A human mind is multidimensional. The idea you can find one number to measure it is downright ridiculous. You wouldn't even buy pants based on just one number, say waist size. You'd get home, they'd be too long or too short. Obviously!
But folks buy into the IQ cargo cult big time. Totally baffles me.
Most software engineering jobs involve communicating with people. Customers, other engineers, other teams, leaders, etc. I would hazard to say that most effective senior engineers will spend at least as much time communicating with people as they will spend on individual technical tasks, if not more.
Communication skills are vital. If you cannot effectively persuade a team of people that your approach or point of view is correct, then your views, no matter their objective merit, will not impact the organization. Being an effective engineer requires having good ideas and also influencing other people to understand and adopt them.
A person can be an effective journeyman individual contributor engineer without strong communication skills, but to become a master with wide impact requires it.
You make a good point about primadonnas and other potentially toxic personality types with high IQs, but you can screen that too. And I mean, I don't care about IQ. To me, pretty much anybody with talent should be able to come in with something awesome and say "look what I did", and if it's great, then who cares? Hire them. Obviously this isn't an argument for creating a new narrow-minded structure to replace the current one; I'm just talking about prioritizing along the essential lines instead of dancing around the real question. Isn't someone who codes and who can give you a fibonacci sequence in realtime more valuable than someone who codes, but can't? I can't do it, but I'd hire that guy.
The classic example goes as follows:
The testee is shown four pictures: a teapot; a saucer; a table, and a water pump. They are then shown a teacup, and asked to match it with the appropriate picture. The upper-class testee, for whom tea was always served in a cup on a saucer, selects the saucer. The middle-class testee selects the teapot, as the tea obviously goes in the cup. The child in sub-Saharan Africa recognizes the teacup as a cup, a so selects the water pump, as water goes in cups.
This is obviously a contrived example, but it shows how the biases of the test-makers can conflict with those of the test-takers, leading those from different backgrounds to score worse on the test.
The "correct sequence" was: Get Up, Eat Breakfast, Go To School while many of these children were getting subsidized breakfasts at school.
For more background about IQ testing for employment in America, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. .
2. The microscopic number of black engineers have already run the gamut of cognitive testing. An IQ test would not have a "disparate impact". This is why big corporations ask for university degrees: the degree itself is an IQ test.
3. FizzBuzz will screen out virtually the entire African race, and is provably related to actual job performance. After that an IQ test will not appreciably change the statistics.
Who would do such a thing? Cops.
Because pretty much everything I can find on it has the whiff of urban legend, which folk like you repeat because it feed into their worldview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
If there are factual inaccuracies there, please point them out. However just going by the "whiff" of something seems like you're opening yourself up to rejecting parts of reality that do not fit your worldview.
Edit: better source: http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html and here is an interview of the man by CNN: http://www.postroad.com/news/2000/20000912-new-london-police...
"No IQs above 125" is not the same as "No IQs above 90".
On the other hand, of course, if your house has been burglarized, you want just his guy on your side, ignoring the lame folks babbling inanities and looking for the one that won't meet his eyes, has a cut from broken glass on his hand, or too much cash in his pocket. Never mind socioeconomic theories. And when he finds him, he brings him in, even if it takes the truncheon.
Everybody thinks they know who should be running things. Scholars think scholars would do well. Merchants think they should rule. Soldiers want to rule all the time. Most of the time they're wrong.
It takes a certain mindset to survive any job. Assembly-line, sales, engineering. Even police work. You have to be pretty thick-skinned for that. More important, you have to go where angels fear to tread, confront argumentative people pretty much all the time, and be willing to be yelled at afterward because you gotta do what you gotta do, out on the street.
Except that cultural background is not, unfortunately. And it's highly correlated with the first and probably weakly linked to the second and third classes as well.
For argument's sake let's assume a test that doesn't discriminate or give advantage to any given race or culture. How is that different from a coding test, other than that it requires more general interest and knowledge, and doesn't overly reward memorization of algorithms?
But directly relevent:
* even if the concept of some sort of underlying general intelligence were valid, we have yet to come up with an unbiased test of it.
* And then if you could somehow prove an IQ test was unbiased and germane to the job, then the court ruling referenced elsewhere in this thread wouldn't prohibit it's use.
I am not sure how well this is known. I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there. (And yes, there is some resentment of his fame: in the field the unjustly famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolution proceeds not steadily but in short bursts of rapid change, is known as "evolution by jerks").[3]
[0]http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/
[1]http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/gould-morton-revis...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Criticism...
You've gotta measure people somehow in order to hire them, right? You can spend all day talking about how unfair any possible test is, but the world will continue choosing people based on a multitude of criteria, most of which boil down to intelligence, and all I'm suggesting is that there are more efficient and less circumspect ways of doing that.
(Go and read the wikipedia article about the relevent court case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.)
secondly, IQ testing covers a number of areas, many of which are not necessarily related to the kind of thinking needed for programming. i think most of the verbal stuff in IQ tests wouldn't relate that much
thirdly, even if someone aces the IQ test, there's still no indication that they would actually enjoy programming if they've never done it before. It's kind of pointless to train someone to code if they're just going to get sick of it and quit in 6 months.
and fourth, an IQ test doesn't say anything about a person's ability to work with other people or prioritize things properly. an IQ test provides no protection against ending up with a prima donna who obsesses over brace style at the expense of getting useful things done.
really, i think the best way to find out if someone can code is to look at something they've coded