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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I dodged the draft and in partial atonement, I did some work with Operation Code, which is for vets and their spouses to learn to be techies. I did a podcast with them:

https://operationcode.org/podcast

These people are not in any way, shape, or form "dumb." A lot of them go to 4-year colleges on the GI Bill, but a few did code school. One works for Google now. Almost none of them actually saw any combat.

My favorite was Dick Sonderegger, who enlisted in the Marines during the Vietnam era. He said he wanted to fly close air support in 'Nam, and they said, "No, you're going to be a computer programmer." He never left the States.

They do yell at you in Basic Training, all of them said.

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I didn't consider them dumb but I have to say that everyone insisting "they're not dumb" is changing my mind a little bit now.

There are a lot of dumb people in the military. There are also some, usually in special forces, that can run mental laps around most of the people here, then physical laps, then shoot you in the chest from a half a mile away, then give an incredible speech about it all.

Good answer.

There is a sense of "doth protest too much, methinks"

Vet in tech here. Vets are generally socioeconomically disadvantaged compared to the average tech employee. They rarely come from great school districts, and the military is one way to give them a leg up on the system that held them down, via a decent paying job, and path to “free” college education and retirement.

Rich kids and those from top school districts (generally) don’t end up in the military. In the end, it’s all about education and opportunity. Most folks who enter the military see it as a way to get more of both.

The US military is one of the few American employers that can legally use an IQ test as part of their hiring process.

They have to. It is illegal to hire people in the bottom 10% of IQ to be in the military.

You can use it to by hiring veterans.

Doesn't really make a difference either way. Companies just use some other aptitude test instead

Surely most employers use IQ which varying degrees of effectiveness?

I expect in most settings IQ 100-140 is very hard to guess from an interaction. Harder if there is a specific field being assessed where someone has experience/training.

But everyone will pick up IQ <90 almost immediately and that's not even necessarily abnormally low just borderline.

By proxy, yes, but not directly and there's a big difference.

I'm not sure there is.

IQ is just an aptitude score, it's far more objective and unbiased than an interview.

I think you're not understanding. Direct IQ tests for employment are illegal in the US.

Which means it goes to subjective interviews where racism is known to be a factor.

Why have an objective test for what you want when you can introduce subjectivity and racism for the same goal? It's the American way.

But IQ tests are also racist which is why they're illegal for most employers. What legal non-racist policy do you have in mind?

IQ tests aren't racist lol they aren't sapient. How could a piece of paper be racist.

No they're not.

De facto they are, mostly[1]. The corollary that there exist jobs where intelligence isn't pertinent is perhaps somewhat baffling to common sense, but then the law often is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Huge tech companies have used the Wonderlic IQ test as recently as the last 10 years. Somebody here, if this thread isn't moribund, can chime in to say which; I'm not saying. There's a meme that IQ tests are a powerful hiring tool that have been suppressed by political correctness or gunshy HR departments, but the real reason they're not ubiquitous is that they're not fit for purpose.

More accurately, you can simply adapt the IQ test overall and end up with a "situational judgement test". Which is better.

Ultimately that can be used to accurately predict an IQ test, and vice versa.

Same with MCAT, or any other "aptitude" test.

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