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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed that exactly. IQ presumably is something inherent.. But personal experience shows that technical interviews have nothing to do with IQ. They can be easily solved by creating a dynamic programming problem pattern matcher in your brain, which is what I created after doing 300 leetcode problems. I did not become smarter in general or at coding at all, I just got good at mapping problems to binary trees or dynamic programming or string search.

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I don't get how IQ could be considered inherent. It's a test, so results are defined by talent and training. A person who spent a month solving the types of problems present in an IQ test will certainly get a higher score. By, the way, you did become better at coding by solving Leetcode problems, cause now you can easily spot them in the wild and use a proper algorithm instead of some naive solution.

aren't IQ tests the same? You just learn how to solve some kind of problems (series of images, series of numbers and so on) etc. This obviously does not make you "smarter", it just makes you good at solving some kind of puzzles. But "smart" is ill defined and vague anyway..

That's the reason all real IQ tests (not the ones you find on the internet, the real ones) are secret/closely guarded: Knowing the tests beforehand skews the results. So: yes, it is the same in that way and has been theorized as one of the reasons for the Flynn effect. Afaik there's also research into new types of IQ tests to mitigate this all the time, but a good IQ test has higher requirements than the typical interviewing test, so it takes longer.

I think that the point is that being able to do what you did requires intelligence to accomplish.

it looks like a humblebrag..

"I'm not intelligent, I'm just able to see enough patterns in chess to defeat Carlsen"

"I'm not smart, I'm just able to solve algorithmic problems based on my vast memory and ability to map new questions to old solutions"

It's really not. Knowing how to solve those leetcode questions has not improved my professional life one bit. I am not a better programmer.. In fact it probably made me worse. At my work I pretty much never deal with the kind of coding that leetcode requires. I'm more interested in writing larger scale software rather than throw away toy problems which completely ignore code quality or maintainability.

In fact, I'm not even good at solving leetcode problems that well so I wasn't able to get a job at the big N companies...although it did help with passing the interview at one of the smaller companies.

It depends- maybe if people devoted enough time to cramming algorithmic problems (more than they did in their CS classes, even) could they have memorized enough solutions and seen the patterns enough to be able to master this type of technical interview? One wonders, can that rote memorization + pattern machine process be trained into anyone- meaning that this is not a measure of intelligence but of brute force, like memorizing Rubik's Cube solutions?

And then the practical concern arises- does that actually make anyone a better programmer, and benefit employers?

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