developers.

[rdudek]

Don't count on it. I failed out of college due to my inability to take and pass tests, yet at work, I'm being promoted constantly to higher ranks due to my productivity.

[puredemo]

Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well-examined trend.

Did you ever take the SAT / ACT?

[clarle]

Standardized testing doesn't measure the same skills needed to be successful at creative work.

Please don't ever do this.

[pekk]

What does measure that? An interview where someone gauges whether you love Node.js and can spout dogmatic gibberish about MVC?

[puredemo]

Sure, that's why every college relies on them for admissions, not to mention everyone taking the GRE / MCAT for grad school.

Are applied sciences grad programs not "creative work" in your mind? Standardized tests statistically predict success within those programs.

http://portal.scienceintheclassroom.org/sites/default/files/...

[xiaoma]

Thanks for backing up your claim with a citation to directly relevant research. I wish others in contentious threads could to the same.

[nwjtkjn]

What if reality is politically incorrect?

[wai1234]

More and more colleges are NOT using them for admissions because they predict NOTHING.

[manigandham]

Where's your source? The parent's source is about 8 years old but still completely valid.

[BinaryIdiot]

Source? It's all anecdotal but I know far, far too many great developers who never even took the SAT (or did horrible on them) and are wildly successful in their careers. I have a hard time believing this is "extremely rare" especially considering most colleges now don't rely on them to a large degree.

[pekk]

It is okay in the industry to discriminate employees based on whether they just graduated from a top tier school like Stanford. Or whether they have years of experience at a top tier company like Google. Or answer absurdly irrelevant puzzles, or implement red-black trees from memory on a whiteboard. Or whether they can answer aggressive questions demanding to explain their business value. Or whether they are a "culture fit" (too black, too old, too female, etc.) Or whether they have enough names of technologies you use in the resume. Or whether their resumes are well-formatted.

In short, throw people out for almost any reason you want, and HN will defend your right to do so. But suggest that we could ever choose employees based on measures of "intelligence" or academic performance, and you are obviously doing something horrible and nobody should see your post.

There's at least one good thing about standardized testing: at least it's standardized and objective rather than being based on vague emotional criteria - how well you can con the interviewers, or whether they think you're just like them, or whether you present social proof that you convinced sufficiently many other companies in the past, or whether you are literally a friend of an employee.

[BinaryIdiot]

> In short, throw people out for almost any reason you want, and HN will defend your right to do so

No way. All those reasons you mentioned above you've really seen people on HN defend those without being downvoted? I only ever see HN against many of those items of discrimination you mention...

> There's at least one good thing about standardized testing: at least it's standardized and objective rather than being based on vague emotional criteria

Except they're not objective but you're right they are standardized. This is not a good way of measuring people for many reasons. The more importance you put into standardize testing the more you get teachers teaching only the content contained within and you put more weight against a teacher's grading styles (which can vary wildly even on standardized testing when they're graded away from the school).

Standardized testing probably has its place but as criteria for employment is laughable at best.