I can't agree with this. High IQ can't be everything. Wouldn't this value experience and knowledge (like everything you learned in university) at zero?
Imo there are a lot of great/amazing and productive Software Engineers that wouldn't do well in a whiteboard algorithm interview. The people that tend to do well, are the ones that have a lot of practice with the kind of problems.
> Wouldn't this value experience and knowledge (like everything you learned in university) at zero?
Having switched professions twice, I now use practically nothing of what I learned in university from about second year forward. Math and to some extent physics are still relevant, but that's pretty much it.
It might be painful to admit, but the practical value of that rather specialized knowledge that took me several years of hard work to obtain is pretty much zero now.
> It might be painful to admit, but the practical value of that rather specialized knowledge that took me several years of hard work to obtain is pretty much zero now.
It's sad that your professors didn't tell you beforehand that you were going to learn how to learn during that time, not just study a particular technology stack.
The short answer is probably no. And the fact is that top universities mostly aren't so focused on teaching whatever language or framework is the flavor of the day.
That said, you need tools of some sort if you're going to actually build things as opposed to just learning, say, algorithms in pseudo-code. And it probably makes sense to use some fairly standard language to do so. There's not much point in making things deliberately obscure by making students use some language that the professor designed for his PhD thesis.
I bet it wasn't a total waste. The real point of school, particularly university, is to learn how to learn rather than learn a bunch of facts or tools. Attending university probably made it a lot easier for you to switch professions twice.
I read the parent as talking about narrow skill sets that a smart and motivated individual can pick up pretty quickly. If you're looking for a senior developer you probably don't want to hire someone who has never programmed even if they're widely acknowledged as really smart and an expert in ball bearing design.
And obviously applies in lots of areas. If I'm looking for someone to head up a digital marketing or marketing research initiative, someone whose only work experience is software development is probably not the best choice no matter how smart and motivated they are.
OTOH, as you get to the level where people are more managers than practitioners, their specific skill sets presumably start to make less of a difference.
Added: And, as peer noted, people do shift careers significantly all the time. I never really directly used my undergrad (or grad) engineering degrees all that much.
So, what we know from industrial psychology isn't that experience doesn't add value. It's that high IQ people learn faster. This makes sense when you remember that intelligence is broadly defined as the ability to learn.
While Alice may have fewer years of experience than Bob, she might have effectively more experience if she absorbed understanding at a faster rate. An unexperienced, high-intelligence person usually starts at an initial disadvantage, but manages to "get up to speed" quickly.
This also underscores the particular importance of intelligence in software. The field is constantly awash in new technologies, where nobody has had time to accumulate extensive chronological experience. So, it's really important to find people that can absorb new concepts quickly.
My interpretation is that among the pool of people who meet the minimum requirements and are interested in that position/career, IQ is the best predictor. If you're just picking random high-IQ people off the street, I don't think they'll do very well in a software engineering job.
> Wouldn't this value experience and knowledge (like everything you learned in university) at zero?
I haven't read the research myself but if they are only looking at interviews, this could be explained by the fact people with absolutely no prior knowledge would be filtered before reaching the interview.
