
Top Tech Companies: You filter on raw IQ, here is how to do it more effectively - nadam
http://nadamhu.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/top-tech-companies-you-mostly-filter-on-raw-iq-and-here-is-how-to-do-it-more-effectively/
======
larsberg
This post is a mischaracterization of why tech companies as basic coding
questions. Or at least Microsoft, where I learned to interview and coached my
own team of interviewers over several years.

1) Basic coding questions are a nice filter. If you can't remove an element
from a doubly-linked list in C on a whiteboard immediately after graduating,
what were you doing the last four/five years? It's like the height signs
before an amusement park ride: "you must be at least this competent." These
are not intended to be hard problems. You should not be crippled if you "think
differently" or "form important theories." Further, dropping one on the floor
is not a deal-killer; you just have to get most of them.

2) Do you really understand how a computer works? If I give you some inputs
(or you come up with them), can you walk through your program and describe the
execution and memory state in some detail? You'd be shocked how many 4.0 GPA
CS students from Stanford/etc. cannot. I am willing to teach new graduates how
to work at scale. At a top firm, I am not willing to send them back to school
to take Operating Systems and Architecture again.

3) Can we have a discussion about your code and the problem without you
breaking down completely? More edge cases, expand it to a broader domain,
increase perf (MSFT), scale it to web size (Google), etc.

None of these are raw IQ measures. If you want to see such measures, look to
the finance industry where, for example, my wife had to take the Wonderlic
Test during one interview, which is definitely more a measure of "raw
sprinting smarts."

~~~
olalonde
> point 1)

I remember what a doubly linked list is but I wouldn't remember C well enough
to pass the test. Does that make me a bad programmer?

> point 2)

Depending on the position, this might or might not matter. If you are modeling
high level concepts in functional languages for example, does it really matter
if you don't know what a logic gate is or how processes are scheduled?

> point 3)

Agreed.

I would say whatever questions you chose, it will only filter out for a
certain type of programmer. Your questions are most likely targeted at C/C++
systems programmers.

~~~
Arelius
> I remember what a doubly linked list is but I wouldn't remember C well
> enough to pass the test. Does that make me a bad programmer?

Unless the position was for a C role, Most people would accept psuedo code, or
help you along with enough syntax to get you through.

------
edmond_dantes
My IQ is 136. I can attest that it is not an indicator of anything. I am a
lazy, average programmer. Whatever benefit I gain from having a higher IQ is
offset by my inability to focus for more than a minute. I don't understand how
people can study and lack many basic skills because I aways seemed to sneak by
without them. I am a chronic procrastinator, only the fear of having to write
a final in 24 hours made me study/cram by pulling all nighters. I have a CS
degree and rarely went to class, having collected every letter grade A+
through F, and survived being on academic probation (my semester with four D's
and an A+). Just one data-point and a counter-example as to why IQ is not a
good measure of anything.

According to Gwern[1]: It is worth noting that studies of human genius
frequently say that raw IQ and talent are not helpful past unexceptional
levels like 130 IQ; what makes the difference is motivation and the "drive to
mastery"

1:
[http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective)

~~~
MDS100
ADHS?

~~~
edmond_dantes
I've never been diagnosed. In high school I had an uncharacterized
organizational learning disability. Out of desperation I wanted to be
medicated and have made the huge step, huge for me, of talking to a doctor who
referred me -- we'll see. The stories I've seen on HN have soured my opinion
of medicating. I don't want to become addicted or unable to function, less
than I already do, without drugs.

------
rachelbythebay
I suggest they might want to filter based on IQ but the math doesn't support
them. Pick a cut-off point, below which you will not hire a person. Assume
perfect filtering and no mistakes. How big can your company get?

Start with 7 billion humans, then reduce to the set of those with at least the
target IQ. Are there enough people in the world to make this work? How about
after subtracting people who don't do that kind of work or don't speak the
right languages? Or they're in the wrong country and won't move. Or they're at
some other employer. Keep subtracting from the pool and see who's left.

If your company is bigger than the number you get after this filtering, then
you aren't really filtering that way. You just think you are.

------
EllaMentry
Ignoring the not-so-thinly-veiled-advertisement. The premise is wrong.
Companies optimize for a lot more than raw IQ (company fit, engineering
skills, response to criticism and pressure etc.)

Humans can also get better a solving problems like he presents. It's not about
memorizing test cases, it is about developing heuristics and noticing patterns
- something humans are actually very good at. If you practice you will get
better.

~~~
hnriot
Why "response to criticism" \- is that prevalent in your corporate culture?
Sounds like a great reason to walk out of an interview.

~~~
EllaMentry
In a professional environment, generally the best way to get started is to
simply throw something up on a whiteboard, tear it apart, throw something
else, tear it apart...rinse repeat. If I tell someone in an interview that
their solution is flawed, I want them to be intrigued, ask questions and find
out way OR tell me why I am wrong/mistaken in a professional manner - if they
are stubborn, rude, angry or simply fail to respond, they will not be a good
fit.

In any large culture people will constantly tell you you are going about
something the wrong way, it is simply in the nature of large cultures. It is
the job of any professional engineer to compile notes, listen and react
appropriately to this. Sometimes the other people don't have the whole story,
or are simply just wrong...other times they know something you don't and you
have to be willing to scrap what you were doing and go back to the drawing
board - with a new contact and fresh information.

------
dinkumthinkum
I struggle to find the point of this article. OK, I'm somewhat being coy and
perhaps somewhat dismissing it with a middlebrow but in a real sense I'm not
quite sure what is being argued. Is this the developer of "Find the Mafia!"?
It's not as if the "Top Tech Companies" are actually measuring IQ, so that
seems to belie the point. Sure, you could say they are asking questions that
you believe correlate with raw IQ if you want, I might say "citation needed"
but the fact is it is not exactly what they are doing. Now, I'm not sure this
particular type of puzzle is the perfect solution, or even a candidate
solution. Yeah, I'm a little flummoxed.

By the way, the simpler explanation for asking question about CS theory and
algorithms is that they want people that have really studied them thoroughly.
I know, it's a crazy idea, ... but it just might be the answer. :)

------
mynameisme
I feel like your article is just a not so subtle ad for your game.

------
honu
While I find the premise of the blog post to be potentially interesting (2nd
post since 2011), I wonder if this is much more than a thinly veiled
advertisement.

------
od2m
I've always had difficulty interviewing because I'm a #2 on this guys list--
the "long distance runner" of thinking. My talent has always been slow,
methodical crunching of massive amounts of data-- analysis. There's no way to
demonstrate this talent during an interviews. I've gotten feedback from
interviews and heard, "It's not that you didn't answer every question
correctly, it's that you weren't fast enough." So I essentially can't show my
most valuable skill to a potential employer.

------
tokenadult
I read the fine article and all the comments submitted here before seeing some
questions that can be answered by reading a FAQ I've posted here on HN before
about company hiring procedures. The last full posting of that FAQ was a while
ago,

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923)

and the tl;dr of the FAQ is "If you are hiring for any kind of job in the
United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are
hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination
with a general mental ability test."

Readers of HN have asked me to put that FAQ somewhere on the Web with a
permanent link, and I am revising it for posting to my personal website. If
you have suggestions for how to make the FAQ better, I'd be glad to hear them,
as I have already been doing further research on company hiring procedures.

------
streptomycin
The most effective way to filter on raw IQ would be to... filter on raw IQ.
But that's illegal.

~~~
tsotha
It's not technically illegal, just legally perilous. Some companies do it, but
they're companies that require a whole lot of other qualifications - "we only
hire from Harvard and Yale" or "applicants must have ten years managing at
least 150 employees".

~~~
rlanday
I think the situation is basically that it’s allowed, but employers have to
jump through probably more hoops than they should be required to to prove it’s
fair. The Supreme Court ruled in 1971 in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that Duke
Power Co. had high school graduation and IQ test requirements for all but the
lowest-level positions, the IQ requirement having been added after the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 was passed and they were made to stop directly
discriminating against black applicants. The court looked at promotion records
and decided that the requirements weren’t really predictive of anything and
served mainly to allow them to continue discriminating against black
applicants, and decided that the Civil Rights Act prohibited general
intelligence tests, so employers either have to prove that such tests are
predictive of job success, or only use tests that are written to test job-
specific abilities.

I don’t know where to find the data used in that case, but my understanding is
that intelligence tests have been shown to be broadly predictive of job
performance, more so than any tests written to test only “job-related” skills;
intuitively, it’s often better to hire someone who can more easily learn new
things than to hire someone who already has some amount of experience but has
difficulty learning new skills, drawing inferences, and dealing with
unexpected situations. So if you’re hiring someone, and you have two otherwise
equal applicants, and one scores better on an intelligence test, it makes
sense that you’d be better off hiring the one who scored higher, but this is
prohibited by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Rights Act.

Banning employers from using an effective method to choose who to hire
necessarily causes economic efficiency. It’s fascinating to think about how
much; a large part of why companies like to hire from top universities is that
that’s where the smart students are. A large part of why so many companies are
requiring college degrees for jobs that didn‘t previously require them is that
it’s an effective form of cognitive selection; as more and more students go to
college, fewer high-IQ students don’t go to college, and the IQ gap between
those who do and those who don’t grows. I think eventually someone’s going to
realize it’s possible to hire students straight out of high school on the
basis of test scores and provide them with all the necessary training,
skipping the whole process of making them spend $250,000 and four years of
their lives experimenting with drugs and getting shwasted.

~~~
tsotha
>I think the situation is basically that it’s allowed, but employers have to
jump through probably more hoops than they should be required to to prove it’s
fair.

Actually, no, you're misunderstanding the key to _Griggs_. It doesn't matter
if the test is fair if the outcome is discriminatory.

------
kenster07
Raw IQ should only be one of several components to consider. There are many
proxies for determining raw IQ, but the proxies themselves should not be the
end goal.

Remember that writing maintainable code is also about communicating an idea --
knowing how to pick the right word to describe a variable or function --
knowing how to document your code succinctly, are critical and have a
significant effect on a company's bottom line in the long-run.

Furthermore, you want to hire someone who will not negatively affect the
productivity of his coworkers with his attitude. He must be able to work
productively in a team setting.

------
kozikow
There are two major types of problems while programming. Firstly how to break
down a bigger problem into set of smaller problems. Secondly how to solve
small problems quickly and efficiently. Large scale design question represent
the former. Type three interview questions test the later. While raw IQ may he
correlating with it this is not what big tech companies are looking for IMHO.

------
samatman
The game Set would appear at first glimpse to be the same sort of raw-
horsepower IQ test.

And yet, skilled players are substantially better than unskilled players. They
also tend to be formidably intelligent people, but any game may be gamed.

