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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

"staffed with below-average IQ people"

I'm not sure why your co-workers' IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them.

Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren't bouncing.

My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the company face. Make incremental improvements.

If you really want to you can work late every day and at weekends. It's your choice. Bear in mind your job won't love you back.

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I seem to be getting a lot of heat for this comment - fair enough, but I will expand on that.

Before joining this company, I hired and managed teams across various startups. I don't think I would be speaking out of turn to say in every company we looked for aptitude and intelligence. I don't know what my previous or current colleagues literal IQs are, but you know a highly intelligent person when you meet and work with one.

Through my entire FOUR MONTH interview process, I met a dozen people, all of whom would be considered highly intelligent. Maybe I am naive to assume that's what that interview process was designed for.

And to be clear, those folks I interviewed with and many other people around me are highly intelligent. But the people I work with on daily basis, whom I did not meet in my interview, are categorically less intelligent and honestly at the root of most of the problems I've dealt with since starting.

Sorry if it is rude, but I think it's an honest depiction of the situation.

That reminds me of the old joke about hell being just a sales demo.

http://www.jokes.net/heavenandhell.htm

Maybe you are mixing intelligence with jaded people? I mean if you are in a team and nobody wants to do the hard work, they will probably realized something extra that you haven't or you just have more ambition than your peers and actually want to work. In mega corporations there are all kinds of talented and motivated people, some people just want to coast at work and that's probably ok.

IQ is kind of a weird metric to measure people by. Do they get their shit done?

I read it as a proxy for "am I going to learn from them."

Why is it a weird metric?

Because it's not something OP or anyone can actually measure their coworkers for, so it isn't actually a metric, just a way of degrading their coworkers. To me, it says more (negatively) about OP, than it does about their coworkers.

Because there are many forms of intelligence. He may be over indexing on mathematical intelligence and under indexing on the intelligence required to work within constraints, ambiguity, difficult people, adversity, and unreasonable leadership direction and expectations.

> He may be over indexing on mathematical intelligence (...)

It reads as OP didn't indexed anything and just wanted to denigrate people around him to try to portray himself as some kind of ubermensch towering over his peers.

IQ is literally the strongest predictor of job performance across every category. Even stronger than years of experience in the job. This result has been replicated by industrial psychology resource again and again over decades.

I get that it’s kinda rude to bluntly talk about IQ, but without a doubt intelligent colleagues make for a more effective work environment.

IQ and intelligence are related but not equal. If work performance ~ intelligence ~ IQ, I don’t think it’s fair to say literally

You can just directly observe how productive your teammates are, why bother using IQ as a proxy.

And it's not like OP gave his co-workers IQ tests.

I think there's three different potential points/statements:

* a) The main overall productivity issue * b) Making a more general point that they don't seem very bright, at least compared to former colleagues * c) Specifically mentioning IQ score

Yes even though the main topic is (a)... b/c is just extra context.

I think OP's goal was to make point b/c to give some further context on their perception of the situation (whether it's true or not doesn't matter, the point is explaining what they think).

Sure both (b) + (c) especially can make you look like a dick, but I don't think making the (b) point is totally irrelevant to the overall post. It at least gives us more insight into what OP thinks, even if they're wrong.

So perhaps going the (c) route (rather than b) was just an attempt at trying to be slightly more objective (even though there's obviously no evidence at all). (b) is vaguer than (c), so I don't see that (c) was completely irrelevant, even though it comes across arrogant.

> IQ is literally the strongest predictor of job performance across every category. ...This result has been replicated by industrial psychology resource again and again over decades.

Do you have source(s) for that?

edit: The top google scholar result for "IQ predict job performance" is Does IQ really predict job performance? (2015), a fascinating paper which discusses a lot of the relevant issues and their history.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10888691.2014.98...

"To supporters of IQ testing...the picture seems crystal clear. Job performance must be a good test of individual differences in intelligence. IQ test scores (or their surrogates) correlate significantly with ratings of job performance. As a result, IQ tests must be a valid test of intelligence.

What we actually have are scores from a predictor of nebulous identity correlated with ratings for a seemingly discrete construct that is turning out to be equally slippery. In other words, very strong conclusions are seemingly being drawn from correlations between two under-specified constructs. This makes interpretation of the (modest) correlations extremely difficult. In primary studies such correlations have generally left over 95% of the variance unexplained. Even the typical meta-analytic correlation of 0.5 still leaves 75% of the variance unexplained. This does not seem to us to constitute grounds for asserting test validation so strongly."

Their "summary of the main points":

"1. Much in developmental theory, and psychology in general, depends upon the validity of IQ tests. 2. In the absence of agreed construct validity this has weighed heavily on indirect validity using correlations with criterion outcomes among which job performance has a special status. 3. Hundreds of studies prior to the 1970s reported low and/or inconsistent correlations between IQ and job performance. 4. These correlations have been approximately doubled using corrections for supposed errors in primary results and combining them in meta-analyses. Such corrections have many strengths, theoretically, but are compromised in these cases by the often uncertain quality of the primary studies. 5. The corrections to sampling errors, measurement errors, and to range restriction have required making a number of assumptions that may not be valid and have created a number of persistently contentious issues. 6. The claim that the IQ-job performance correlation increases with job complexity is not born out in more recent studies. 7. A range of other—including noncognitive—factors could explain a correlation between IQ and job performance, and even constitute part or all of the enigmatic "general factor." 8. There remains great uncertainty about the interpretation of IQ-job performance correlations and great caution needs to be exercised in using them as a basis for the validity of IQ tests and associated concepts."

Speak with your manager or manager's manager that your current team is not the best match for you (if you don't trust your manager). Your manager's manager is incentivized to keep you inside hes team even if you switch managers.

You shouldnt have to feel bad for calling people low IQ. I work at FAANG and feel the exact same way. Completely underwhelmed by the talent.

You are confusing IQ and intelligence. It would have been better to say "my co-workers do not seem to be highly intelligent".

I'm tired of the semantics, my co workers are dumb. They passed these interviews by memorizing the answers to questions, and they cant come up with useful software architecture. Everything they code is a one off solution to a one off problem.

Are they better with people than you are? Does that make you dumb as well? If you were “smart” you would have figured out how to work with your leadership team to optimize a solution for all parties. But you don’t know how to, and therefore from my perspective, could also be considered “dumb”.

This comment feels like cope.

And this one feels like cope.

Honestly some people are dumb and it’s as simple as that. No need to bend backwards to make excuses for them.

This debate isn't really about people being dumb inasmuch as it's about someone accusing every single person around him of being dumb.

> Everything they code is a one off solution to a one off problem.

To me, this is more indicative of the company culture than your coworkers' IQ.

Not at all. They are not capable of building useful abstract components.

What should I do, if I have a low IQ?

Find work that speaks to your strengths, whatever they are. Some people aren't very smart but good at communications, or nice, or creative, or attentive, or can do boring tasks over and over without getting bored, or could sell snow to Norwegians in winter - there is a myriad of qualities beyond intellect, and one has to be truly exceptionally unlucky to not be good at even one (usually there are a few). The trick is finding what you're good at, and what you like to do, and if you're lucky there's intersection between the two, and if you're lucky, there's somebody somewhere willing to pay for it.

In school, I noticed that many people don't learn deeply. They get good grades even with a shallow understanding of the material.

They learn by heart and are not interested in why something works. (For example, what a Fourier transform essentially does. A Fourier transform is essentially projecting a target function to the sinusoidal bases. That is what the dot product implies.) I don't think this is necessarily related to intellect. I think it is somewhat related to laziness and lack of interest or curiosity.

They use a bunch of formulas and code snippets and glue it together until it somehow works without understanding it.

I am a big believer in learning deeply by focusing on the fundamentals. Here's what I previously wrote about that very topic:

> Instead of APIs, learn the fundamental algorithms that those APIs provide. Instead of OpenGL, learn rendering algorithms (raserization, Bresenham etc.). The same applies for other frameworks such as Vue.js. Learn how to write a virtual DOM yourself. Learn how JS operates under the hood. Learn how to implement a hash table (std::unordered_map) and a dynamic array (std::vector); understand why you cannot simply delete a bucket when using the open addressing scheme. Learn C and memory management, since many other programming languages are influenced by C. Implement the algorithms in C if you are proficient enough in it (gives you a better understanding).

"If most companies optimize for finding the best talent and the people with the best talent change companies often then logically only the people joining a company have the best talent" - Average people are average and most people are average.

I work at the FAANG considered the “dumbest” - do you think people like me have any hope for the future?

I have no idea which FAANG is considered “the dumbest”…

Any thread with FAANG in the title always brings out the weirdest insecurities. Maybe it's because emotionally stable people don't optimize their life and identity around which megacorp buys their time from them.

There is no linear ordering on workers! You might be dumb at algorithms but great at stakeholder management and average at coding. Takes all sorts of strengths to make a good team.

You should feel hopeless, you're doomed to having a steady career where you are paid well.

Except I’m not - I make the same as a new grad at other companies.

go bus tables or work a cash register and then complain about your paycheck

How does OP knows that they are low IQ? That seems insulting to me. It is one thing to say they lack right skills or are unmotivated to work hard. But saying someone is low IQ without doing IQ test is same as calling a fat person lacks discipline to eat healthy.

Or reading your or OP's comments and assuming that you have social and possibly serious mental health issues. Not very nice, right?

Untreated ADHD, depression etc. might also contribute to low performance. Beyond that, it is bold to claim "low IQ" without even demonstrating it. I don't think many people are interested in learning and thinking deeply regardless of intellect.

Of possible interest to you:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

I'm sorry that your thread is getting completely derailed because everyone here seems to offended by your IQ comment.

FWIW, I agree with you and am in the same boat. I joined a FAANG so that I could work alongside and learn from truly impressive people. So far, after a few years of working at my FAANG, I have not worked alongside one single person who I would consider impressive. I won't go so far as to say they're "low IQ" or dumb or anything like that. I enjoy them as people and I like working with them, but they certainly don't inspire me and I do not feel like I am learning things from them that further my career. All of them, even the ones at higher levels than me, seem just as clueless and lost as I am. And that's an awful environment to be in.

It's frustrating, disappointing, feels like you were lied to, etc. My only advice to you is to just quit. Don't stick around searching for something that you already know isn't here. It's very unlikely to get better.

Having worked for FAANG, I do tend to agree that there are not a lot of exceptionally smart people. However to say that they are below average intelligence is very dismissive. Its not exactly a breeze to get a job at FAANG, and you do have to know a good bit of stuff to get in.

That being said, if you consider yourself intelligent, and wanted to work amongst "smart" people, you would have asked questions about the team and the process, and made your decision on that. And also not equate IQ and intelligence when talking about people.

> you would have asked questions about the team and the process

The standard recruiting process for FAANGs seems to be that you are just a replaceable "human resource", and your team will be decided later (decidedly after signing an offer) and may change every now and then.

You may get better treatment with seniority, but I see people reporting that as the typical experience.

Four months? Sounds like Google. I highly doubt there are low IQ people at Google. Your interpretation seems off.

I notice that while you talk a lot about why you believe you should be able to tell what "high IQ" people are like, you don't say anything about what it is about these people that tells you they're not.

In other words, all you've done is attempt to establish that we should just trust you when you say they're "low IQ", rather than give us any actual evidence that they are, or even any elaboration of what you mean when you say that.

What about EQ aka emotional intelligence? Your comment betrays a very biased view. Is it at all possible these people are very good at areas you yourself may be considered "low IQ?"

And how are they to work with otherwise? I've worked with many "high IQ" people who were awful colleagues because they had superiority complexes, had no concept of collaboration, were crap communicators, especially for audiences not familiar with their domains, etc.

Meanwhile I've worked with others who may not be traditionally smart, be deeply technical, etc. But they got people. And people liked talking and working with them. And that led to progress, alignment, and less stress.

I know who I'd prefer to work with any day of the week.

You're looking for independent thinkers. You won't find them at a megacorp because the hiring funnel actively selects against such a personality. Good employees are good followers.

Perhaps you should reconsider selling out to the megacorp, and sell out to VC instead. Now that you're a Xoogler (or FANG-er, whatever), raising money will be easy.

That was my hunch as well. People who don't care about learning topics deeply. Understanding why something works etc.

I noticed that a lot in school/work. People can get good grades even without understanding the topic at hand. Many learn mechanistically and succeed with good grades.

I do the opposite, but it takes time and effort to learn a topic deeply using the Feynman method. Many are not interested in this. Many just apply formulas and code snippets, and they succeed nevertheless. Good for them!

I actually don't care about success or grades or whatever. I care about the topic, because I want to understand why it works. This is just me though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m with you. It’s really an annoyance that we need money to survive.

I had the same visceral reaction to that comment.

I was fortunate enough to work in an environment, where I was the "below-average IQ person," and I am not below-average, but I worked with some fairly smart cookies.

I know that some of my co-workers looked at me with disdain; but I was honored that most did not.

Working with frustrating people has been a very useful part of my career. As a manager, I had to make life-changing decisions for employees, and it was important for me to be empirical in my decision-making.

It appears that working for FAANGs is a "mark of distinction," these days. I know they pay ridiculous salaries. I'm pretty much aware of the working environment, and don't find the prospect enticing.

In NY, I know many, many folks that worked in the finance industry as brokers and traders. They got their licenses, and made a whole boatload of money in a few short years, while absolutely destroying their mental and physical health.

They then left, when they couldn't stand it anymore, and used the money they made to start companies, doing the things they liked doing.

Maybe that could be the approach the OP may want to take.

> I was the "below-average IQ person,"

I had a rule after my time working a peer equivalent to FAANG: if I consistently find myself the obviously smartest person in the room, I should go else where. There has been so much joy working in an environment where there are people who are more experienced, skilled, and/or talented than me.

At my current startup, which has been just amazingly successful, our engineering team hires a lot of people who are a lot like how you sound: no dummy and also emotionally intelligent/mature. It's been such a wonderful experience. I never have to hear any silly debates over the nuances of some irrelevant issues so some people can proof their intelligence. People know what the company's business is and just worry about that. Most of the times we work a 9 to 5 (10 to 6 because of Bay Area traffic) and go home. It's taught me a lot about startups and what it takes to succeed. Having the smartest people around working for you is one possible path but there are other very viable alternatives. I've also worked at companies with lots of former FAANG engineers, several Ph.D., and 3 full CS professors that burned that down ignominiously.

Not to mention "so what if the iq is actually low?". These folks have passed the same bar the OP has. Now they have to work together with existing team and achieve what progress can be achieved.

Anecdotally, a lot of engineers (and especially managers) have this mentality where they don't treat the job as something that puts food on table and helps the company move their products forward in what ever pace the overall organisation is happy with. They want to get the high of entire life's achievement there which results in dissatisfaction/burnout.

Not even close. Have you heard of acquihires? I spent 6 years at Google, and I'd say half the people I worked with over those years were definitely average or a little below in terms of skill and intelligence, certainly one couldn't describe them as "highly intelligent". Every time that I asked, they told me they didn't go through the interview process.

> have this mentality where they don't treat the job as something that puts food on table

Boomer?

>These folks have passed the same bar the OP has.

The notion that any type of consistent "bar" exists for hiring at FAANGs is a myth. These companies are far too large to consistently apply hiring standards. Some teams intentionally have different standards, some teams unintentionally (due to the hiring managers or interviewers just not being on the same page) have different standards, even within their specific team. Some teams are so desperate for people that they'll hire anyone with a pulse, while others are so flooded with applicants that they don't hire anyone unless you have 6 PhDs and won a nobel prize.

At my FAANG, it's so well known that the "hiring bar" is bullshit that when someone wants to do a team transfer, we usually require them to go through a full hiring loop again, just like an external hire, because there are some teams/organizations within my company that we do not trust to have upheld a reasonable bar when initially hiring someone.

Wow, requiring an interview to move around in the same company just sounds like the epitome of pigeonholing.

At the size of these companies, it's more like several companies that happen to be under the same roof.

I’ve never heard of Olympians or similar (ARML or whatever) at Amazon.

For what it’s worth, the process is becoming standardized at the L5 Industry hire level at Amazon as it was for most L4 new grads. The hiring bar being different across orgs is going away soon.

Maybe in your org that's true. In my org, we are intentionally heading in the opposite direction. We are intentionally holding different standards, complete with different question banks and different interview tasks (sometimes code challenge, sometimes not) depending on which team you join, even for L5s within the same job family.

> Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren't bouncing.

Best and funniest comment.

OP really should have a side project or something to keep skills nice and sharp but I don't see a reason to complain about working for CV companies like a FAANG making shovel-loads of cash from every orifice. Not sure what the downside is, maybe I've been too poor for too long.

This stood out to me as well. I'd never attempt to quantify someone's "IQ", which is really a very specific type of test. There are many types of "intelligence."

I'd be more interested in productivity, adding value, understanding the problem space, leadership, communications, technical range, ability to listen.

Maybe they are jaded that they grinded leet code for two months only to be working on boring problems.

I’ve also worked with people who are against trying something new or take forever (thanks processes) to do simple things. It doesn’t equate with how hard the interview and gatekeeping is. People know they can coast and riding out a year or two until the bottom 10% are weeded to make a half million or more is worth it to some.

All that being said yeah the comment was a bit crass for sure.

Exactly!

OP should also consider being perhaps less inflammatory with his language. Be mindful of others.

Simply complaining won't help you, OP. Be proactive and seek to synergize[1]. If you are Einstein-level smart, then why don't you synergize with people instead? In a gearbox, every part counts. The smaller gears and the bigger gears do play a role in the final transmission.

Learn to make the best out of a given situation. If you can't or don't want it, you can leave and go somewhere else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effecti...

> I'm not sure why your co-workers' IQ is your concern

It's a concern as much as working with a smart person that can understand - and support, and improve on, and challenge if needed - your ideas is a delight and brightens your day. And working with somebody who can't get the basic things and you have to waste time on explaining the obvious and treading water instead of moving forward is a drag and makes your life hell. Of course we're not talking about IQ score on a puzzle test or something like that - I'm sure the OP talks about practical skills as seen in everyday interactions. I've been lucky to work mostly with very smart people - but occasionally there was a dud, and it's very annoying and sucks a lot of energy out.

That line is definitely a harsh way to put it, but as someone that has a similar feeling, my interpretation is as follows:

Many people in the industry have a very glorified view of FAANGs, and in particular one of the reasons that many people want to work at a FAANG is because of the idea of working and learning from the most impressive people in your field. If you've ever heard the saying "if you feel like you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room", I think that is a saying that these types of people ascribe to.

The problem is that oftentimes someone joins a FAANG and that glorified view is shattered. The reality is that the people at a FAANG are not necessarily geniuses (there are geniuses at FAANG, as there are at any company, but they are far and few between compared to the 'average' FAANG engineer). I work at a FAANG (look at my name and you can guess which one) and I would certainly say that it is very frustrating to me that my career has felt like it has effectively stalled ever since joining, because everyone on my team is just as clueless as I am and I do not find any of my direct or extended teammates particularly impressive or inspiring.

When this happens, the "shattering" reality that your new job isn't some wonderland and is full of all the same issues of your old companies can make you quite frustrated and dissapointed, and it's quite easy to place that blame on your coworkers or the tools they use. I don't think it's disdain as much as it is disappointment, and OP probably feels like they were sold a false bill of goods. I know I certainly relate to that a lot.

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