[tokenadult]

I'll reply to a specific comment already made as a subcomment here, to comment about the larger issues that have come up in several top-level replies in this thread.

I don't think such a hypothesis is awkward but I doubt high IQ as an excellent predictor for an individuals performance in tasks that are not IQ tests. As a layman when it comes to psychology I think IQ measures some things but the way the brain works, no real world task a person does is exactly like those IQ tests.

The interesting blog post submitted here is talking about the bread and butter of "industrial and organizational psychology," namely about how to select individuals for a training program. There are three generations of published research on this topic already, and there is a huge amount of ongoing research on this topic, because organizations all over the world want to figure out how to select successful applicants when there are more applicants than places in school or work programs.

The short answer is that there is a HUGE body of research to show that the single best hiring process you can use for hiring a worker, if you want to get a worker who will perform well on the job, is to use an IQ test for hiring.[1] The long answer is that some other applicant characteristics matter too, of course, but the single best thing to look at in a job applicant is "general mental ability." Work-sample tests are also very good for hiring for specific jobs, and are grossly underused in hiring in the United States.

To the point of the interesting submitted blog post, one always has to be empirical about these issues. The people running the bootcamp so far have found data that suggests that the algebra test they have tried is a bit more revelatory than the IQ test they tried, and less expensive besides. One response to that might be to suggest a test like the Wonderlic test (an inexpensive IQ test designed for company hiring procedures) but in the end, results matter. If empirically at this bootcamp, the algebra test works better than some other selection procedure, it doesn't even really matter why it works, just that it serves the bootcamp's purpose of identifying successful students from among multiple applicants. The data set is still small. I am very glad that the blog post includes a scatterplot of the data. More bivariate data should be shown that way, in blog posts on dozens of topics.

[1] My FAQ post on company hiring procedures, which I am still revising to put on my personal website after composing it for Hacker News, provides references for this and some commentary on legal issues in hiring.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613413#up_4613543

[michaelt]

  there is a HUGE body of research to show that the 
  single best hiring process you can use for hiring 
  a worker

The best process, assuming you have to use a single process for every job in the world? Or the best process even when hiring for a specific role?

I can understand IQ being the best choice if you had to judge poets, plumbers, town planners, golf instructors, programmers, salespeople and warehouse workers using the same process. But surely if you're exclusively hiring for one of those roles, you'd want to test their domain-specific knowledge?

[lmz]

As was written above:

> Work-sample tests are also very good for hiring for specific jobs, and are grossly underused in hiring in the United States.

[michaelt]

But isn't essentially all hiring for a specific job?

[tokenadult]

Industrial and organizational psychologists have researched this issue, with hundreds of studies spanning most different kinds of jobs in most developed countries now published. A work-sample test is especially strong for spotting people who need to do something right away after they are hired. For any worker who may need to learn new things on the job--and that is a lot of different kinds of workers, in a lot of different industries, and almost all managers--a "general mental ability" test adds to the predictive validity of selection applicants who will do well on the job over time as industry conditions and market pressures and technologies change.

[divegeek]

Not necessarily. For example militiaries routinely recruit (hire) first, and then later figure out where to put the hiree. The same is less common but does happen in industry as well with entry-level college graduate positions, and in some cases even with higher-level positions.

Even if what you say is true, though, some companies intentionally hire people without the necessary skills to do a job, then train them. In that case there's no point in testing them for job-specific skills they don't have so what you want is a way to determine which candidates are likely to be successful after training.