Chinese Company Seeks US Workers With 125 IQ

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."

Comments

World is changing

[SquarePixel]

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.

Re:World is changing

[EmagGeek]

Percentage of people with an IQ higher than 140: 0.31349%

Percentage of people with an IQ higher than 125: 4.15182%

(Based on Wechsler)

Re:World is changing

[Jedi Alec]

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.

Re:World is changing

[ortholattice]

It's really hard at times for those of us up in the 140s to conceive of why a lot of this stuff isn't common sense. And hence end up spending a lot of time being misunderstood or explaining what ought to be perfectly obvious.

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:World is changing

[oldspewey]

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

[tophermeyer]

True, but the WAIS tests are typically considered very reliable IQ tests. This company is using their own test, claiming it is an IQ test. If this test was developed within the company, it is very probably biased toward the industry and company culture. People on the "inside" probably score quiet highly on that test, they know all the right lingo and are more familiar with the problems that company faces. Personally, I would be surprised if this test produced anything close to a normal distribution.

Re:World is changing

[Grishnakh]

This is the whole problem with the idea of "intelligence", or someone being "smart". Smart at what?

Different people are smart at different things. Some people are musical geniuses, but they wouldn't have the first clue about partial differential equations no matter how hard they tried. Some people are brilliant at understanding other people and relating to them, but have a hard time working with a computer. Some people are brilliant theoretical physicists, but are basically retards when it comes to social mores and dealing with other people.

I'm not sure if it's true, but I've read that Thomas Edison couldn't even do long division, and had to hire a mathematician to do math for him. He could invent brilliant mechanical contraptions, but couldn't understand higher math. This would explain why his rival Tesla was able to invent so many things involving AC power (transformers, generators, motors, etc.), since that relied on understanding Maxwell's equations well.

Article missing it's mark

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Their banks don't cheat?

[sirwired]

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:Smart enough to cheat and steal

[th3rmite]

Hey, don't blame me because I figured out the system!

Re:Ok, this is stupid

[Eivind Eklund]

(Repeat of similar post above, where you made this misinterpretation too.)

http://gawker.com/5392947/googles-broken-hiring-process

And I quote Peter Norvig

One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

I'll quote the original source of that claim, Peter Norvig, and his refuting of that interpretation:

What do you know? Valleywag got everything wrong. Google is hiring, not laying off. Also, our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process. And I guess Valleywag will keep doing what they do...

(emphasis mine)

Eivind.