There is a very large number of employers. If you want to convince me they're all unreasonable, you'll need to show me some pretty compelling evidence.
They're almost all cargo culting the same whiteboard algorithm hiring criteria for otherwise humdrum jobs so yeah, they're all kind of unreasonable. An HR fad can cause structural employment just as easily as bona fide requirements not being met.
They are cargo cutting, I was about to make the same point. I am more likely to get a leetcode quiz from a small company trying to emulate a FAANG company than I am from an interview with an actual FAANG company. Leetcode is part a costly signal given the study that has to be put into it, and part IQ test. I think part of the proliferation of leetcode is due to the illegality (edit: in effect even though not explicitly) of using IQ tests. But if someone could have a certified IQ test they could reuse that one test result for the entire job market improving liquidity. It would be no worse than leetcode as the IQ part of leetcode is in effect already an inefficient and arduous IQ test that people have to take repeatedly. The costly signal was supposed to be university but the academies have sold out their responsibilities. I think the effort to democratize university education, instead of lifting people up, has instead dragged universities down. The reason I think the solution is difficult is that we have to chose between a more fair world where just about anyone can get a degree and IQ tests are illegal but we have to keep taking these leetcode tests. Or a less fair world where an IQ test / SAT score and a university certificate is sufficient.
Yes, it would be very possible. In Brazil for example, several million people each year do the national test for public sector jobs, with the test result deciding who gets hired. So it doesn't matter who you're related to, if you have the same hobby as your interviewer, or if the HR person thinks you're cute or not. It's the test and that's it. At least in theory.
The military branches world wide also generally hires and promotes on merit and testing. So it's nothing strange.
I think previous work history is currently most used as a substitute. As in the hiring company assumes the previous companies have acted as a gatekeeper. Given the amount of money involved it would be difficult to maintain a formalization / certification process that would be both trusted and resistant to corruption.
No, I mean just like companies would like to see a sort of IQ test results for applicants, I'd assume applicants would like to see a sort of employment-worthiness test for the companies. Previous work history here could be the history of that particular aspiring company of hiring people and people leaving the company.
Ah, I see, I think companies being far fewer than people are more able to operate on reputation in a way that would be impractical for general mass of individuals. The companies can and do pay PR to try to influence that reputation, as can individuals, and many high profile individuals do in fact hire PR. Glassdoor is one public source of info, but there is generally quite a lot of gossip around companies. People can reach out to current employees of an company like employers can reach out to previous employers of an individual and I've never had an interview where I was unable to ask the interviewer questions about the company.
Perhaps a proxy for a corporate IQ test would be net earning per employee which is often pretty public information.
It is not illegal to give candidates IQ tests. There are huge firms that do so openly. The practice isn't widespread because it doesn't work well, not because it's proscribed.
Any test that has disparate impact is in effect illegal. Leetcode at least makes this process more opaque which helps limit liability. I have edited my post to note that there is no explicit legislation making IQ tests illegal in the US.
> Any test that has disparate impact is in effect illegal
Nope, it just has to be shown to be relevant to the requirements of the job.
So you call it an "employment skills assessment," make 80% of it indistinguishable from an IQ test, and add some domain-specific questions related to the industry or the position.
P&G has done this for a long time, among other companies.
This has been true for a long time but I would suggest that it's no longer true, or at least less true. Such aptitude tests, the opaque form of IQ tests, are now increasingly and effectively being challenged on the same disparate impact that IQ tests were. Rather recently the NY Teachers aptitude test was demonstrated to have disparate impact resulting in a payout of $1.8B. Perhaps one way to get rid of leetcode would be to demonstrate that it also has a disparate impact. Though I have little hope that what would replace leetcode would be any better, especially since it would have to be even more opaque than leetcode already is.
As it appears you are more familiar with the case than I am, it would be helpful if you could point out what those errors are?
As best I can tell 'Judge Wood ruled that an older state-certification test, which was intended to measure teachers’ knowledge of the liberal arts and science, was racially discriminatory.'
Elsewhere I'm seeing "The court found that Black and Latino teachers clearly passed these tests at lower rates than white teachers. In order to prove that this wasn't illegal, the defendants had to show that the test actually demonstrated what it promised: that teachers who did well on the test would do better in their jobs."
It seems to me that the error was using the wrong test and it was the wrong test because it had disparate impact. What it does not appear to be is a case that is not about disparate impact because it instead had errors.
That kind of reasoning seems amazing to me. Some people didn't perform as well on the test as the judge wanted, so the test is wrong. It's even racist!
If men get into traffic accidents more often than women, then clearly there is something wrong with the cars and car manufacturers should be sued for their discrimination?
In the Eastern bloc, agriculture was immensely held back because everybody had to follow the ideology and adjust their science and methods to "I god damned said so!" of the rulers. Seems like America is curious about following the same path.
Ahh, I'm looking at a much more recent case in New Jersey, not this one from 10 years ago. The test you're talking about isn't an IQ test; it's a heavily and obviously culturally-loaded literacy test. The whole point of actual IQ tests is to isolate intellectual aptitude from cultural literacy.
(I'm writing as if I think real IQ tests are a good idea, and they are not --- in fact, that's my whole point: there's a mythology that IQ tests aren't used because they're illegal, but they are not that; what they are is ineffective.)
The efficacy of IQ tests are a separate argument and the general abandonment of IQ tests by corporations as a demonstration of their inefficacy would be more substantive if such tests were not in effect made illegal at the same time. I.e. if IQ testing conferred no possible legal liability then the spontaneous abandonment of their use might be evidence of their ineffectiveness.
I don't need to litigate this, but they're not "effectively" illegal either. Again: big firms with huge HR departments and lots to lose use then, and brag about it.
Those I assume also have big legal departments, for smaller companies such lawsuits can be extinction events.
This has been previously discussed in detail on HN 12 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414135 I would suggest that times have changed since then and disparate impact lawsuits are now more likely to prevail in 2024 than in 2012, so the in-effect aspect has increased since then.
I know quite a few CEOs who confide in me that they would rather give IQ tests but do not because of their concerns over legal consequences. Clearly this is anecdotal but this sentiment does seem to be pervasive and extensive and repeated throughout the internet over a long period of time.
It would be helpful if you could list some of these companies that publicly state they give IQ tests. I've only heard about this as a practice at hedge funds and even then it was public knowledge / gossip but not publicly stated.
This NY Post story is speculative; the VC firm that did this (stupid) hiring thing, of asking people to take a free online IQ test and a Meyers-Briggs personality test(!), got called out on Twitter and backed down, blaming the process on an intern. They weren't sued. I'm not saying you won't get dunked on if you, for instance, Wonderlic-test applicants for your tech company. You will. But I don't think you're going to get sued.
I'm grasping at straws looking for a counter example to my overall assertion, that it is not a great counter example does not undermine my case. I made a genuine good faith effort to find them - you could help me out a lot if you could list these companies that boast publicly about administering IQ tests. That would go a long way to demonstrating that such tests are not in effect illegal.
My assertion is that IQ tests are already known to have disparate impact and with laws as they are in effect they are illegal. My next assertion is that aptitude tests will suffer the same fate as IQ test because they too will be shown to have disparate impact for the same reasons. That not all such aptitude tests have been sued already under this law does not make them safe from lawsuits as the burden of proof is on the company using them.
Ok, so what several largest employers are you talking about? If this is pubic knowledge as you allege then there is no need to be obtuse. And again, that list of employers that publicly brag about continued administering of IQ tests would be rather helpful to your case and would allow me to substantively check your assertion. I don't understand why in good faith you would not want to share this information.
You cannot use the absence of lawsuits for a list of companies that you are keeping secret as evidence of absence of legal liability.
As best I can tell P&G is an aptitude test that only resembles fake IQ tests and more resembles a mix of leetcoding and personality tests - probably sharing the same benefit of opacity.
Other info I found on it suggests that it’s easily gamed which is something real IQ tests are designed to be resistant to.
I’m not trying to ‘no true Scotsman’ this but it would be helpful if the company described their test at least as an intelligence test. They seem to describe it more as a personality test; “Discover the PEAK Performance Assessment from Procter & Gamble (P&G) tand get an insight into how your personal profile matches the company's needs.”
My specific focus on IQ tests is to be less opaque alternative to leetcode, the P&G assessment seems to be similarly and perhaps more opaque and thus, for now, confers the same protections from disparate impact lawsuits.
I was able to find those things but I fail to see how they are relevant. My point is the IQ test are in contrast to leetcode tests because the IQ test is transparent and transferable between organizations. These tests are neither transparent nor transferrable. Aptitude tests like this have been safe from disparate impact lawsuits for a long time but not for any legal basis. My point is that while such aptitude test leaves them less exposed than IQ tests it does not eliminate it. That they haven’t been sued yet isn’t evidence of lack of legal exposure.
The extent to which the test is arbitrary and gameable would make it more suspect under employment law, not less, so you're working against your own argument.
Disparate impact is US civil rights law, not employment law, that law applies to employment because it applies to everything. I think I’ve been very clear about which laws and legal precedents I am talking about. When it comes to breaking a law it’s better for the company to do it with opacity than clarity. At least then it would be more difficult to show intent which would instead be disparate treatment which is far worse and more damaging for the company. Intentional breaking of the law is always worse than unintentional breaking of the law.
The latest fad appears to be forcing all candidates to be vetted by an external recruiter, even if they are already known to people inside the company. Apparently, this is for reasons of "fairness", but it's yet another segment of an increasingly long pipeline full of holes that drop out candidates somewhat randomly rather than based on the actual required attributes to perform the job effectively. The HR filter was already bad enough but now having a recruiter filter before the HR filter just means even more random rejections of candidates who could have filled the role successfully.
Look at the recent crypto bubble that popped. I'd point to the current potential hype cycle although that's contentious here. For the crypto fad, there was no demonstrated profit beyond speculation, yet lot's of money was poured into it. I have no explanation that can be explained by so-called market mechanisms, it's just chasing hype.
I've gone through a lot of job seeking in the last year (two companies in a row I've worked for have closed). Didn't have a single leetcode challenge. And I'm looking for us companies who hire remotely from other countries but pay at the us level, so it's supposedly about the hardest difficulty setting possible.
But consider: the hiring pipeline looks pretty much the same for all companies? Why is that? Well, they mostly use similar services to manage hiring, and those services all have similar features. But those features aren't great: they've narrowed the hiring pipeline to squeeze all candidates for all jobs down to the same sort of toothpaste that can be squeezed through the pipe.
Are the employers unreasonable? No, they are following what is considered HR best practices for attracting and vetting talent. But that process is broken, therefore the majority of companies are struggling to find talent.
The process is both homogenized across the industry and fundamentally geared towards preventing false positives - hiring the wrong person. That filters out many people that might have been hired, blowing up the number of false negatives - not hiring the right person.
Companies can't find candidates and job seekers can find jobs because the tools and processes for connecting candidates with jobs is both broken and homogeneous across the industry.
What data would satisfy you that employers are being unnecessarily picky? Provide the criteria. Their costs are sunk, they can push candidates through as many cycles as they want until they can find the cheapest unicorns pushed through their pipelines. There is also strong evidence that some employers are cutting anyone with a developed world wage and pushing that work to cheap countries (Google, very publicly, but there are others).
My hot take is the labor market was very tight, employers thought they were going to get a deal on folks with the layoffs [1] that took place over the last 2 years, but the labor market still remains tight so they continue to search for "diamonds in the rough" at lower costs (which leads to this mismatch at scale). Offshoring is cost optimization to continue to realize desired profits in a high capital cost macro, and there is probably some knock on effect from software development tax code changes [2].
