> it's illegal in the US to require job candidates to take IQ tests. > So the issue for companies is that without the usual whiteboarding or educational paper

> it's illegal in the US to require job candidates to take IQ tests. > So the issue for companies is that without the usual whiteboarding or educational paper trail you have to find a way to identify high IQ people without being too obvious about it. Yup. I was surprised to find myself gravitating to this through trial-and-error, since I had pretty thoroughly absorbed my affluent coastal background's bullshit religious conviction in the pure blank slate of every human mind and the uselessness of intelligence as a distinct concept. > The other issue is if you find no-experience very-smart people you have to spend time training them before they start being productive. This works if you're not in a hurry, but it's harder to justify when runway is limited. Right, the other ingredient that I mentioned was that the engineering work we needed didn't require any specific skills. The vast majority of our engineering work was just a Python backend, which is about as "pure" an exercise of manipulating logic as you get in engineering.