I've always felt like a good data point in favor of IQ playing a non-trivial role in suitability for programming is the fact that anti-credentialist moves like 10-week coding bootcamps have been so incredibly successful.
Bootcamps took off shortly after I graduated from my top-ranked CS program, and I remember being extremely dismissive of their value: there was no way that you could fit the four years of my CS degree into ten weeks. I've since realized that being good at Computer Science grossly overqualifies you for many programming jobs, and that bootcamps do a great job of giving reasonably smart people an on-ramp to these jobs. I know three separate people who jumpstarted six-figure careers from scratch after attending a bootcamp: one was a waitress, one an artist, and one's entire career thus far consisted of a decade of changing tires at Costco. One of the three wasn't college-educated, and two were first-generation Mexican immigrants (as children) from working-class families, belying the assumption that privilege and educational access fully explains programming ability. Unsurprisingly, all three are fairly intelligent people.
I can't think of another industry that has a similarly egalitarian entry path, and I think a very plausible explanation is that suitability for these types of entry-level programming jobs is little more than a test for high IQ (relative to the population norm).
This is my experience as well. During an ill-advised foray into building the tech org for a mediocre startup with a poor candidate pipeline, the quality of candidates we got was so poor and the work we were hiring for so easy that I pretty immediately found myself dropping every requirement except for knowledge of basic programming + intelligence. This worked pretty well: The no-experience, very-smart guy that I strongly recommended hiring became the capable workhorse of the eng team, and the dumb guy with a decade of experience that the founders hired over my objection was an absolute dumpster fire, unable to work with any autonomy and bounced from area to area in an effort to find a place where he would do the least damage.
You do indeed get very smart people doing menial work, and their talents are largely wasted.
IQ has always been a good indicator of programming skill. Unfortunately school grades and specialisation aren't a good indicator of IQ, and (I think?) 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.
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.
> 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.
<<I've since realized that being good at Computer Science grossly overqualifies you for many programming jobs>>
Thank you. What a naked and honest thing to say on HackerNews. My brother is so much smarter than me. I went the CompSci route and suffered (toiled!) for years at a university. His boot camp was less than three months and he landed a just fine job. Internally, I was incredibly dismissive of his boot camp, but was proven wrong (again!) by my own horrible elitism.
No everyone needs to be working on cutting edge ML/AI. My brother makes websites for shopping. (Yay.) His income easily doubled after a year of cutting his teeth.
I experienced this from the other direction, joining Google and assuming the work would be stimulating because it's The Best Smart-Person Job (at least at the time). I didn't have a lot of good mentorship, so it took me years of wrong turns until I found myself where I am today, finally feeling like my career doing Applied CS Research is a good fit for me.
Bootcamps took off shortly after I graduated from my top-ranked CS program, and I remember being extremely dismissive of their value: there was no way that you could fit the four years of my CS degree into ten weeks. I've since realized that being good at Computer Science grossly overqualifies you for many programming jobs, and that bootcamps do a great job of giving reasonably smart people an on-ramp to these jobs. I know three separate people who jumpstarted six-figure careers from scratch after attending a bootcamp: one was a waitress, one an artist, and one's entire career thus far consisted of a decade of changing tires at Costco. One of the three wasn't college-educated, and two were first-generation Mexican immigrants (as children) from working-class families, belying the assumption that privilege and educational access fully explains programming ability. Unsurprisingly, all three are fairly intelligent people.
I can't think of another industry that has a similarly egalitarian entry path, and I think a very plausible explanation is that suitability for these types of entry-level programming jobs is little more than a test for high IQ (relative to the population norm).
This is my experience as well. During an ill-advised foray into building the tech org for a mediocre startup with a poor candidate pipeline, the quality of candidates we got was so poor and the work we were hiring for so easy that I pretty immediately found myself dropping every requirement except for knowledge of basic programming + intelligence. This worked pretty well: The no-experience, very-smart guy that I strongly recommended hiring became the capable workhorse of the eng team, and the dumb guy with a decade of experience that the founders hired over my objection was an absolute dumpster fire, unable to work with any autonomy and bounced from area to area in an effort to find a place where he would do the least damage.