Comment by adev_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adev_ | Hacker News Reader

Reddit and Forums are full of people with similar experience.

Canonical currently uses this "psychometric test" as a decisive critera for candidates

https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Exampl...

And from their own words "they take it very seriously".

The result is exactly what you would expect of this kind of test. It is unsurprisingly utter rubbish.

It asks the candidate to solve "important cognitive tasks" and translate that to substract 2 number as fast as possible, identify letters as fast as possible or rotate an image as fast as possible.

I would honestly be curious to know how anybody with a functional brain can believe 5 seconds that this can be an important selection criteria for a senior software engineer, a SRE or an engineering manager.

Is the goal suppose to be identifying the best human-based GPUs ?

I wonder how many top talents they lost in early selection process due to this kind of garbage.

its obviously just an abstraction over an IQ test.

Id argue its probably quite hard to find a 'top talent' that has an IQ thats substantially outside their desired range. Obviously theres variance and there's other factors that contribute to someones success in their career, but their raw intelligence is certainly a large input thats worth considering.

Its nearly impossible to train someone with an IQ of 80 to be a senior software engineer.

and please dont respond to this comment claiming IQ is a useless metric. its not, and thats been very clear for decades.

>and please dont respond to this comment claiming IQ is a useless metric. its not, and thats been very clear for decades.

I'm glad you settled the debate with a single sentence.

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

if you could guarentee your child had an iq of 80 or an iq of 120 which would you pick? presumably if IQ is useless youd be fine flipping that coin?

"High IQ" != "able to do certain simple things faster than everyone else".

What you're really looking for is "able to do really hard things at all".

that is a fair point, but i think the two are correlated

IQ is not a useless metric, but using it as a proxy for a ability is extremely questionable at best.

they arent using it as a proxy for an ability. they are just trying to hire people with high iqs

If people are just selecting high IQ applicants for the sake of them being high IQ applicants, then I think we can all agree they're doing it wrong regardless of our other opinions about IQ.

Presumably, companies that value a high IQ do so because they think it's an indicator of ability. But perhaps I'm wrong here. What other reason could they have?

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