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Comment by Kharvok | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely a way to have leecode type tests for most jobs. We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ. Academics act mostly as a signal in some industries where you just back into IQ ineffectively by creating certain filters for pedigree.

instead of IQ test -> competence signal

you have:

SAT/ACT = IQ Test -> university acceptance criteria -> degree/credentials -> competence signal

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I'm going to take a different path from the other responses so far. The claim that IQ predicts job success seems to be contentious among a lot of people, but as far as I can tell, it is fairly well supported and other ways of evaluating candidates are at least as noisy anyway, short of professions with the sort of concrete standards that allow for meaningful licensing or something like being a military officer where they're going to train you and evaluate your performance in context for 4 years before ever giving you a real job anyway.

However, thanks to the way mental traits get distributed, a fairly small proportion of the population is ever going to have a high IQ. Roughly 16% of the population at any one time will have greater than 1 SD north of median. Less than 3% will be greater than 2 SD.

More people than that need to have jobs. If you're going to insist only 97th percentile people can work for you, you need to be offering 97th percentile salary. Currently, that is around $220,000 a year in the US. "Most" jobs can definitely not offer that.

> fairly well supported and other ways of evaluating candidates are at least as noisy anyway

It's on you to back up this claim. And the reason had better not be 'oh a bunch of tech companies do it' when there are entire fields from psychology that do research on this exact question, and they consider things like personalities, etc.

You also might be confusing higher-iq job scopes for job success.

Yeah this is a good point. Another issue though is the SAT is a snapshot of your IQ, but also your general life state at one point in time. I think it's cruel to have that follow you for life, especially if you are going through difficulties as a teenager.

I've seen rumblings out there[1] that "whiteboard interviews" can be cast as "pre-employment tests" and litigated against in a "Duke Power" sense. Not to endorse that and I'm not sure anyone wants to hear that.

[1] https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1506870732889985025

>We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ.

Wow, so many people react so sharply to this, I'm not sure why. May be there is an inherent belief that all one has to do is work hard and success will follow.

Minor nitpick - I think performance has a good correlational with IQ, I think less so a job, because a job also generally requires high conformity (not an enviable trait IMO)

> We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ

I'm not sure a construction company wants a bunch of people with 140+ IQ standing around all day leaning on shovels waiting for gravel to shovel into little holes. I'm pretty sure those employees will just quit or break something on purpose just for something to do. In fact I've seen this with my own eyes.

Maybe you're proposing binning people by IQ instead? Where groups of people who fall in certain ranges of IQs are sorted into different jobs.

But again, I'm not so sure that Walmart wants to hire a shelf stocker with an IQ between 88-95 if that person has oppositional defiant disorder and/or a tendency to steal from their employers.

If you think that you can distill the essence of an entire human down to a single variable and rank them accordingly for jobs, go for it man, but I have a sneaking feeling that it isn't going to work.

There are a ton of people on construction sites with very high IQs that prefer manual labor, physical problem solving or managing divergent teams and contractors to accomplish a project. The notion of clustering people into professions for anything other than their desire to participate in the profession and ability to perform the tasks is a fools errand.

Thanks for this. I'm in Software because that's the best way for me to provide for my family. If I could have my way, I'd be outside working on making things that last longer than a couple of years.

> I'm not sure a construction company wants a bunch of people with 140+ IQ standing around all day leaning on shovels waiting for gravel to shovel into little holes. I'm pretty sure those employees will just quit or break something on purpose just for something to do. In fact I've seen this with my own eyes.

I'm quite convinced that a typical construction site would benefit a lot from employees who would be smart enough to notice inefficient processes and plain mistakes, and take some initiative to fix the problems. And management who would believe the employees, but that is probably never going to happen.

> We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

IQ predicts how fast you learn shit, not how well you do on the job. Plenty of studies from the fields of personality/social psychology/psychometrics talk about this, get out of your narrow SWE field and read up on these subjects. This IQ=job success belief is simply SWE self ego-stroking.

edit:

Jordan Peterson (psychology phd) - The Mystery of High IQ and Industriousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C0zS2RAzlI

Actually, I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to this: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006

A degree is a signal of IQ + Long term planning + Effort.

Plus financial backing, and/or inside influence on the process. Cheating is rampant is some cultures, and I guess some people even basically but their whole degree

Ah so something like Chinese Gaokao? where you spend 3 years of your life preparing for one exam? Or am I reading what you wrote wrong?

Sure, let me use Raven's progressive matrices to test whether someone has the ability to make plans, stay organized, keep on task and interface with others in a productive way.

Sounds like a smashing idea, I'm sure you'll kill it in business.

One would think if it's such an obvious failure it wouldn't need to be banned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

> We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ.

Citation for this? As far as I know IQ isn’t a measure of intelligence (because intelligence is hard to define, let alone come up with a single number that quantifies it!)

good summary of all the relevant data and studies for the last 50 years:

https://www.amazon.com/Know-Debunking-Myths-about-Intelligen...

> Citation for this? As far as I know IQ isn’t a measure of intelligence (because intelligence is hard to define, let alone come up with a single number that quantifies it!)

All you have to do is get a figure that mostly correlates fairly well to most of the phenomena we might consider intelligence, and it works well enough for many purposes, even if it's not measuring any of those others.

That's a far cry from "We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ."

I think when people say things like that, what they mean is "what simple number is the best predictor of success", which begs the question that a simple number can be a good predictor at all. Keep in mind that something can be the best merely because every other option is even worse: in practice, the best predictor is a really terrible predictor. So bad, in fact, that a five-minute conversation with somebody will tell you more about their ability to succeed at a job than knowing their IQ.

> that a five-minute conversation with somebody will tell you more about their ability to succeed at a job than knowing their IQ.

Got any citations to support this?

> So bad, in fact, that a five-minute conversation with somebody will tell you more about their ability to succeed at a job than knowing their IQ.

But when you try to put a number on that five minute conversation it turns out that the number is worse than the number provided by IQ tests. Otherwise the simple number from conversations would be well known to be a stronger predictor, but nobody has found such a result.

If we forget about the concept of intelligence for a while, there is a lot of research that points to the direction that whatever the quality that IQ tests measure is, it correlates strongly with financial success, health and a bunch of other things that are often considered good. Whether it is the cause or effect is also anyone's guess.

> We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ

Who knows this? I sure as hell don’t and would be extremely surprised if that were the case.

the standard reference for this is ree and earles 1992.

every other method of selection, e.g. structured interviews, work samples, etc, are (noisier) proxies of general mental ability.

"Intelligence is not the best predictor of job performance" (McClelland, D.C. 1993)

Not sure why you would use a paper as a "standard reference" when flaws in its method were identified almost 3 decades ago.

it's not consistently referred to as "IQ" or intellligence, typically the measurement is called "g" or "g factor" or "general mental ability" and over the last couple of decades the meta-analyses just keeps pointing towards g being the single best predictor of performance.

IQ tests are stupid and have large language components to them. The large language components of the tests mean they essentially boil down to culture tests. If your parents were in the in group, you speak scientistese.

Your in group membership is what propels you forward in your career, not your intelligence. Race and Gender are predictors of career success as well.

Any proponent of IQ, I'd challenge to take an IQ test in Chinese, Irish, or AAVE.

This is largely a myth.

If you were trying to get a job in a Chinese workplace with chinese coworkers that spoke chinese, taking a chinese IQ test would be a great predictor of success in that group. Doesn't mean you'res 'stupid', but my giant english IQ would be useless reading docs and taking meetings if they were all or majority in chinese.

What about tests that only use patterns/shapes/rotation/etc?

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