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Comment by maximus-decimus | Hacker News Reader

The way I see it, it's just an IQ test in disguise, which do have empirical evidence they predict your future performance at intellectual work.

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The tech part maybe, and the tech part is only a small part of the entire interview. On top of that, since IQ tests exist, you don't need a bad proxy to test IQ.

Leetcode-style tech interview segments aside, that still leaves the myriad of other things happening during the hiring process which either do nothing, or function as poor proxies for other things. Personality testing through mundane questions, for example. If we're following this train of thought, since certain personality tests do have support, interviewers shouldn't be using their gut instinct to begin with.

> On top of that, since IQ tests exist, you don't need a bad proxy to test IQ.

Yes you do. Because administering an IQ test is forbidden

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

There is empirical evidence for that? Where? Where are the 170+ IQ employees churning out magnificent solution after magnificent solution, rather than being stuck in the same rut as everyone else?

170+ IQs are extremely rare. That's 4.67 standard deviations above the mean. That should be about 0.0002% of people, or 14,000 people in the entire world, and that has to be shared with every other occupation that exists.

You focused entirely on an operational detail of my question and not at all on what I was actually asking: Why is it assumed higher IQ is connected to higher performance.

The reason I am asking this is because it is not at all my experience - if anything, higher IQ correlates strongly with dysfunction.

It's not though, it's a test of how hard you've studied for algo problems. Relevant for some programming jobs, but not for most.

IQ's whole point is it was supposed to predict how fast kids are gonna learn at school. I would argue testing for people's ability to learn irrelevant stuff in their limited free time is going to rate people's ability to learn which is the very definition of an IQ test (at least what it was meant to be).

Testing people's ability to learn irrelevant stuff in their free time mostly tests how much free time they have and whether or not they're willing to sacrifice it to learn irrelevant stuff.

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