Exercises for anyone who thinks this way:

1. Pick an individual sport (running, swimming, biking)

2. Study an elite athlete in that sport

3. Try to get as good as them.

What you'll notice is that, in fact, you can get really really far.

Coding is the same way -- I doubt someone who can't get through a book would ever become Jeff Dean (same way most of us won't be Usain Bolt), but they can become employable and lead a good, meaningful, productive life doing coding!

Brains aren't so different from muscle fibers ... they can grow and learn anything with enough activation.

While this line of thinking has become en vogue, especially to dismiss the notion of IQ entirely, I think doing so causes more harm to individuals. Yes we all have the same malleable brains with the potential of learning, but it just seems like some people come out way ahead, and over the course of a lifetime, that head start becomes insurmountable, in my opinion, and Psychology 100% firmly agrees.

For all the flack the field of psychology gets, one of the most replicated studies in it's history is IQ and it's predictive nature of positive outcomes such as health, school success, job success, mental health, etc

First a quote, and then some sources.

"IQ doesn't necessarily set the limit for what we can do, but it does give us a starting point. And the truth is some people start ahead."

- IQ measured in childhood correlates with important life outcomes, including school success, job success, health, mental health, and longevity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170757/

- All psychological traits are partially heritable, including intelligence http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Tea...

- The Heritability of IQ increases with age https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7a6b/ad93d88b0158d449881e56...

- One final one, having trouble tracking the source down but particularly relevant here to HN and YComb -- Higher IQ correlates to success of founders

When I say intellectual arrogance ... what I mean is the following:

Many coding jobs are equivalent to being a brick layer (intellectually)

Most CS degrees teach you how to benchpress 500 lbs.

To a large degree you have to be genetically gifted to bench 500 lbs ... but you really don't need that to be a brick layer.

So my point is not that you aren't right... you are. But rather, my point is, there is a lot of menial work to be done that involves code... and not all of it has to be done by high IQ people. As "software eats the world" more and more work will be produced. Coding will become more like addition and subtraction. If you went back to the age of the greeks, they were probably sitting there thinking that no one would ever need to use this stuff except for "High IQ people" like themselves.

Anything remotely as simple and repeatable as "brick laying" gets automated in the industry. Nobody pays the requisite >$100k/yr in the Bay for something that simple.

You complain about "arrogance", but your notion that there's many coding jobs out there that are as mindless as brick laying actually reveals a much sharper bias, and is simply untrue.

> Most CS degrees teach you how to benchpress 500 lbs.

Right... so you and your CS-graduating friends can "benchpress 500 lbs" intellectually, but fortunately most coding jobs are so trivial they're like "brick laying".

Who are you calling arrogant again?

In reality, this dichotomy doesn't exist. There's no upper-class/lower-class chasm in any tech company I know. Everyone is competing for the same jobs.

Maybe now you can understand why someone who never went to college and just completed a 4-10 month course finds it hard to compete with you Stanford kids.

Automation happens, but you still need somone to supervise things.

Brick laying is completely repeatable iteration, requiring no modification or thinking. Anything "directly comparable" to that can be done by a program. That's not a job - that's a short programming project.

More broadly, there's always a set of roles which haven't been automated... just yet.

Being a sysadmin, for example, used to be a job. People used to be able to make pretty good living from managing a small custom set of servers sitting in a room somewhere. It was extremely common, too. Almost every company had some of these people on payroll. Must have seemed like a good, secure career.

It required a ton more learning, skills, and thinking than brick laying. Yet it got completely automated. Now we have devops, which are programmers who write programs to do what sysadmins used to do. Each devop is effectively replacing hundreds or more of those former sysadmins, by leveraging automation.

Also, plenty of system administrators still make a good living out there. Just as their are still companies running 40 year old code. Automation is less about replacing every system administrator as it is allowing companies to have fewer of them. Which eventually means it’s not a full time job and it’s folded into other tasks.

Generally the costs of automation outweigh the benifits at some point and people sit in the middle. Look at a coke bottling plant and their is one manual step where a guy loads the can lids into the machine. It’s just one guy and he gets something like 1,700 cans a minute so it’s just not a big deal.

PS: See 5:00 to 6:00 on this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nHQXxhd4CHE#fauxfullscreen

Sure, but that's exactly my point.

One devop who is much more capable in programming, leverages his superior skills to automate away 20-50 sysadmins.

That one devop still has a job. In fact, he is probably promoted and makes more money than any of the single sysadmin he replaces, since he his set of skills and abilities is more rare. But that doesn't change the fact that 29-49 lower-skilled tech workers are now out of a job.

All these people went into sysadmin training because someone naively projected very high demand for their relatively limited skillset. Then they got automated away.

The same process is happening relentlessly. Ever more so as the cost of living in places like the Bay skyrockets. Companies employ fewer people, pay each of them more, but expect a very large amount of output from each.

So telling people "hey, you don't have to be smart, or learn much, to have a great career in tech" is simply misleading. Take a guess at the number of sysadmins who followed this advice, and have out of a job since the advent of the cloud.

To inject some reality into these wild numbers being thrown around so casually: 90 IQ is the bottom 25% percentile. Someone with 90 IQ would be noticeably slower than about 75% of the entire population.

Not just "people and you know and worked with". Less intelligent than 75% of everyone in the US.

I really doubt you worked with anyone like that.

When folks talk about "you don't need to go to Stanford to be a programmer", they mean you can be a programmer with maybe 110 IQ (top 25%, which is still not what most of us here would consider "smart") versus 135 IQ (top 1%, which is what top tech is aiming to hire).

Anyway, I think people vastly over estimate IQ’s of people they work with. Look at the number of 17 year olds in the US compare that with the top schools minus smart people not going to top schools. Now consider each school gets a fraction of that and Stanford students really don’t have that high of a median IQ. Extreme outliers pull the average up, but the bottom 50% at standard are just not that impressive.

Very few people had their IQ measured properly.

Either way, I doubt you ever worked with a programmer who really did have 90 IQ. Not to put too fine a point on it: such a person would appear dumb and slow. It will take them a long time to understand anything. They'll be disruptive and a drag on everyone else.

There's a reason top tech spends billions (!) recruiting a highly intelligent workforce.

> Look at the number of 17 year olds in the US compare that with the top schools minus smart people not going to top schools. Now consider each school gets a fraction of that and Stanford students really don’t have that high of a median IQ.

Well, I did the math.

Per the NCES, there were 16.9m undergraduates in 2016. Stanford had about 7,000 undergrads the same year, which includes all departments, including non-STEM like Art and English. Let's say there are 10 schools at Stanford's level (there aren't). That still means schools at that top level will accept only 0.4% of applicants.

That means they could easily pick only candidates with 140 IQ or more.

Of course, they don't, but the IQ at these institutions will still be pretty high.

> I think people vastly over estimate IQ’s of people they work with.

I think you under estimate the IQ of people you work with :)

I'll be surprised if you worked with anyone below 100 IQ (population average).

In fact I'll be pretty surprised if you worked with any programmer below 110 IQ.

That’s way off base. Schools like MIT and Stanfard are comparable for CS students. But High IQ people are not so limited. So, you need to include say Cal Arts which absolutely stomps Standfard for people interested in Animation etc. Standfard might reasonably attract 1% of the very high IQ population if you assume high IQ people go to elite schools. But, as a CS student that took an actual IQ test and was classified as exceptionally gifted aka 160-174 IQ, I can say never had any interest in doing so. IQ tests are relatively uncommon now days, but historically high IQ people where very likely to choose local options and not infrequently avoid collage and join the military etc. There is very little evidence this has changed.

Anyway, 90 IQ is really close enough to average not to appear significantly different in most situations.

Population average? Maybe. Subpopulation of professional programmers average? Less likely.

Granted, it’s a somewhat more abstract skill than most things. But, plenty of young children learn basic programming and brain development means a 90 IQ adult is generally more capable of preforming tasks than a 110 IQ child. Sure, the child learns faster, but that’s of limited long term value.

Honestly, building the same basic CRUD application for some random government agency is just not that difficult. People like that don’t make 200+k, but they make up the bulk of professional programmers out there.

PS: I did say he seemed a little slow for a programmer, but still capable of the job.

There were 162.63 million people employed in the US as of October 2018, according to the BLS: https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?graph_name=LN_c...

That makes programmers 0.7% of the total working population.

It can easily be seen as an elite field.

Tech companies could theoretically disqualify anyone with an IQ less than 130 and still be left with over x3 times more candidates than working programmer positions in the US.

Any profession that wants to attract 1+ million people simply can’t be that selective.

You keep making claims, then reliable data is presented to refute these claims, which you ignore, and pile up more unsubstantiated claims.

Most recently in this thread, you claimed:

> Their are around 1.17 million programmers in the US, that’s far from an elite field.

I showed by official BLS data that this means only 0.7% of US workers are programmers, and it can thus certainly be considered an "elite field", and employers can certainly limit job offers to high-IQ candidates. You just ignored that and proceeded to make absurd more absurd, patently false claims:

> Any profession that wants to attract 1+ million people simply can’t be that selective.

An absurd claim, demonstrating complete ignorance of statistics.

If I have to choose 1m out of 1.5m, I can't be very selective.

If I have to choose 1m out of a work force of 162m, then I can certainly be very selective.

It no longer makes sense to resume this discussion.

You are confusing theory with practice. In theory some field like investment banking could attract every single one of the smartest people, in practice that does not happen.

Doctors are considered an ‘elite field’ yet their are 950,000 active licensed physicians (ALPs) in the U.S. Lawyers are not nessisarily as presegious and cover 1.3 million jobs.

Sure, a top law firm, research hospital, etc can be selective. But, you don’t see even 1/5 of the smartest people enter any one field. Chess grand masters have higher IQ’s than the average population but that’s in large part because it’s a small group. Medicine, Science, Art, Law, Computers, etc all have very smart people at the top of the field, but the elite don’t represent the minimum. Even the professional world does not have a monopoly as you will find some people with 160+ IQ’s working in fast food or raft guides for various reasons.

I said they generally don't because they don't have the stamina, discipline, and curiosity to do so.

Some do. The minority. Most don't.

Respondents are attacking me as if I am saying this is how things should be.

Trust me, I wish it was the opposite. I've been involved in hiring in all my recent roles, and we'd be happy to hire anyone who has enough motivation, discipline, and interest in the field to learn CS and React through books and come work for us.

There's just not many of these.

I didn't make it so. I didn't stand behind people taking Udacity courses and whispered in their ear "give up!" like some sort of comical Satan.

If I could, I'd whisper "Try harder! You can succeed!"

However when I did end up interviewing folks coming out of code bootcamps, I ended up not being able to offer them a job.

Bluntly, most of them seemed to have no real interest in tech. They initially studied something else, were on a different track in life, typically had little interest in tech at best. Then they heard you can make 6 figures in tech no problem, and I met them 4-10 months later, often after they went through some lazy course designed specifically to game my interview process.

Results from recruiting straight out of bootcamp simply do not justify the effort.

In fact they're so bad that despite all our need for talent, we don't hire anyone straight out of bootcamp anymore. We'll gladly be your second job after bootcamp, but never your first.

Because the vast majority who even complete these bootcamps realize the money isn't enough to keep them engaged in a field they don't inherently like - which is why they didn't go to tech in the first place.

My impression is that a large majority of them leave the field after working for a short while on their new job. This is based on reports from friends in the industry + the fact we get a ton of resumes from people who just finished bootcamp, but very few from people who finished bootcamp and then worked in the industry for any amount of time.

All this is for people who signed up and finished a bootcamp, which is already a high bar. The amount of people who bought a "micro-degree" from commercial companies like Udacity is probably far larger, and only a tiny minority of them even completed this relatively easy course (look up MOOC completion ratios), let alone went through a bootcamp which is far more taxing and less accessible.

People will probably attack me like I'm the evil wizard who conjured this unfortunate situation. They're killing the messenger.

With that being said they were all quant majors in undergrad, and actually enjoyed coding.

I've also seen people with non-quant backgrounds land ok jobs doing menial coding (e.g working at an accounting firm on database stuff) ... but they are still making $50k-70k and happy about it... they got there by doing a coding bootcamp.

Those are the two categories I'm talking about. I'm guessing you probably work at a company like Facebook or Google -- and I agree those companies can't find good candidates that meet their bar. I've worked at those places myself.

Right, this is top edge of bootcamp folks, and these guys do get hired and do succeed.

You're talking about folks who completed a tough STEM degree and then switched to tech. These are the folks you know. But these are already pre-selected people. They were already in the top 1% "most likely to succeed" before they even set foot in the bootcamp.

You're missing the 99% who never went to college because they lacked the desire or ability to learn, then drifted into some skill-mill that took their money.

These are the majority of bootcamp graduates.

> I've also seen people with non-quant backgrounds land ok jobs doing menial coding (e.g working at an accounting firm on database stuff)

Ten bucks say these were non-quant college graduates, and probably a good college too. So now we're not talking about the top 1%, but probably top 5%.

What you're considering "menial coding" is just simpler jobs, but not really simple or brain-dead. That stuff gets automated... often by startups staffed by folks who went to Stanford CS.