HN user
Not surprising in the slightest. I work in machine learning and no longer trust most papers I read. A lot of papers have fabricated or dishonest results, and the people who publish these results are often the ones who get recognition, jobs at FB etc. It happens in all fields of so-called "science".
That is malice.
Doesn't have to be a standard IQ test, I would be fine with the test being about algorithms and systems design type questions. Just please remove the biased human component from interviews and use a more standardized metric across a group of people instead of randomly chosen questions for each candidate with subjective evaluation. The current process is not great even for people with good tech skill due to the randomness and subjective evaluation factors.
Also you are wrong about standard IQ tests not being able to measure relevant skills for tech companies. They not perfect but I bet even those would do a better job than the current process. The psychometric research is clear that they are useful for predicting results across a wide variety of domains.
But some races were likely separated for longer than that, so these mutations are likely uneven across populations. Very disturbing if true.
Well I appreciate these interview loops because at least they are still far more objective than big company promo processes when whoever lies the most and forces others to do their dirty work gets promoted. I do wish the interview process was even more objective, just administer and extremely difficult IQ Test instead.
the vast majority of ML/data scientist positions are actually similar to the hypothetical ML engineer position you described.