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.