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Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the military.
I can't say I object to people who probably have access to lethal weaponry being required to have a minimum level of intelligence. But I'm not a gun advocate.
According to Gwern[1]: It is worth noting that studies of human genius frequently say that raw IQ and talent are not helpful past unexceptional levels like 130 IQ; what makes the difference is motivation and the "drive to mastery"
The most effective way to filter on raw IQ would be to... filter on raw IQ. But that's illegal.
It's not technically illegal, just legally perilous. Some companies do it, but they're companies that require a whole lot of other qualifications - "we only hire from Harvard and Yale" or "applicants must have ten years managing at least 150 employees".
I don’t know where to find the data used in that case, but my understanding is that intelligence tests have been shown to be broadly predictive of job performance, more so than any tests written to test only “job-related” skills; intuitively, it’s often better to hire someone who can more easily learn new things than to hire someone who already has some amount of experience but has difficulty learning new skills, drawing inferences, and dealing with unexpected situations. So if you’re hiring someone, and you have two otherwise equal applicants, and one scores better on an intelligence test, it makes sense that you’d be better off hiring the one who scored higher, but this is prohibited by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Rights Act.
Banning employers from using an effective method to choose who to hire necessarily causes economic efficiency. It’s fascinating to think about how much; a large part of why companies like to hire from top universities is that that’s where the smart students are. A large part of why so many companies are requiring college degrees for jobs that didn‘t previously require them is that it’s an effective form of cognitive selection; as more and more students go to college, fewer high-IQ students don’t go to college, and the IQ gap between those who do and those who don’t grows. I think eventually someone’s going to realize it’s possible to hire students straight out of high school on the basis of test scores and provide them with all the necessary training, skipping the whole process of making them spend $250,000 and four years of their lives experimenting with drugs and getting shwasted.
Ignoring the not-so-thinly-veiled-advertisement. The premise is wrong. Companies optimize for a lot more than raw IQ (company fit, engineering skills, response to criticism and pressure etc.) Humans can also get better a solving problems like he presents. It's not about memorizing test cases, it is about developing heuristics and noticing patterns - something humans are actually very good at. If you practice you will…
Why "response to criticism" - is that prevalent in your corporate culture? Sounds like a great reason to walk out of an interview.
This post is a mischaracterization of why tech companies as basic coding questions. Or at least Microsoft, where I learned to interview and coached my own team of interviewers over several years. 1) Basic coding questions are a nice filter. If you can't remove an element from a doubly-linked list in C on a whiteboard immediately after graduating, what were you doing the last four/five years? It's like the height sign…
By the way, the simpler explanation for asking question about CS theory and algorithms is that they want people that have really studied them thoroughly. I know, it's a crazy idea, ... but it just might be the answer. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't say I object to people who probably have access to lethal weaponry being required to have a minimum level of intelligence. But I'm not a gun advocate.
Minimum or maximum: http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923
and the tl;dr of the FAQ is "If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test."
Readers of HN have asked me to put that FAQ somewhere on the Web with a permanent link, and I am revising it for posting to my personal website. If you have suggestions for how to make the FAQ better, I'd be glad to hear them, as I have already been doing further research on company hiring procedures.