[Jach]

I'm a bit confused by your reference to HackerRank -- is not "extract max value without a binary search tree" a kind of problem that might show up there? Is it that type of problem you're complaining about, or the fact that you've already done enough in public that you shouldn't have to be subjected to it again time after time?

If it's the latter, a counterpoint is that doing these sorts of tests (usually not strict pass/fail ones but ones with levels of progression or orthogonal points of detail like "handles the divide-by-zero case without it being pointed out") lets me rank candidate A and B in a consistent and arguably more fair way. Sometimes A will have lots of impressive github contributions, while B will have nothing but schoolwork to discuss. Personally I'm unwilling to automatically grant the job to A on such a basis as publicly available work artifacts, or indeed anything on their resume (such info probably made it easier to get to the interview stage, of course) so I test A and B the same way. I might expect A to do better, but I give B the chance anyway, and B sometimes does way better. If A's past work/volunteer experience isn't directly related to the jobs which they'll be asked to do, how valuable is it? I think minimal. (It may become more valuable in the future, but such hidden future utility applies just the same to B, just in likely less obvious places such as the ability to read a crypto paper and pump out exploit code in a couple days rather than a month or two.[1])

All that said, I'd love it if I could just give (and as a candidate, receive) a certified IQ test (or perhaps the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test) and OCEAN personality test once every n years that can be reused. A lot of jobs don't require anything else but "smart and gets things done" (i.e. high enough IQ and trait conscientiousness). Maybe something fizzbuzzy in addition in order to lower job onboarding costs, though you'll find anecdotes of companies hiring smart people who couldn't program and successfully training them / otherwise supporting their education to become good programmers.

My advice for finding a less-BS job besides the already-linked no-whiteboards repo (which is a bit suspect since I know at least one company on the list shouldn't be in general) is to find one that isn't in high competition from candidates (they're more likely to shorten the process to find someone good enough, i.e. "smart and gets things done") or one with a very defined job role (in which case they'll test you on that knowledge specifically if your public contributions don't make its presence evident rather than give the usual generic quizzes that sort of act as proxies of IQ or ability to do real non-quiz work).

[1] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

[protocontrol]

IMHO I did enough coding, even wrote papers, just to find recruiters didn't eve bother to read the titles.

Your reply makes me thought about a community certification test, taxonomy or classification of company profiles. Which as far as I know it doesn't exists.

Wasn't the IQ tests somewhat discarded by Stephen Jay Gould work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

[Jach]

Recruiters hardly ever seem to dig into things... But if you get far enough in the process, the people doing the interviews sometimes will dig a bit. Sometimes. Sometimes they print off your resume 10 minutes before, ask one or two things about it, and throw you a couple whiteboard problems to take up the rest of the time.

A college degree in CS or related used to be a kind of 'community certification test', but then interviewers started getting bad candidates even though they had BS or MS degrees, and when they started testing for ability to program a FizzBuzz, found that some MS students couldn't do it! So its value as a test has gone down significantly. This is why I like the idea of an IQ test better, because it can't be cheated and corrupted the same way.

Classification of company profiles is kind of what Glassdoor et al. purport to be, but sometimes I can get the feeling I won't fit in just from the company's website and how it represents itself (especially if they have a dev blog). e.g. One company had a picture of a scrum team doing pushups together at standup. I'm not opposed to exercise, or the idea of getting together with some coworkers to go work out at a gym, but I am opposed to such group dynamics and conformity pressures at work. If I worked on a team that already had the established culture of doing pushups during the daily standup, I would decline, and that probably indicates there would be other cultural problems down the line.

I'm not familiar with Gould's discussion of IQ but I generally don't trust Gould's work at all and don't bother reading it. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-... convinced me of that, what he did to evolutionary biology isn't really forgivable. From the first sentence of your wiki link I would worry he did the same to IQ research by representing everyone in the field as whatever he characterizes are "biological determinists". IQ is merely the best single predictor we have for a large variety of "success" metrics. Its validity predicting job performance, as one of those metrics, depends on the job and can range from 20% to 80% (i.e. knowing nothing about a person but their IQ, for some jobs, you can predict their performance bracket accurately say 75% of the time -- they will be better or worse than predicted the other 25%). I suspect software job performance would be towards the upper end of predictive power. Throwing a second data point of Conscientiousness in, your predictive accuracy rises even more, but Conscientiousness alone isn't as useful as IQ alone.