> A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process.
I'm not sure what any of these mean in concrete terms. Is an IQ test like those "why are manhole covers round" Microsoft questions of yore? Yuck. Is a work sample a homework test? That takes more time for both parties. It's not a good substitute for a 1 hour first round screen. And what's a "structured" interview??
You should probably look up what an IQ test involves instead of just guessingly blindly, getting it wrong and then writing off the suggestion based on a wrong assumption.
in sofar as IQ helps predict actual job performance, I'd say yes.
Now I'm not saying the situation isn't complicated. In the mid-20th century, IQ testing was a great driver of social mobility. However, as was pointed out in _The Bell Curve_, it's becoming the opposite. From what I understand, the heritability of IQ and assortative mating (i.e. people marrying other people of similar IQ/educational attainment) are the main drivers of this.
I don't think the formation of an entrenched class system is necessarily a good thing, but I think in the local context of our industry there's still a lot of good that could be done by improving our hiring process. I mean, would you rather hire people who only sound smart, or who are smart?
The truth is, software engineering really quite hard, but that whiteboard interviews just happen to be a rather poor way of evaluating candidates.
A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process.