Chinese Company Seeks US Workers With 125 IQ 553
CWmike writes "A Chinese IT outsourcing company that has started hiring new US computer science graduates to work in Shanghai requires prospective job candidates to demonstrate an IQ of 125 or above on a test it administers to sort out job applicants. In doing so, Bleum Inc. is following a hiring practice it applies to college recruits in China. But a new Chinese college graduate must score an IQ of 140 on the company's test. The lower IQ threshold for new US graduates reflects the fact that the pool of US talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said."
World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite interesting how you can already predict how the world will change in the upcoming 10-20 years. The Chinese have the workforce (and hence more persons with high IQ), they're used to work hard for a living, and realistic economy. They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country like in the US where everyone must get the latest HDTV, big cars and just spend money on non-important items and entertainment. That is how US has been doing for many many years and loaning more and more money along the way.
IQ isn't everything (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, the the high poverty rate, a government that pretty much decides what the truth is, and a bunch of human rights violations will certainly not help them get there.
Yes, China does have a large population/workforce resource... But they got where they are today because that resource was really cheap. China's getting more expensive, and with the issues that the rest of the world has with their government, I don't think it's such a guarantee.
Re:Article missing it's mark (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the article missed the reason they are hiring US people. "To speak English"
They aren't hiring people from the US to do CS jobs, they are hiring them to train their mainland China employees on how to communicate in English on the specific topic (computer science) that otherwise would be completely lost on regular "GREAT ENGLISH JOBS IN CHINA TESOL" type of people who may know English but know little about computer science.
That's surprising because I would think that there are far more English-speaking Chinese, than Mandarin (or whatever)-speaking Americans.
Their banks don't cheat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Their banking industry is largely (if not all the way) corrupt. They take the savings of the people (who do indeed have a high savings rate), and then loan them out to largely state-owned enterprises. Who gets the money is largely politically directed, and has little to do with how likely it is the loan will be paid back.
Eventually those savers are going to want their money back, and it won't be there. So, it would be accurate to say that Chinese banks haven't collapsed their economy yet.
So, in the US, all the wasteful spending and foolish loans go to consumers. In China, they go towards state-owned businesses. I'm not sure one way or the other is better.
SirWired
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
>> "realistic economy"
Soory you need to know a lot more about economics to stop making an fool of your self, the chinease economy has an artificialy manipulated curency and a corupt stockmarket all the major funds investing in china prefer the HK exchange as its less risky.
"attitude", or the test does not work well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Transparent government and democracy do not make a superpower, no matter what we enlightened westerners may think.
A dictatorship that controls the flow of information, doesn't skim too much off the top and cracks down on corruption in the lower ranks is a quite efficient way of governing a nation. We may not like it, and it goes against everything we in the west believe in, but that doesn't mean it can't work. No electoral circuses or free press that get in your hair.
As to what extent china will be able to maintain an iron fist when economic prosperity grows is another question, but then he has the guns makes the rules. Heck, a pretty big chunk of the planet isn't quite enamored with the US either and we're still doing business with them.
As for getting where they are because resources are cheap...isn't that pretty much how all current and past superpowers came to be? They either had resources on their own turf to exploit or went elsewhere to do so.
Probably done by people with a higher IQ than you (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at least the ability to write more interesting and useful posts. Seriously, what is with shit like this and why does it get moderated up? Are you trying to make a statement of some kind? Then make it, don't sit there and be obtuse about it. Or are you just trying to make yourself appear smart by "predicting" something that is quite obvious?
Seriously, this is worthless. You have something to say on using IQ tests, say it. Don't try and be obtuse as though that somehow makes your post more interesting.
Re:Ok, this is stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Google tests are (way) better than IQ, but guess what Google found out: the best performers are the ones who have the lowest scores on their interviews.
Then maybe Google tests are not that good then. IQ tests show a correlation with income and with education level. Correlation is not causation, but if a company wants someone with good education, IQ is not such a bad instrument.
Re:Someone's hiring smartly! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is especially surprising because the average slashdotter is doing the same crap that the average developer in India is doing.
Everything built today is short-term throw-away crap, often because the cultural, organisational, specification and documentation requirements won't translate (and the people involved in outsourcing don't care anyway).
Try discussing a real-world requirement with a well-spoken Englishman who has lived in the same area as you and experienced the same social and workplace culture and worked with you in the company on similar projects, then try communicating it to a man living in India who has experienced none of the above. Sit down with that man in a quiet room and prepare, say, an API together; now do the same with Bob from Bangalore over MSN. If you don't experience /any/ barrier then your need is so simple you'd be better off spending the next hour fulfilling it yourself.
Outsourcing is often used because the guy who got the bonus from apparently saving money in the short term knows that he'll be long gone by the time the shit hits the fan. Sometimes it works really well, but just as often it's a cruel joke. Its essential premise is: let's move work to an area with a greater supply of desperate workers and fewer workers protections because that'd be cheaper. It assumes that saving, say, $500,000 on the salary line of the budget for some project is not going to be offset by the disadvantages of not having someone with a local understanding. Communication takes longer, requests are more likely to be misinterpreted, there is no link between robustness of output and long-term advancement of the worker so his code is likely to suffer worse engineering practice, etc.
In some cases (where IQ's much higher), the worker may come up with solutions radically faster.
Or mull around over-engineering. Or not make much difference because the IQ test didn't identify skills applicable to the problem.
Hence it makes sense to link pay to IQ (at the start) and pay to IQ and results as time passes.
Why don't we link pay to colour? And any other number of immutable measures of an individual which have some correlation with intellectual performance.
Re:Ok, this is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
"Google found out: the best performers are the ones who have the lowest scores on their interviews." [citation needed]
Re:Article missing it's mark (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World is changing (Score:2, Insightful)
their economy is based on making said non-important things. so with out our unrealistic economy they'd be in a different boat.
also, the banks where only doing what Congress told them to. then, when that went horribly wrong, as most of the "good ideas" Congress has tend to do, they took the money Congress "offered". don't get pissed at the banks. get pissed at the people causing the problem. CONGRESS.
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a person with an IQ of 140 has pretty good human rights where ever he/she goes.
Ever heard of the Khmer Rouge [wikipedia.org]? A 140 IQ would be enough to have you shot.
Re:Ok, this is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
IQ is highly overrated
In practice, it's almost useless...
It's true that it's not all you need to do well. Citation needed on it being almost useless, in the same way that citation is needed on water not being wet.
Google tests are (way) better than IQ, but guess what Google found out: the best performers are the ones who have the lowest scores on their interviews.
The best performers are those that were hired in spite of having a low score in one interview out of several. These are people that are so impressive for some reason or other that even a low score in an interview does not rule them out. Citation needed on Google tests being way better than just an IQ test - I only know that they are more laborious, not that they outperform 100 years of research into IQ. If they do I expect it's because they include either an actual IQ test or an IQ test by proxy such as riddles or hard subject-specific questions you can't just memorize ahead of time. In any case, citation needed.
IQ is not concerned with - the candidate knows about the job - the candidate has good (enough) people skills - the candidate showers, shaves, etc
... and yet IQ tests still predict performance very well in many jobs. It's both fantastic and fantastically politically unacceptable.
If you are up in arms about IQ, then just wait till you read about the general fitness factor. This is the first link I found on google: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ698164&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ698164 [ed.gov]
But that's the point really (Score:5, Insightful)
Feynman was an unconventional thinker is so very many ways. That was where a large part of his brilliance came from. He did not work in the world of numbers and equations, despite being a theoretical physicist. He was an examples kind of guy. He always had to have a physical example running in his head of a theory, and was always challenging people to provide them for him. As such he often found errors they could not, as he was mapping the problem in a completely different way.
It was his unconventional methods that made him so very brilliant, that lead him to his Nobel research. It was also part of why he was so good at teaching. He could explain things to undergrads that most people could only explain to others with advanced knowledge. He could do that because he saw through all the equations and such to the real essence of what the theory was, and he could come up with examples because that was what he did anyhow.
That an IQ test can't measure that well is a failing of the test, not of Feynman. The IQ test is one mold for how people can be smart, one particular way. He didn't fit that. So while the test rated him above average, because he was just so smart overall, it could not truly measure the depths of his genius.
It is a good lesson: Don't put too much stock in a single test. Tests test for particular things, they are not generalizable to everything.
As an analog, take a blood test for liver function. A simple test can be done to determine if your liver works right (just takes blood now, they don't need urine anymore as well). It does so reliably and well. However, that's all it does. Passing a LFT doesn't mean you are in good health, it means your liver is doing its job. It doesn't even mean your liver is undamaged, it just means that to whatever extent it has been damaged, it is still currently capable of filtering as needed.
The test is useful, but you must understand its limits for it to be so.
x and y axes (Score:5, Insightful)
there are people with
1. high traditional iq, high social iq,
2. high traditional iq, low social iq,
3. low traditional iq, high social iq,
4. low traditional iq, low social iq
your inability to conceptualize more than one axis in the formulation of your comment doesn't speak very well for your iq, any iq
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps your IQ isn't quite high enough then, since it is hard for you to conceive that. Some of the most accomplished scientists are often also the best teachers, since they are intelligent enough not only to understand the material but also to understand their audience.
Re:IQ isn't everything (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember being bored out of my mind for most of the last 6 years or so of my pre-college schooling. I'd almost certainly have dropped out if I didn't get to go to college a couple years early. Had I not been milking the funding I would've been able to graduate by 20 easily. Even taking a year off and losing a couple quarters due to illness, I still made it out by 22.
pop quiz: (Score:3, Insightful)
how many presidents have we had with a PhD?
answer:
one. Woodrow Wilson
yes, Barack Obama is someone with a high traditional iq and a high social iq
but as GW Bush demonstrates that you can be well below 100 on both social iq and traditional iq and still become president. you just need to score high on the nepotism iq test and the oil money iq test
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to think that most Americans, with an IQ higher than 140 would probably find little interest in going to China to work in an IT shop.
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
intelligent enough not only to understand the material but also to understand their audience
It takes a whole lot more than raw intelligence to understand people. I have met plenty of folks who are wickedly smart but couldn't read body language or a facial expression if their life depended on it.
Re:World is changing (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe but the funny thing is 2 of the worst professors I had in university were amongst the most intelligent people I've ever met. Admittedly one knew he was kind of bad, largely because his english was pretty bad and gave everybody a break. They other guy was obviously super smart and wrote "the" book in his field but couldn't teach at all. (Unfortunately other professors at the school only knew him by his reputation and would say stupid things like "he's really good isn't he?" This guy was so bad he couldn't tell you how he determined your grade. The reason he couldn't tell you is because he didn't even know how he was going to do it. Yes, that's literally true.)
Sounds like my circuits professor. He wrote the book. The students had to buy the book. He also taught the Circuits I class, and he taught straight from the book. It all sucked massively. My Circuits II professor said the book was "good" but politely suggested that we all go out and find a "supplemental" textbook to help us in the course.
I doubt the professors who said "he's really good, isn't he?" didn't know that your professor sucked. They just didn't want to openly bad-mouth one of their colleagues. In fact, "he's really good, isn't he?" sounds more to me like "yeah, we know he sucks, but we can't do anything about it."
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Professors aren't teachers. They're lecturers. You know who the teacher is in a university? I mean, a proper one, not a hand-holding University of Huge State, Main Campus.
It's the student.
If the student wants to succeed, he or she has to teach him- or herself. To do this, the university provides a number of resources the student can use: lectures, teaching assistants, textbooks, libraries, etc.
Ultimately, though, it's the student's job. And that's the main difference between high school and college.
So it doesn't matter if your professors are "bad" at teaching. That's not even remotely their job. Presenting material during lecture hours and holding office hours for undergrads? That's a minuscule obligation compared to their real work for the university.
Mensa is packed with idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest idiots I know are in Mensa. Just a bunch of incompetent morons who like taking IQ tests.
Re:IQ isn't everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Basing emplyment on IQ is pointless as it doesn't actually predict "real-world" performance. Citation needed in the same way that citation is needed for water not being wet.
See Outliers [wikipedia.org] by Malcolm Gladwell. It references several studies and anecdotes in which no connection between high iq and success is found. The smartest man in the world works as a bouncer.
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a certificate, then you have to pay.
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ok, this is stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
McDonald's had a training model "green is growing" and that's probably the effect Google is seeing. If you ace every single area, then you might be really smart and motivated... but you're probably not reaching far ENOUGH for challenging work. From an employment point of view, somebody reaching "over their head" is more likely to TRY harder to make themselves better. It would be like paying somebody good in the 100 yd dash to walk your dog.... they could probably DO the job quite well, but they wouldn't better themselves with the job and shortly after boredom would set in and they would do worse than hiring a chubby girl that really likes dogs and benefits from the daily exercise.
Fantastic...and non-PC (Score:3, Insightful)
As the parent says: "IQ tests still predict performance very well in many jobs. It's both fantastic and fantastically politically unacceptable". This is so well known as to be beyond any credible dispute. As an overall predictor of success, IQ is known to be quite good. Here's a nice summary. [iq-tests.eu] Note that the correlation between IQ and professional success is even stronger than the correlation in height between parents and children.
If China uses this policy widely, over a long period of time, it will be interesting to watch the media try to spin it. Such a test must somehow be evil, because there will undoubtedly be disparities in the gender and/or race and/or background of the people who pass the test. Yet everyone will know - whether or not they dare say it - that the test is purely economic: get the best people for the money.
The elephant in the room: what everyone knows but no one will admit. Shades of The Bell Curve [amazon.com].
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha! I guess you buy the crap the Chinese government feeds you. You don't know what corruption is until you've gone to China. That's one of the biggest problems, hands down, with doing business in China. And if you're friends with government officials then you've got it made in the shade.
In principle a dictatorship should be able to keep these problems under control, but it reality it almost never works out that way. Usually it's the government and anyone tied to them raping the nation for their own gain. The big difference between a dictatorship and democracy or republic is that a dictatorship is far more effective in controlling the flow of information and thus hiding how bad things actually are.
That's true (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Preferring the Chinese factory worker lifestyle (work 12-16 hours, return to small dormitory, go back to work, ad infinitum) to an American lifestyle might just be taking the old Protestant work ethic a bit too far.
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World is changing (Score:5, Insightful)
Atlas Shrugged is selling for the same reason superhero comics do: people like power fantasies. I'd imagine that it would sell even more in times like this, when people have their helplessness in the face of "market forces" clearly demonstrated once again.
Maybe we shouldn't be striving for equality, but for elevating the lowest? That is, rather than trying to make everyone equal, simply ensure that even those who are at the bottom of the pile have food, water, clothes, shelter, and generally acceptable standard of living; and, most important of all, have the means to participate in society and improve themselves, which nowadays pretty much requires an Internet connection.
IMHO the best way to do this would be to pay everyone a certain sum per month, enough to live on. One of the many problems with social security systems of today is that they are designed to prevent abuse, which results in them being tremendously complicated and pretty arbitrary. Make sure that people have a certain amount of income they can count on, and you empower them: they can make long-range plans and take whatever opportunity they happen to come by rather than worrying about losing their eligibility for SS. Also, knowing that you'll survive even if you'll become unemployed would cut down a lot on both abuses and stress of working life. Finally, getting an automatic payment with no strings attached would remove the necessity of any bureuecrat to go through your finances to decide whether you're eligible for it.
This, actually, is a very good question, and one which I wish more people would ponder before starting their glorious revolutions for whatever goal.
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
The only problem is that certificate is what's needed to get a job in most cases. It's the equivalent of "pics or it didn't happen" in the business world.
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Re:Ok, this is stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Citation needed on Google tests being way better than just an IQ test
Maybe because one has to do with skills related to the job and the other doesn't. Do you even know what kind of questions google asks? Well, I do.
IQ tests can sometimes outperform subject-specific tests even for determining future performance in that specific subject. This occurs especially when everyone tested is known to already posses the basic knowledge of a field.
It's surprising until you think about it for a bit. People can increase their knowledge if they have a high IQ, but people cannot increase their IQ no matter how much they know of their subject.
and yet IQ tests still predict performance very well in many jobs. It's both fantastic
Depends on the job. Get out of the lab and onto the real world.
Yes, it is generally the case that each job has a certain level of IQ beyond which further IQ doesn't help you very much. There is a limit to how much sweeping the street can be improved with brainpower. I don't have a number for programming, but it is a complicated technical field where productivity differs wildly among individuals. That's exactly the kind of thing that lends itself to IQ mattering into very high levels. It's true that high IQ doesn't help if the guy then doesn't show up for work at all or spends all his time at work playing World of Warcraft, but that is true of anyone so it isn't something specific to people with a high IQ.
Telling me to get onto the real world does nothing for your argument. I could tell you that knowledge of IQ would probably increase your ability to talk about it, but that would equally do nothing for my argument.
Google had every reason to use IQ for hiring and still it doesn't. It's about 70% 'knowing stuff'.
You seem to think that a question about "knowing stuff" cannot have an IQ loading. It doesn't work that way and the more so the harder the questions are. The way to know if the Google hiring process is highly IQ loaded is to measure people's IQ and compare that to their interview score. If you think IQ isn't relevant I think you'd be surprised.
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
With the way the American economy is going, don't be so sure.
Just because they have an IQ of 140 doesn't mean they're good at lying and bullshitting and schmoozing, the qualities you need in America to be successful.
Who would pay? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then who would work to create all the stuff everyone needs?
If everyone got paid the minimum needed to live on, no one would want to work for minimum wage. Which means that wages would have to be raised even for the simplest jobs. But that would make it more expensive to live on, so everybody would need to be paid more. And wages would have to be raised again...
A socially benevolent government works for rich countries because they import low cost raw materials and export high priced products and services. It wouldn't work worldwide, at least not until artificial intelligence has advanced enough to let machines do all the jobs that people find uninteresting.
Re:World is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the assumption behind giving people any amount of liberty. If you don't think they can be trusted to make rational choices, vote for communism.
To put it bluntly, this can't be prevented no matter what you do, and if someone really does this, the children need to be taken away from them.
I call bullshit. Most poor people won't, in fact, use the money they receive on booze and cigarettes while their children starve. If some do, the children need to be taken away and placed into orphanages.
Re:Article missing it's mark (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares? Unless you want to criticize the government or practice Falun Gong, they're probably not going to restrict any of the freedoms you actually care about. You're free to dress the way you want and go about your normal business there.
This is different from, say, Saudi Arabia, where if you're a female you'll be restricted from many freedoms you take for granted in the West: dressing in a Western manner, driving a car, reading a paper, being without a male escort, etc. Even if you're male, you have to watch your behavior in the Islamic countries, and even then you'll probably get all kinds of nasty comments and rude treatment there from people who hate Westerners. In China, you don't have these problems.
Criticizing the lack of freedoms in China is laughable coming from what I assume to be an American. In America, you can't even photograph an Amtrak train without being attacked by police.
If I ever took a job in China, I'm sure I could keep my mouth shut about the government for the time I'm there (which wouldn't be permanent, obviously, just enough to save some money for a while). I'm also sure I'd have more complaints about the pollution there than the lack of freedoms.
Re:World is changing (Score:2, Insightful)
To put it bluntly, this can't be prevented no matter what you do, and if someone really does this, the children need to be taken away from them.
And this is were your idea suddenly turns into the bureaucratic mess that it was trying to solve. When is it time to take the children away? Who makes that call? where do they go? Who deals with the legal and social problems that this causes? Maybe its better to do everything we can not to take the children away, introduce some conditions on the payments.. but ONLY for these circumstances...oh, what about those disabled people.. and the criminals... and that single young person shouldn't be getting the same as a mother of 3...
A big big reason why governments are so full of rules and regulations is because they are (for the most part) OLD, and during their lifetime they have had to deal with exception after exception and what initially started out as a simple rule 'Everyone is entitled to health care' turns into several encyclopaedias of terms and conditions.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that in a lot of cases we have ended up with to much bureaucracy, especially in government but the large private corporations are getting there as well, and a lot of it self generating. But to think that the solution is to get rid of it all is not going to work either.
Oh, and people are dicks who will game any system they can.
Re:World is changing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not aware of any test cases, but the legal reasoning outlined in the majority opinion in "Lawrence v. Texas" (the case that legalized "sodomy") would also apply to statutes like the ones you cite, so you can consider yourself free to engage in lights-on non-missionary heterosex without fear of prosecution, regardless of which U.S. state you're in. As with so many civil rights battles, it wasn't just the obvious victim who benefited from the win.
You're welcome. :)