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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

We use university degrees and GPAs as a proxy for IQ, and even with grade inflation, it think it is still a good proxy.

Degrees and GPA are primarily a proxy for social status. You have to start by giving some thought to what your screens aren't telling you. A bad screen that rejects 90% of qualified candidates can easily look like a great screen so long as it's not passing through obvious bozos. That's the problem with screens! It's easy to reject most bozos, but hard to let through most solid candidates.

And of course Google and Facebook and the like don't really have a problem with rejecting 90% of qualified candidates, because "everyone" wants to work there and they have no shortage of qualified applicants. On the other hand, everyone that is imitating them has a rather big problem, because most potential candidates haven't even heard of their company.

> Degrees and GPA are primarily a proxy for social status.

And IQ also has a correlation with social status, like it or not.

I find all the most important and incisive comments about the nature and distribution of intelligence in society tend to end with "like it or not".

What do you do about people who didn't go to school?

If there are plenty of candidates applying that have degrees from accredited institutions, then they are SOL. It gets interesting when there aren't enough qualified candidates.

I like that you make a distinction between qualified candidates and those without tertiary education. It makes your priorities very clear.

Wasn't my intention. I should have qualified qualified:

> between "qualified" candidates

I'm presenting from the point of view of the hiring institution. But still... If I were a law firm, I wouldn't hire a lawyer who hadn't gone to law school. Why would we behave differently with software engineers?

Largely because a lawyer who hasn't gone to law school won't be able to practice in most places, due to their guild preventing them.

That same guild has coordinated a test & accreditation process that largely spans their industry.

Whether or not this process has led to better lawyers or legal procedures is an open question, but the software industry has no such standardization, testing, or work embargo, so they are largely not comparable.

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