5 ms·

Does Klarna still do the IQ test as part of their hiring process?

artemonster 5y ago
tangential thought, but related: I am, in general, a proponent of nuclear energy as a green alternative to whatever the hell we are doing today. But when I see such stories that humans manage to fuck up simple payment processing apps, still make errors while maintaining bridges, still manage to do hugely negligent screw-ups (most likely corrupt) in *cable cars maintenance*, I immediately think that it is imminent, that something will go wrong with such complex thing as a nuclear reactor and the price there is much bigger.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  The Italian cable car was really messed up. The emergency brakes of that cart were intermittently triggering, so the operator jammed a piece of metal to stop that from happening. His assumption is surely, "Relax, what's going to happen, the cable won't break!".
  - ectopod 5y ago
    > The emergency brakes of that cart were intermittently triggering My guess: each time a strand within the cable broke the cable stretched a little and the brake triggered. Five years ago a company was hired to maintain the cable car. They took one look at the state of it, wrote to the operator (the town council) saying it needed to be shut down and exited the contract. It was an accident waiting to happen long before the brake fiasco.
- viraptor 5y ago
  I kind of get the worry, but the requirements and processes seem to scale exponentially with reliability needs. Online companies may fuck up every day in new and creative ways and we barely get to hear about it. On the other hand we know of every nuclear failure so far with enough public details to discuss the whole time line, system design, steps each person followed, etc. and the death count is still minimal. Then each of those is an input to the future processes. Nuclear power plants and air traffic are in their own class of reliability and safety processes - not even comparable to that's happening in internet commerce.
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    We know every nuclear failure. We don't know every time a strong nuclear risk existed but by chance, didn't trigger. Nuclear power plants are probably much safer on average, but it only takes one corner cutting plant to cause a nuclear accident. That said, I'm also pro-nuclear.
- lwhi 5y ago
  Yes! We will always make huge mistakes. .. so we need to accept the eventuality that the worst result will eventually occur.
  - pdkl95 5y ago
    ...which is why it's important to design things to fail safely. That "worst result" needs to be minimized by design.
    - lwhi 5y ago
      With nuclear .. that's probably a bit difficult
      - zentiggr 5y ago
        There are much-safer-by-design reactor plans out there now. Hopefully the "nuclear is horribly unsafe by default" opinions will consider the new options.
        lwhi 5y ago
        The worst scenario is always meltdown.
- swiley 5y ago
  There are also plenty of services with really incredible uptime. You just don't hear about them because they're deep in whatever stack you're using and haven't broken publicly in decades. It's all about good engineering practice and architecture.
- papito 5y ago
  In fairness, the government does not watch over your shoulder if you write code for payment apps. Nuclear energy oversight is so over-the-top, it's almost not worth doing it.
sidebits 5y ago
yes
vishnugupta 5y ago
Oh boy this brought back memories for me. I thought that IQ test was screening test, pre-phone interview. But no, they had me redo it at the onsite interview too. The funny part was the onsite test had the exact same questions as pre-phone interview. edit: typo
- domano 5y ago
  Maybe to check for cheaters
  - claudex 5y ago
    Asking the same question doesn't help a lot to find cheater with a memory.
    - macintux 5y ago
      Weeds out those who had someone else take it, though.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Ha. I remember doing it too. I was at work in a meeting and they have instructions saying something to the tune of finding a quiet place and all of that, but my thoughts were if they are serious about this, then solving these abstract problems is something I'll have to be able to do while under pressure or under the heat of conversation. Long story short anyway, I'm not intelligent enough to work there I guess, so good thing they used that test to screen me out and make sure I knew. It does have a little bit of merit with the very quick no versus the long, drawn out no. I recently interviewed at a great company, 4 1-1 interviews, a presentation/demo I had to make to present to 7 other people, etc. and I think another interview after that and I'm just over it.
kukallan 5y ago
Yes, sadly a quite common part in too many recruitment processes here in Sweden.
- domano 5y ago
  Wow, first time i hear that. Aren't those IQ test horribly biased?
  - pvillano 5y ago
    not only that, but they aren't a great predictor of actual job performance
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      Depends on the job actually. (I know this will be unpopular but in my experience hiring for certain roles it is correlated)
      - willeh 5y ago
        This is exactly why these IQ-test companies make so much money. It gives out yeses and no:s confirmation bias does the rest. Quickly why they don't work: You create a huge chain correlational assumptions. First that visual-spatial tasks of this kind predict performance on visual tasks. 2. That performance on visual tasks predict general intelligence (whatever that is). 3. That this notion of general intelligence (which is usually and arbitrarily defined not to include social skills) actually correlates with the tasks that you think the person will be performing, and finally that your idea of what the role has an impact on the company. Of course it is completely absurd, what they are selling is snake oil, plain and simple. The remedy I recommend is simple, talk to the person - do it and you will be able to tell within 5 minutes.
        ericmay 5y ago
        Right - and the general intelligence thing is funny too because all of these companies want to hire specialists in some area, not generally intelligent people.
linoor 5y ago
They did it a year ago when I was applying there. I was so annoyed it almost made me cancel the interview. In the end I canceled, because they didn't allow working from home.
yunohn 5y ago
Yep, took it just a month ago. Quite dumb honestly, not sure what it indicates. It was a bunch of weird pattern matching and guessing? Seemed easy, but got a rejection a week later.
arthur_sav 5y ago
We are all mistakes that sometimes make humans.
philbert101 5y ago
It's not an IQ test. It's just pattern recognition which is about 5% of the tasks you do in a real IQ test. When I joined Klarna in 2011, the test was so easy that I joked I could score full marks on it even if I was hungover with no sleep. There was one question on the test that actually had 2 correct answers depending on what logic you applied. This was actually a real issue when recruiting, because there was a hard cut-off to make it into the engineering department, and several times I had to ask "what was their answer on question 12?" It caused quite a bit of commotion at HR to change the official test scoring to 2 correct answers for that question. Now the test is like a million times harder and your score at the end is between 0-10 and you have no idea how many questions you actually answered correctly. I would be very interested to know the "true" answers of these new tests to understand what kind of crazy logic you need to apply to get every question right. I'm almost certain it would take me longer to understand the answer than the time you have to do the test.
- tremon 5y ago
  It's not an IQ test. It's just pattern recognition which is about 5% of the tasks you do in a real IQ test. So it is an IQ test, just not a comprehensive one?
- piva00 5y ago
  That test was always stupid and fought hard by a lot of engineers that considered it so. It was still kept even after a lot of pushback. I left the interviewing team due to that, I couldn't be part of a process that considered that step not only required but as a hard cutoff for engineers. I lost so many great candidates that would be great hires to my teams at Klarna to that stupid test.
throwkeep 5y ago
They did that? Although, I guess Google does IQ tests too in effect? But it's called "solve this puzzle" and "here's a riddle".
- ericmay 5y ago
  I don't think they do those anymore. At least when I've interviewed there (2x) over the last couple of years I did not encounter any of those types of questions.
canada_dry 5y ago
When I applied to work for a bank in Canada back in the 80's I had to write a Wolfe-Spence Programming Aptitude Test (was basically an IQ test). The hiring company would send your answer sheet and work sheets off to the company to analyze and provide a score. Anyone else remember those?
Rapzid 5y ago
Doesn't almost everybody? I mean let's get real here, what's the IQ distribution at FAANG or any other competitive software engineering company? There may not be an explicit "IQ" portion to the process, or a hard number, but they are absolutely filtering on intelligence. An uncomfortable aspect of our society that I'm both surprised and not surprised doesn't get talked about much.

tangential thought, but related: I am, in general, a proponent of nuclear energy as a green alternative to whatever the hell we are doing today. But when I see such stories that humans manage to fuck up simple payment processing apps, still make errors while maintaining bridges, still manage to do hugely negligent screw-ups (most likely corrupt) in *cable cars maintenance*, I immediately think that it is imminent, that something will go wrong with such complex thing as a nuclear reactor and the price there is much bigger.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
The Italian cable car was really messed up. The emergency brakes of that cart were intermittently triggering, so the operator jammed a piece of metal to stop that from happening. His assumption is surely, "Relax, what's going to happen, the cable won't break!".
- ectopod 5y ago
  > The emergency brakes of that cart were intermittently triggering My guess: each time a strand within the cable broke the cable stretched a little and the brake triggered. Five years ago a company was hired to maintain the cable car. They took one look at the state of it, wrote to the operator (the town council) saying it needed to be shut down and exited the contract. It was an accident waiting to happen long before the brake fiasco.
viraptor 5y ago
I kind of get the worry, but the requirements and processes seem to scale exponentially with reliability needs. Online companies may fuck up every day in new and creative ways and we barely get to hear about it. On the other hand we know of every nuclear failure so far with enough public details to discuss the whole time line, system design, steps each person followed, etc. and the death count is still minimal. Then each of those is an input to the future processes. Nuclear power plants and air traffic are in their own class of reliability and safety processes - not even comparable to that's happening in internet commerce.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  We know every nuclear failure. We don't know every time a strong nuclear risk existed but by chance, didn't trigger. Nuclear power plants are probably much safer on average, but it only takes one corner cutting plant to cause a nuclear accident. That said, I'm also pro-nuclear.
lwhi 5y ago
Yes! We will always make huge mistakes. .. so we need to accept the eventuality that the worst result will eventually occur.
- pdkl95 5y ago
  ...which is why it's important to design things to fail safely. That "worst result" needs to be minimized by design.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    With nuclear .. that's probably a bit difficult
    - zentiggr 5y ago
      There are much-safer-by-design reactor plans out there now. Hopefully the "nuclear is horribly unsafe by default" opinions will consider the new options.
      - lwhi 5y ago
        The worst scenario is always meltdown.
swiley 5y ago
There are also plenty of services with really incredible uptime. You just don't hear about them because they're deep in whatever stack you're using and haven't broken publicly in decades. It's all about good engineering practice and architecture.
papito 5y ago
In fairness, the government does not watch over your shoulder if you write code for payment apps. Nuclear energy oversight is so over-the-top, it's almost not worth doing it.

sidebits 5y ago

yes

vishnugupta 5y ago

Oh boy this brought back memories for me. I thought that IQ test was screening test, pre-phone interview. But no, they had me redo it at the onsite interview too. The funny part was the onsite test had the exact same questions as pre-phone interview. edit: typo

domano 5y ago
Maybe to check for cheaters
- claudex 5y ago
  Asking the same question doesn't help a lot to find cheater with a memory.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Weeds out those who had someone else take it, though.
ericmay 5y ago
Ha. I remember doing it too. I was at work in a meeting and they have instructions saying something to the tune of finding a quiet place and all of that, but my thoughts were if they are serious about this, then solving these abstract problems is something I'll have to be able to do while under pressure or under the heat of conversation. Long story short anyway, I'm not intelligent enough to work there I guess, so good thing they used that test to screen me out and make sure I knew. It does have a little bit of merit with the very quick no versus the long, drawn out no. I recently interviewed at a great company, 4 1-1 interviews, a presentation/demo I had to make to present to 7 other people, etc. and I think another interview after that and I'm just over it.

kukallan 5y ago

Yes, sadly a quite common part in too many recruitment processes here in Sweden.

domano 5y ago
Wow, first time i hear that. Aren't those IQ test horribly biased?
- pvillano 5y ago
  not only that, but they aren't a great predictor of actual job performance
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Depends on the job actually. (I know this will be unpopular but in my experience hiring for certain roles it is correlated)
    - willeh 5y ago
      This is exactly why these IQ-test companies make so much money. It gives out yeses and no:s confirmation bias does the rest. Quickly why they don't work: You create a huge chain correlational assumptions. First that visual-spatial tasks of this kind predict performance on visual tasks. 2. That performance on visual tasks predict general intelligence (whatever that is). 3. That this notion of general intelligence (which is usually and arbitrarily defined not to include social skills) actually correlates with the tasks that you think the person will be performing, and finally that your idea of what the role has an impact on the company. Of course it is completely absurd, what they are selling is snake oil, plain and simple. The remedy I recommend is simple, talk to the person - do it and you will be able to tell within 5 minutes.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        Right - and the general intelligence thing is funny too because all of these companies want to hire specialists in some area, not generally intelligent people.

linoor 5y ago

They did it a year ago when I was applying there. I was so annoyed it almost made me cancel the interview. In the end I canceled, because they didn't allow working from home.

yunohn 5y ago

Yep, took it just a month ago. Quite dumb honestly, not sure what it indicates. It was a bunch of weird pattern matching and guessing? Seemed easy, but got a rejection a week later.

arthur_sav 5y ago

We are all mistakes that sometimes make humans.

philbert101 5y ago

It's not an IQ test. It's just pattern recognition which is about 5% of the tasks you do in a real IQ test. When I joined Klarna in 2011, the test was so easy that I joked I could score full marks on it even if I was hungover with no sleep. There was one question on the test that actually had 2 correct answers depending on what logic you applied. This was actually a real issue when recruiting, because there was a hard cut-off to make it into the engineering department, and several times I had to ask "what was their answer on question 12?" It caused quite a bit of commotion at HR to change the official test scoring to 2 correct answers for that question. Now the test is like a million times harder and your score at the end is between 0-10 and you have no idea how many questions you actually answered correctly. I would be very interested to know the "true" answers of these new tests to understand what kind of crazy logic you need to apply to get every question right. I'm almost certain it would take me longer to understand the answer than the time you have to do the test.

tremon 5y ago
It's not an IQ test. It's just pattern recognition which is about 5% of the tasks you do in a real IQ test. So it is an IQ test, just not a comprehensive one?
piva00 5y ago
That test was always stupid and fought hard by a lot of engineers that considered it so. It was still kept even after a lot of pushback. I left the interviewing team due to that, I couldn't be part of a process that considered that step not only required but as a hard cutoff for engineers. I lost so many great candidates that would be great hires to my teams at Klarna to that stupid test.

throwkeep 5y ago

They did that? Although, I guess Google does IQ tests too in effect? But it's called "solve this puzzle" and "here's a riddle".

ericmay 5y ago
I don't think they do those anymore. At least when I've interviewed there (2x) over the last couple of years I did not encounter any of those types of questions.

canada_dry 5y ago

When I applied to work for a bank in Canada back in the 80's I had to write a Wolfe-Spence Programming Aptitude Test (was basically an IQ test). The hiring company would send your answer sheet and work sheets off to the company to analyze and provide a score. Anyone else remember those?

Rapzid 5y ago

Doesn't almost everybody? I mean let's get real here, what's the IQ distribution at FAANG or any other competitive software engineering company? There may not be an explicit "IQ" portion to the process, or a hard number, but they are absolutely filtering on intelligence. An uncomfortable aspect of our society that I'm both surprised and not surprised doesn't get talked about much.