5 ms·

I think (1) is probably the primary reason, along with the fun factor I mentioned above. But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? Or at least ask

I think (1) is probably the primary reason, along with the fun factor I mentioned above. But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? Or at least asking for SAT scores? We shouldn't have to run through training puzzles just to prove we're smart enough to build a site.

deluxaran 13y ago
What kind of IQ tests? Math thinking? Language? Other? These tests are kinda old and don't prove anything besides the fact that the person has a certain level of intelligence but that doesn't mean they can code.
- kenster07 13y ago
  Exactly. I would feel much more comfortable testing the job's requisite domain-specific knowledge directly.
- morgante 13y ago
  > What kind of IQ tests? Math thinking? Language? Other? Both. They're not perfect, but I'm going to be picky and look for people who can generally reason well (both mathematically and verbally). > but that doesn't mean they can code. That's why you pair it with work samples. The ideal hire would be an impressive GitHub + evidence of intellect. The GitHub shows they have coding chops, while an IQ test usually means they can react quickly and learn new skills.
  - robryan 13y ago
    What if all your most relevant work is owned by previous employers? Restricting hires to people with decent personal projects and/ or extensive open source contributions isn't ideal either.
    - morgante 13y ago
      I'm fine with only hiring people who have done some work outside their workplace. If they're really great at programming, they have the drive to try new things outside work. Indeed, a couple good personal projects is probably the best predictor of skill you could find. (Skill and interest tend to be highly correlated.)
      - mariozivic 13y ago
        I've heard one too many times that I have to react now and voice my confusion. When you have students and you want then to have had some work done outside of coursework, I'm perfectly ok with that as I understand the merits but I wonder is it true for people 10+ years into their career. I see great people having great jobs who, if they have free time, code something that can help their current job but that code also ends up being own by the employer and is very rarely released as open source.
      - kelnos 13y ago
        I used to believe that as well. Now I'm not so sure, mainly through my own personal experience. For 5.5 years (2004-2009), I was a core developer and maintainer over at Xfce. Over that span of time I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code, perhaps more. I did this in addition to my job, which morphed from engineering project management to programming tasks that I didn't find very challenging. After I left that job, I joined a tiny, early startup. The programming work there I found very challenging, and the insane hours quickly ate up any spare time I might put toward Xfce. Eventually I realized that lacking a life outside of work made me sad, so I left. Fast forward a little bit, and now I'm at another startup, which (while demanding, challenging, and rewarding) gives me time for outside pursuits and a social life. But I don't feel the desire to work on personal coding projects anymore. The job fulfills my desire to write code, and outside of that I'd rather be, well... outside. It's interesting, because all my Xfce contributions are on git.xfce.org, and not on GitHub. My GitHub account contains 2 personal projects: a semi-finished Android UI library (which was really only relevant and useful in the 2.x days), and a script for building a Gentoo image for a Raspberry Pi (which I've since abandoned as I mainly run Debian nowadays). Looking at my GH account would be fairly unimpressive, and might even be worse than not having a GH account at all. So I'd easily fail the GitHub test. If a particular company was making that a no-go for getting through an interview pipeline, well... their loss, I guess. I'm responsible for a fair bit of hiring at my current company, and I rarely ask about personal projects anymore, unless a candidate has one listed on their resume. While I'm not always happy with the coding problems I usually give (they tend to be data-structure/algo problems that I'd probably have trouble solving in an interview setting), they do at least clearly show whether or not the candidate can write code, and I also get a rough idea of how cleanly they code, not to mention insights in how they approach and solve problems. And not being able to completely solve the problem isn't an auto-fail in my book either, as long as they tried to work on it and their approach (and whatever code they did write) was sound. I do very strongly believe in the aptitude test + work sample formula as the best way to evaluate candidates, but the problem is more that it's not always so easy to apply those tests in a traditional interview setting. Maybe that just means we need to come up with a different way of interviewing, though.
  - cromulent 13y ago
    Smart & Gets Things Done, as Joel Spolsky would say. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/1590598385?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181076229&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/15...
    - infinite8s 13y ago
      Or as Steve Yegge likes to say, "Done and Gets Thinks Smart" http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
    - infinite8s 13y ago
      Or as Steve Yegge likes to say, "Done and Gets Things Smart" http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
      - RogerL 13y ago
        That is an extremely long post that says "hire the rock stars". Except, of course, we all cannot only hire the very best, transformative people (like Jeff Dean at Google). And, he has no way to actually identify them, except "ask around". It's entirely unrealistic as a business strategy. It sure is nice if you luck into it.
  - collyw 13y ago
    And what about when all your work is internal only, so you can't show it off on GitHub?
  - svachalek 13y ago
    I agree with the principle of wanting to see code but keep in mind that expecting Github (or similar) is a bit ageist. I definitely went through a phase of my life where I coded like crazy and produced lots of interesting side projects, but that was long before Github or even Sourceforge existed. So I could point you towards some interesting stuff I passed around the BBS world in 1985, except that even I didn't bother to keep a copy after its usefulness faded. I still have a bit to show on Github and mean to put up more when I have a chance but still, most developers find that when you've got a decade or more of experience, you start to want to take on new challenges and experiences (whether family or woodworking) in your free time rather than more programming.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    I'm curious to know how many employees you currently have.
  - kenrikm 13y ago
    GitHub is a false profit. Almost every excellent programmer I know has almost nothing in their public GitHub. I've been doing this for a great many years however going off my GitHub I'm barely a programmer if that's the metric you're tracking.
- clarkm 13y ago
  But it means that they can learn quickly.
bradleyjg 13y ago
> But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? It's illigal. Or at least very very legally questionable.[1] Theoretically good proxies could be attacked in the same way, but there's a difference between doing something that could conceivably be the basis of a lawsuit and doing something that the Supreme Court has specifically ruled on. [1] See Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) http://finduslaw.com/griggs-v-duke-power-co-1971-401-us-424-91-sct-849 http://finduslaw.com/griggs-v-duke-power-co-1971-401-us-424-...
- morgante 13y ago
  I meant that mostly rhetorically in that I think that was a poor decision, or at least applied poorly. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you can show a high IQ is necessary for the job, isn't an IQ test acceptable?) Still, asking for SAT scores is still legal and they correlate decently with intelligence.
  - jacobgreenleaf 13y ago
    Actually the primary correlate of SAT scores is not intelligence but wealth.
    - thomasz 13y ago
      I'd guess that there exists a causal relationship between "intelligence" as measured by standardized tests and the sum of dollars poured into someones education.
      - epo 13y ago
        The causal relationship is with "success", i.e. exam results and college acceptance rather than "intelligence" per se.
    - smsm42 13y ago
      I suspect the actual correlation is not with wealth (i.e. giving money so somebody with low SAT scores would not actually improve their scores - unless he would have enough money to bribe whoever is overseeing the test of course ;) but with some things that correlate with wealth.
redschell 13y ago
Management consulting firms and Wall Street banks have employed somewhat strict GPA and SAT/GMAT cutoffs for quite some time, but even they can't resist the allure of brainteasers during the interview process. Google, on the other hand, appears to have done away with them, and now prefers to evaluate potential hires without giving too much weight to GPA or test scores: http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteasers-were-completely-useless-for-hiring/ http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...
- nerfhammer 13y ago
  GPA and SAT correlate well to IQ. With those two pieces of information you could estimate IQ pretty accurately.
driverdan 13y ago
Standardized tests like SATs and school grades are a terrible way of ranking a potential employee and have significant biases such as income and age. I didn't have very good grades and my SATs were ok but not great, both primarily because I didn't study or apply myself. I was completely uninterested in school. Get me to write code and you'll see what I'm capable of. I'm certainly not unique in this regard.
aestra 13y ago
Because SAT scores are a very very terrible indicator of if you have 1) the ability and 2) the work ethic to build a site. And how old are you? SAT scores? I'm only in my 30s and I don't remember my what my SAT scores were or remember if they were "good" or "bad" I only know that they changed the SATs after I took them because my youngest sibling took a different one than I did, with some crazy scoring. I wouldn't be able to find my SAT scores even if I wanted to.
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
In what way will an IQ or SAT test give you an indication if the applicant even knows what a compiler is? Your comment is cute but I'm not sure how useful it is ... :(

deluxaran 13y ago

What kind of IQ tests? Math thinking? Language? Other? These tests are kinda old and don't prove anything besides the fact that the person has a certain level of intelligence but that doesn't mean they can code.

kenster07 13y ago
Exactly. I would feel much more comfortable testing the job's requisite domain-specific knowledge directly.
morgante 13y ago
> What kind of IQ tests? Math thinking? Language? Other? Both. They're not perfect, but I'm going to be picky and look for people who can generally reason well (both mathematically and verbally). > but that doesn't mean they can code. That's why you pair it with work samples. The ideal hire would be an impressive GitHub + evidence of intellect. The GitHub shows they have coding chops, while an IQ test usually means they can react quickly and learn new skills.
- robryan 13y ago
  What if all your most relevant work is owned by previous employers? Restricting hires to people with decent personal projects and/ or extensive open source contributions isn't ideal either.
  - morgante 13y ago
    I'm fine with only hiring people who have done some work outside their workplace. If they're really great at programming, they have the drive to try new things outside work. Indeed, a couple good personal projects is probably the best predictor of skill you could find. (Skill and interest tend to be highly correlated.)
    - mariozivic 13y ago
      I've heard one too many times that I have to react now and voice my confusion. When you have students and you want then to have had some work done outside of coursework, I'm perfectly ok with that as I understand the merits but I wonder is it true for people 10+ years into their career. I see great people having great jobs who, if they have free time, code something that can help their current job but that code also ends up being own by the employer and is very rarely released as open source.
    - kelnos 13y ago
      I used to believe that as well. Now I'm not so sure, mainly through my own personal experience. For 5.5 years (2004-2009), I was a core developer and maintainer over at Xfce. Over that span of time I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code, perhaps more. I did this in addition to my job, which morphed from engineering project management to programming tasks that I didn't find very challenging. After I left that job, I joined a tiny, early startup. The programming work there I found very challenging, and the insane hours quickly ate up any spare time I might put toward Xfce. Eventually I realized that lacking a life outside of work made me sad, so I left. Fast forward a little bit, and now I'm at another startup, which (while demanding, challenging, and rewarding) gives me time for outside pursuits and a social life. But I don't feel the desire to work on personal coding projects anymore. The job fulfills my desire to write code, and outside of that I'd rather be, well... outside. It's interesting, because all my Xfce contributions are on git.xfce.org, and not on GitHub. My GitHub account contains 2 personal projects: a semi-finished Android UI library (which was really only relevant and useful in the 2.x days), and a script for building a Gentoo image for a Raspberry Pi (which I've since abandoned as I mainly run Debian nowadays). Looking at my GH account would be fairly unimpressive, and might even be worse than not having a GH account at all. So I'd easily fail the GitHub test. If a particular company was making that a no-go for getting through an interview pipeline, well... their loss, I guess. I'm responsible for a fair bit of hiring at my current company, and I rarely ask about personal projects anymore, unless a candidate has one listed on their resume. While I'm not always happy with the coding problems I usually give (they tend to be data-structure/algo problems that I'd probably have trouble solving in an interview setting), they do at least clearly show whether or not the candidate can write code, and I also get a rough idea of how cleanly they code, not to mention insights in how they approach and solve problems. And not being able to completely solve the problem isn't an auto-fail in my book either, as long as they tried to work on it and their approach (and whatever code they did write) was sound. I do very strongly believe in the aptitude test + work sample formula as the best way to evaluate candidates, but the problem is more that it's not always so easy to apply those tests in a traditional interview setting. Maybe that just means we need to come up with a different way of interviewing, though.
- cromulent 13y ago
  Smart & Gets Things Done, as Joel Spolsky would say. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/1590598385?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181076229&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/15...
  - infinite8s 13y ago
    Or as Steve Yegge likes to say, "Done and Gets Thinks Smart" http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
  - infinite8s 13y ago
    Or as Steve Yegge likes to say, "Done and Gets Things Smart" http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
    - RogerL 13y ago
      That is an extremely long post that says "hire the rock stars". Except, of course, we all cannot only hire the very best, transformative people (like Jeff Dean at Google). And, he has no way to actually identify them, except "ask around". It's entirely unrealistic as a business strategy. It sure is nice if you luck into it.
- collyw 13y ago
  And what about when all your work is internal only, so you can't show it off on GitHub?
- svachalek 13y ago
  I agree with the principle of wanting to see code but keep in mind that expecting Github (or similar) is a bit ageist. I definitely went through a phase of my life where I coded like crazy and produced lots of interesting side projects, but that was long before Github or even Sourceforge existed. So I could point you towards some interesting stuff I passed around the BBS world in 1985, except that even I didn't bother to keep a copy after its usefulness faded. I still have a bit to show on Github and mean to put up more when I have a chance but still, most developers find that when you've got a decade or more of experience, you start to want to take on new challenges and experiences (whether family or woodworking) in your free time rather than more programming.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  I'm curious to know how many employees you currently have.
- kenrikm 13y ago
  GitHub is a false profit. Almost every excellent programmer I know has almost nothing in their public GitHub. I've been doing this for a great many years however going off my GitHub I'm barely a programmer if that's the metric you're tracking.
clarkm 13y ago
But it means that they can learn quickly.

bradleyjg 13y ago

> But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? It's illigal. Or at least very very legally questionable.[1] Theoretically good proxies could be attacked in the same way, but there's a difference between doing something that could conceivably be the basis of a lawsuit and doing something that the Supreme Court has specifically ruled on. [1] See Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) http://finduslaw.com/griggs-v-duke-power-co-1971-401-us-424-91-sct-849 http://finduslaw.com/griggs-v-duke-power-co-1971-401-us-424-...

morgante 13y ago
I meant that mostly rhetorically in that I think that was a poor decision, or at least applied poorly. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you can show a high IQ is necessary for the job, isn't an IQ test acceptable?) Still, asking for SAT scores is still legal and they correlate decently with intelligence.
- jacobgreenleaf 13y ago
  Actually the primary correlate of SAT scores is not intelligence but wealth.
  - thomasz 13y ago
    I'd guess that there exists a causal relationship between "intelligence" as measured by standardized tests and the sum of dollars poured into someones education.
    - epo 13y ago
      The causal relationship is with "success", i.e. exam results and college acceptance rather than "intelligence" per se.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    I suspect the actual correlation is not with wealth (i.e. giving money so somebody with low SAT scores would not actually improve their scores - unless he would have enough money to bribe whoever is overseeing the test of course ;) but with some things that correlate with wealth.

redschell 13y ago

Management consulting firms and Wall Street banks have employed somewhat strict GPA and SAT/GMAT cutoffs for quite some time, but even they can't resist the allure of brainteasers during the interview process. Google, on the other hand, appears to have done away with them, and now prefers to evaluate potential hires without giving too much weight to GPA or test scores: http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteasers-were-completely-useless-for-hiring/ http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...

nerfhammer 13y ago
GPA and SAT correlate well to IQ. With those two pieces of information you could estimate IQ pretty accurately.

driverdan 13y ago

Standardized tests like SATs and school grades are a terrible way of ranking a potential employee and have significant biases such as income and age. I didn't have very good grades and my SATs were ok but not great, both primarily because I didn't study or apply myself. I was completely uninterested in school. Get me to write code and you'll see what I'm capable of. I'm certainly not unique in this regard.

aestra 13y ago

Because SAT scores are a very very terrible indicator of if you have 1) the ability and 2) the work ethic to build a site. And how old are you? SAT scores? I'm only in my 30s and I don't remember my what my SAT scores were or remember if they were "good" or "bad" I only know that they changed the SATs after I took them because my youngest sibling took a different one than I did, with some crazy scoring. I wouldn't be able to find my SAT scores even if I wanted to.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

In what way will an IQ or SAT test give you an indication if the applicant even knows what a compiler is? Your comment is cute but I'm not sure how useful it is ... :(