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Around and past an IQ of about 135, work boredom is a chronic risk and sometimes a disability. (...) Past 135 (much less at 140, 150, or even 160) even 8 hours per day of grunt work is impossible, much less 17.

Interesting. I went to a rather old-fashioned school with a strict IQ cutoff of 125-130+ (Stanford-Binet LM, I think, because some scored above 160), and my impression is the opposite: the higher they scored, the more they valued career paths like (non-quant) finance, medicine or corporate law --tracks with plenty of grunt work and long hours but well-defined, steady payoffs.

I asked many of them about this because, to me at the time, it seemed counterintuitive and a tragic waste of human talent. It often turned out, however, that they chose those careers precisely because they lavishly reward grunt work, which they can do with such incredible (almost infuriating) ease that, to them, it doesn't feel like work at all!

That is not to say they do not have rich intellectual lives outside of work: but that, for them, corporate work is more like a generous sinecure that doesn't substantially impede their other pursuits. In fact, it was those of us with the "lowest" IQs who tended to be more freaked out about the prospects of mindless corporate work, and who were more likely to go for more "intellectually stimulating" careers like academia or applied fields.

Your thesis is interesting.

I suppose I thought that the grunt work of those careers was like the grunt work of programming, e.g. maintenance of bad code, learning "how we do things here" idiosyncrasies with little general value: mentally taxing (and, at an IQ above 130, mind-crushingly boring) but not intellectually difficult.

I would have thought so too, but perhaps one key difference for IQ outliers is that, to them, inordinate detail-orientation and extreme repetitiveness does not appear to be mentally taxing at all --so their cost-benefit calculus might seem completely foreign and unintuitive to the rest of us!

You're over-thinking the IQ part.

And I know some 20-somethings making $500K and more for PE megafunds. There are some guys from middle class backgrounds there.

The connected-but-useless ones tend to get hired in investment banking.

Plenty of high IQ people in PE and hedge funds, especially those who entered direct from college, skipping IB. They seem to be people who can tolerate grinding though.

It may be true that the work gets boring but the alternatives aren't significantly better (how many people at Google are doing substantially more interesting work?) and pay and career advancement are much better.

Yup. Some of the smartest people I've ever met went into finance, because the money is crazy - these are the kids who were building stuff for fun in college, or first gen immigrants who were on full rides and knew that college was about getting skills and getting a job, not just about 3AM drunk discussions about Sartre. The idea that these people are not as intelligent as "tech people" is silly.

I acknowledge that there are plenty of very smart people in finance (especially in quant roles). I said:

There are plenty of 135+ in finance, but either they go for trading and quant or even IT roles, or they move to "the soft side" at a higher level: usually at least VP.

Smart people tend to avoid competing on hours. Why? Because if you're putting out a 17-hour day (which is necessary at the entry level on "the soft side") anything that is a disadvantage can (no, will) derail you. That includes being too smart for the work. So they prefer trading and quant jobs where the hours are reasonable and also where the work is more interesting and they're not as much at risk of high-IQ problems.

[P]ay and career advancement are much better [in finance than software].

Absolutely. This is completely true. Any idea what we should do about this in engineering? (Or just call it hopeless and exit for finance?)

I don't think it's a solvable problem. People who tend to make the hiring and pay decisions are seldom those who understand the intricacies or value of good engineers. An engineer could make $500k a year, but the business case for why that is a good investment for the company has to be made, and that's where it falls apart.

Most people capable of making that decision believe that somebody with a Harvard MBA is worth a particular sum because that's what the market, their experience, their network, and conventional wisdom tells them. For that same person to believe that a top engineer with or without a strong pedigree is worth the same amount would require that person to understand a lot of details that few are willing to learn.

I don't think this is necessarily a setback for all engineers- it just creates different but highly lucrative opportunities for those that are able to make the business case to those who write the checks. Instead of relying on your pedigree and the fact that the market at large widely agrees what certain pedigrees and jobs are worth a lot (which is what makes top schools and PE/IB jobs so competitive), you have to convince people of your value on your own.

Edit: To be less abstract- an example would be starting a tech consulting business in which you bill $200/hour. Not necessarily an easy task, but if you can show that you're worth more than that to the business, you can convince them to pay you that much.

I'm not convinced that smart people gravitate to quant roles. The hours may be longer on the "soft" side but it is more prestigious and the work is less taxing and doesn't require continually learning new skills.

I don't know how you can enter "soft" finance at the VP level.

> Absolutely. This is completely true. Any idea what we should do about this in engineering? (Or just call it hopeless and exit for finance?)

I think the ship has sailed for many people, you can't get into PE or non-quant HF mid-career. When I was younger I often thought along the lines of "if only everybody..." but I realized the hard way that it is much easier to change yourself than to change the world.

When I give advice to smart kids entering college I tell them they should strongly consider targeting PE/HF: If they hate it they will know from experience and still have superlative exit ops, trivially able to land a management/executive-track job at a tech company or elsewhere.

This is not a comment on what you're saying (I don't think you're far off) but it's pretty disturbing a reflection on tech that executive roles in our companies are what finance people fail into.

Most tech management and VC is failed finance/business guys who failed down into those roles, not programmers who worked their way up the ranks. The latter almost never happens, to tell the truth.

Yup, definitely something I didn't understand when I started out which is why I make an effort to inform others in college.

I would posit that nothing can be done about this in engineering.

PE, big banks, all of that money is based on information gathered from the companies before the rest of us peons get wind of any of it. John Q. Public is playing what he thinks is a fair lottery, while the wizards are pulling the levers behind the curtains. If we as engineers could figure out a legal way to "earn commissions" (read: steal from tens of thousands of people every year based on information asymmetry), then $500k is no problem. Until then, however, we are confined to, you know, actually trying to create value for people rather than extract it from the system.

Pardon the cynicism, I am pretty unnerved by our whole economic incentive structure.

Talent != IQ. And I'd argue "smart" != IQ.