Someone with an IQ of 80 who's literally incapable of coding? Fail.
I actually worked with a developer who said their tested IQ was in the 80s.
I actually worked with a developer who said their tested IQ was in the 80s.
A person with an IQ of 80 usually has trouble functioning in society. It can be difficult to teach them concepts like alphabetization or hypotheticals. For someone with such cognitive impairments to become a software developer beggars belief.
With gap results it’s not uncommon to see 2 low areas scoring 80s and 2 high areas 120 or even 130+.
“A developer declaring a tested IQ of 80” could be a gap case and somewhere along the way the nuance got lost in translation.
Beyond that, IQ is not even predictive enough of job performance for a standard deviation to be a death sentence.
It's definitely possible for someone with IQ85 or IQ80 to be better at programming than the average IQ100 programmer, and it's not even that unlikely. Let's not overstate this.
Our occupations and interests cause us to self-segregate into cognitive strata. For the same reason you don't know many Trump voters or young earth creationists (despite the fact that they're 1/3rd of the US population), you probably don't know many dumb people (or many super-geniuses). Individual differences in cognitive ability are far greater than our personal experience indicates.
Wouldn't you believe that, that's only slightly less than the general population which is at 25%, or right around what I predicted above :)
The median IQ difference between college professors and service workers is not even a full standard deviation.
Beyond that, I said average IQ100 programmer, of which there are many that can do a perfectly serviceable job in many sectors.
Individual differences in cognitive ability are great, yes, but they are not even close to being perfectly represented in IQ.
I don't know many Trump voters or young earth creationists because of where I live, but I know quite a bit of their relative equivalent where I am right now. Yes, there are a lot of differences, but I know enough young-earth-creationist and far-right engineers/stem people to know that it's not that simple.
Anyways, I think I made my point clear, IQ is not a very good predictor of job performance, you can definitely be a programmer with IQ85, and a great many are.
IQ is not the metric that people think it is. You could be above average at doing mental math and finding ways to push data, yet be under average and spatial problems, language problems, etc..., and get an IQ of 75.
It's also not that good of a test and not that predictive of actual programming ability, even if you're not being dragged down by other tests.