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Notes -
Obviously it correlates with IQ and G, but it’s not an IQ test.
The point of an IQ test is to measure something “intrinsic”, and so they try not to rely more than necessary on education (e.g. they tend not to include calculus questions), as this confounds your attempt to measure something intrinsic.
In contrast, a genius who has never programmed a computer or taken a CS class is going to fail a technical interview, which is literally by design.
This doesn't seem like a nit when the debate is around what tests are legal, illegal, or legally grey.
By ‘Google interview question’ I mean the historic kind that made Google a famous interviewer in the early 2000s where they’d ask how many pizza boxes could fit under the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever and see how you reasoned your way through the question.
But they and all the big tech companies have stamped out this sort of question precisely because of the chilling effect of the law. You can obviously make a case that it's related to job performance, but their legal departments prefer to stick to coding and behavioral questions where the case is self-explanatory.
Do we know this is the case? Up until now I had assumed these tests got abandoned because much of the predictive power of the test was based on people not knowing how to approach this novel situation and having to figure it out on the fly. Once the secret got out and people learned a script for this type of question, answering got easier and more routine and the tests ceased to be such a good indicator.
I recall the timeline of the tests going away being shortly after everyone on the internet started talking about Google interview questions and specifically questions of this type, and I don't think that was a coincidence.
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