[npc]

firstly, there's legal issues with IQ tests in job interviews in the US at least

secondly, IQ testing covers a number of areas, many of which are not necessarily related to the kind of thinking needed for programming. i think most of the verbal stuff in IQ tests wouldn't relate that much

thirdly, even if someone aces the IQ test, there's still no indication that they would actually enjoy programming if they've never done it before. It's kind of pointless to train someone to code if they're just going to get sick of it and quit in 6 months.

and fourth, an IQ test doesn't say anything about a person's ability to work with other people or prioritize things properly. an IQ test provides no protection against ending up with a prima donna who obsesses over brace style at the expense of getting useful things done.

really, i think the best way to find out if someone can code is to look at something they've coded

[JoeAltmaier]

Ok, you brought it up. IQ tests test one thing - can you do an IQ test. Scholars love them, write them, and they filter for ... yes! Scholarship!

A human mind is multidimensional. The idea you can find one number to measure it is downright ridiculous. You wouldn't even buy pants based on just one number, say waist size. You'd get home, they'd be too long or too short. Obviously!

But folks buy into the IQ cargo cult big time. Totally baffles me.

[jcrites]

> I think most of the verbal stuff in IQ tests wouldn't relate that much

Most software engineering jobs involve communicating with people. Customers, other engineers, other teams, leaders, etc. I would hazard to say that most effective senior engineers will spend at least as much time communicating with people as they will spend on individual technical tasks, if not more.

Communication skills are vital. If you cannot effectively persuade a team of people that your approach or point of view is correct, then your views, no matter their objective merit, will not impact the organization. Being an effective engineer requires having good ideas and also influencing other people to understand and adopt them.

A person can be an effective journeyman individual contributor engineer without strong communication skills, but to become a master with wide impact requires it.

[noduerme]

Is it actually illegal to hire in the US based on IQ? I mean how is that discriminatory more than any other test for employment? Race, religion, political affiliation, disability are obviously all irrelevant in an IQ test... so in a way, isn't it more equitable?

You make a good point about primadonnas and other potentially toxic personality types with high IQs, but you can screen that too. And I mean, I don't care about IQ. To me, pretty much anybody with talent should be able to come in with something awesome and say "look what I did", and if it's great, then who cares? Hire them. Obviously this isn't an argument for creating a new narrow-minded structure to replace the current one; I'm just talking about prioritizing along the essential lines instead of dancing around the real question. Isn't someone who codes and who can give you a fibonacci sequence in realtime more valuable than someone who codes, but can't? I can't do it, but I'd hire that guy.

[redthrowaway]

Race, religion, political association, and the like are all socioeconomic factors which have been shown to have an effect on an individual's score on an IQ test.

The classic example goes as follows:

The testee is shown four pictures: a teapot; a saucer; a table, and a water pump. They are then shown a teacup, and asked to match it with the appropriate picture. The upper-class testee, for whom tea was always served in a cup on a saucer, selects the saucer. The middle-class testee selects the teapot, as the tea obviously goes in the cup. The child in sub-Saharan Africa recognizes the teacup as a cup, a so selects the water pump, as water goes in cups.

This is obviously a contrived example, but it shows how the biases of the test-makers can conflict with those of the test-takers, leading those from different backgrounds to score worse on the test.

[MartinCron]

A real example I heard of a few years ago was with children putting picture story panels in order.

The "correct sequence" was: Get Up, Eat Breakfast, Go To School while many of these children were getting subsidized breakfasts at school.

[noduerme]

I think anyone with an IQ over 80 would agree that's more of a red herring than a test of actual intelligence, so, if we can dispense with absurd fringe examples of the abuse of the concept of "IQ" maybe we can get down to the nuts of what companies are looking for, what programmers are trying to provide, and put a stop to this dramatic yarn about "how hard it is to find good help" once and for all.

[MartinCron]

The example was for small children and speaks more to the fact that IQ tests are in practice more discriminatory than they are designed to be. That's all.

[derleth]

If you can come up with a way to test for general intelligence without inadvertently biasing your tool in favor of a specific ethnicity, social class, or gender we're all ears.

[barry-cotter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravens_Progressive_Matrices

[dalore]

Couldn't you argue that race, religion and/or political association and the like have an affect on programming tests also?

[bri3d]

"IQ test" is too broad a term to say if it's "illegal to hire in the US based on IQ." Some purported IQ tests are provably biased towards a particular race. Those are illegal. The rest are presumably not illegal, but if you were sued, there'd probably be a pretty large burden in proving that every IQ question you'd ever asked was both not racially biased and directly relevant to the job opening. Hence, very few business even look twice at IQ testing anymore - it's too deep a minefield.

For more background about IQ testing for employment in America, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. .

[patio11]

The Supreme Court has held that a particular IQ test had a disparate impact on black applicants. This makes IQ tests essentially radioactive for most corporations in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

[rhizome]

Unless the job is in law enforcement.

[Daniel_Newby]

1. That case was a social justice witch hunt. The purpose was to prove the political piety of the plaintiff.

2. The microscopic number of black engineers have already run the gamut of cognitive testing. An IQ test would not have a "disparate impact". This is why big corporations ask for university degrees: the degree itself is an IQ test.

3. FizzBuzz will screen out virtually the entire African race, and is provably related to actual job performance. After that an IQ test will not appreciably change the statistics.

[keithnoizu]

As multi-racial fellow with an i.q. of 148 with out a university degree making six figures doing software development i'd like to say that I find #3 questionable.

[burgerbrain]

Interestingly, rejecting candidates because they score too well on IQ tests seems to be totally kosher in the US.

Who would do such a thing? Cops.

[starwed]

Give me a source for that which would allow for corroboration.

Because pretty much everything I can find on it has the whiff of urban legend, which folk like you repeat because it feed into their worldview.

[burgerbrain]

"Some US police departments have set a maximum IQ score for new officers (for example: 125, in New London, CT), under the argument that those with overly-high IQs will become bored and exhibit high turnover in the job. This policy has been challenged as discriminatory, but upheld by at least one US District court. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

If there are factual inaccuracies there, please point them out. However just going by the "whiff" of something seems like you're opening yourself up to rejecting parts of reality that do not fit your worldview.

Edit: better source: http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html and here is an interview of the man by CNN: http://www.postroad.com/news/2000/20000912-new-london-police...

[rmc]

I presume part of the reasoning is due to high IQ tests being too unreliable, and potentially full of people with borderline autistic personalities.

"No IQs above 125" is not the same as "No IQs above 90".

[aswanson]

I pray this is a snide swipe at the police and not actually true.

[wtracy]

Nope.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...

[noduerme]

I used to work in a place in LA with a regular group of cops who came in every night, and one guy told me exactly the same thing. It certainly explains a lot about cops in America, and the US in general. You can reason with most people. But cops in America aren't reasonable, because they aren't fuckin smart enough to hear what you say, when for example you say, "Yes, I left my driver's license in the house, which is right there, I'm just sitting in my car listening to music. Can I please go inside and get it for you?" No - way too much to process. Or when you say, "Is she under arrest, because if so I want to call her lawyer," and they crack you with a nightstick and chase you up Cahuenga Blvd while you're yelling at them for their badge number. Not that either of those things happened to me in the last ten years. But uh, fuck the police and fuck the government that chooses to arm a bunch of meatheads and send them out to lord it over citizens. I could tell you some stories about the cops my dad defended as a public defender, the ones from Culver City who only pulled women over to get blowjobs from them. But what would be the fucking point. You're all screwed. So much for a civilized conversation, now I've just let it all hang out on HN, and I'm sure I'll be attacked for it.

[JoeAltmaier]

Sounds like you've been burned, sorry to hear that.

On the other hand, of course, if your house has been burglarized, you want just his guy on your side, ignoring the lame folks babbling inanities and looking for the one that won't meet his eyes, has a cut from broken glass on his hand, or too much cash in his pocket. Never mind socioeconomic theories. And when he finds him, he brings him in, even if it takes the truncheon.

Everybody thinks they know who should be running things. Scholars think scholars would do well. Merchants think they should rule. Soldiers want to rule all the time. Most of the time they're wrong.

It takes a certain mindset to survive any job. Assembly-line, sales, engineering. Even police work. You have to be pretty thick-skinned for that. More important, you have to go where angels fear to tread, confront argumentative people pretty much all the time, and be willing to be yelled at afterward because you gotta do what you gotta do, out on the street.

[starwed]

>Race, religion, political affiliation, disability are obviously all irrelevant in an IQ test... so in a way, isn't it more equitable?

Except that cultural background is not, unfortunately. And it's highly correlated with the first and probably weakly linked to the second and third classes as well.

[noduerme]

Let's assume a test that isn't culturally biased. The idea behind the test should be to determine the raw underlying intelligence of a person; culture shouldn't play into it at all. The fact that some IQ tests seem to discriminate - referring to the legal explanations above - appears to be a flaw in the tests given in those cases. If a test is biased toward a race or culture, then it's not an accurate measure of intelligence; we can't even call it an IQ test. It doesn't meet the definition of what most people are talking about or referring to when they say "IQ test" -- since "IQ" by definition is measured on a sliding scale in reference to the entire population.

For argument's sake let's assume a test that doesn't discriminate or give advantage to any given race or culture. How is that different from a coding test, other than that it requires more general interest and knowledge, and doesn't overly reward memorization of algorithms?

[starwed]

This is a substantial enough topic that Gould wrote a whole book about it, The Mismeasure of Man.

But directly relevent:

* even if the concept of some sort of underlying general intelligence were valid, we have yet to come up with an unbiased test of it.

* And then if you could somehow prove an IQ test was unbiased and germane to the job, then the court ruling referenced elsewhere in this thread wouldn't prohibit it's use.

[barry-cotter]

Yes, and that book would be a wonderful example in a class on polemic because any relationship to the truth is incidental to its purpose. It ignores the modern science of psychometrics and the vast majority of the material it deals with predates the 60s. Outside of the areas where Gould was an expert ([snail] paleontology) I would actively avoid reading anything by him. If its valuable, someone else would have picked it up, but if it's directly from Gould it could be a rehash of something someone else said better more than a decade earlier that he never cited.[0] Please note that in that case I'm assuming incompetent literature review, not plagiarism. But we also have what looks like another example of politically motivated incompetence or fraud[1]. For specific criticism of Mismeasure of Man look here[2]. For criticism of Gould's general importance as an evolutionary theorist, I quite like this

I am not sure how well this is known. I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there. (And yes, there is some resentment of his fame: in the field the unjustly famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolution proceeds not steadily but in short bursts of rapid change, is known as "evolution by jerks").[3]

[0]http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/

[1]http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/gould-morton-revis...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Criticism...

[3]http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html

[starwed]

I was just using that book as an example of how complicated the topic was!

[noduerme]

So you can't prove anything about anyone. No test can qualify or disqualify anyone. What about writing code? Isn't that a kind of basic test of intelligence? Or do you hold that anyone can write as well as anyone else, and there's no fundamental logic or critical thinking needed as long as they're properly trained? If that's true, why all this bother about who to hire -- can't we just hire anybody, and find them equally useful or useless in their jobs?

You've gotta measure people somehow in order to hire them, right? You can spend all day talking about how unfair any possible test is, but the world will continue choosing people based on a multitude of criteria, most of which boil down to intelligence, and all I'm suggesting is that there are more efficient and less circumspect ways of doing that.

[starwed]

Right, and I said if you could create such a test there wouldn't be objections to it being used. But it is hardly a solved problem! The especial sticking point is actually showing that some general test really correlates with how well you do the specific job.

(Go and read the wikipedia article about the relevent court case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.)

[rmc]

The problem is that, yes from first principals, a biased test is not a true "measurement of intelligence test", however loads of tests that people have been calling "IQ tests", or are found in books called "Big Book of IQ Tests" or "Test your IQ" are biased. So the term has changed, and includes all these biased tests. If you, as a employer tried to do IQ tests, you would probably find it quite hard to find one that you could be sure wasn't biased.