Top Tech Companies: You filter on raw IQ, here is how to do it more effectively

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/

by nadam • 13 years ago

32 31 13 years ago

nadamhu.wordpress.com

mynameisme• 13 years ago

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

honu• 13 years ago

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.

larsberg• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

kyllo2• 13 years ago

larsberg dated himself by saying C; most companies today would want you to do it in your choice of either Java or C++. They would let you use objects, not make you do it with structs.

ep103• 13 years ago

Could I have an example of walk though and describe the memory state? Do you mean just describing what references are in the stack and heap?

EllaMentry2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

EllaMentry2• 13 years ago

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.

kyllo2• 13 years ago

A lot of people take criticism of their work as personal attacks. They don't have the ability to separate the two. Those kinds of people are not fun to work with, particularly in a peer review situation. You don't want to hire people who will break down during code review because someone else didn't like the way they coded something.

streptomycin• 13 years ago

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

thirsteh2• 13 years ago

Except for cops.

daniel-cussen• 13 years ago

And the military.

tsotha2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

wmil• 13 years ago

It'd actually be pretty safe to do it in the tech industry.

The DoJ and activists are only interested in suing companies where a) it's difficult to rate individual performance and b) judges think that "anyone can do that job"

kozikow• 13 years ago

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.

rachelbythebay• 13 years ago

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.

samatman• 13 years ago

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.

kenster07• 13 years ago

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.

od2m• 13 years ago

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.

edmond_dantes2• 13 years ago

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

MDS100• 13 years ago

ADHS?

edmond_dantes2• 13 years ago

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.

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

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. :)

tokenadult• 13 years ago

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

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.

Top Tech Companies: You filter on raw IQ, here is how to do it more effectively

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