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me_irl
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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Does anyone work in a place where this is a real thing? I don't know if I've ever heard of an employer making you take a random IQ test.
I've seen this shit for interviews but never as like a career update thing.
Hey, Organizational Psychologist here, we are the people who make tests like this. I'll try and provide a brief explanation. Let me first preface that the one in the meme is not a legit one and we dont use IQ as a metric in any cognitive ability testing. We do use cognitive ability testing and these tests are actually somewhat good for selection but they aren't the end all be all. If you would like this is deeply discussed in this review by Sackett et al (2022): https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-17327-001
If you want to see a legitimate cognitive ability test, the one I'm most familiar with on the commercial market is by wonderlic: https://wonderlic.com/
Cognitive ability tests unfortunately have a number of issues and as you see from the comments a lot of confusion surrounding them (also the canonical post is hilarious as they are way overboard with their testing imo):
An important thing for you or anyone else to consider is that these tests aren't meant to be used in isolation and overall they only explain a fraction of your potential job performance. Selection is hard, its one of the most studied parts of my field but it's basically an armsrace that has no end. If anyone would like to know more on the science, feel free to reach out.
I dislike organizational psychologists. The whole field. Every time a problematic hr department does something problematic using 'researched methods', the researchers all cry foul and say 'that's not how you're supposed to implement <policy/test>!' But do you not see your own role in legitimizing this behavior? All the research into how to run a happier bee colony is going to be used to justify mistreatment and discrimination by bad actors. Every test and every policy can be maligned, and providing citations just makes that easier. The research field is itself a tool for maintaining capital.
I don't disagree. I detest the use of my science as a means to control people for capitalist interest. The reality however is that regardless of the captualists, it would be a shame if we didn't understand how humans worked together.
Almost all the research we do indicates that the actions of the current economic system are harmful. Humans need to work less, have reasons to do things outside of money, have separations between their spheres of life, live with the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and belonging met. If you ever support things like DEI or equal opportunity for workers, those are practices championed by IO psychologist.
We are no more captured by the capitalists as the chemist making a drung to save lives sold for the cost of a house, the doctor working 80 hours while his patients debts mount, or the computer scientist who wanted to build great things but can't afford rent if his paycheck wasn't from Lockheed martain.
I try my best to pull my science in a humanist direction. We are scientists, we can discover, we can advocate, but we can't prevent people from twisting reality to their whim.
None of the advances in workers rights or DEI have been due to psychologists convincing CEOs with facts and logic. You are confusing your role with that of a union, a civil rights lawyer, or a political activist and you are rewriting the history of hard fought victories as merely scientific breakthroughs in operating efficiency.
The difference is, those on the outside and the bottom want to challenge existing power structures, while you are advising managers how best to maintain those structures.
This is literally illegal where I live. There's a few exceptions like airline pilot, police or firefighter, but besides that it's considered discrimination.
Which isn't surprising to me. I personally am not a fan of cognitive ability testing because of that exact problem. There is too much adverse impact to justify it. A simple structural behavioural interview gets you about the same predictive power with far fewer drawbacks.
It makes sense to have specific skill, ability and knowledge tests as appropriate. Like having a written and road test to get a driver license.
But these overall comprehensive "personality" or "cognitive" tests are blatently unethical.
You are correct, especially about personality. Personality is a very very complex multidimensional construct. The only way we can sort of say someone has a specific stable personality is through a statistical mechanism called latent profile analysis. Even then, that is for figuring out general profiles in the population, not the individual.
What we typically do is look at either personality facets or profiles and do experiments to see how they moderate or mediate different effects such as job performance, well being, turnover intentions, etc.
If you want to look at the best scientifically valid personality assessment I'd suggest the HEXACO. There is no bullshit astrology, it's all just psychology and math.
Yes exactly. I forgot to mention that.
It's not that hard. People in your field just make up a bunch of shit that over complicates it and gets in the way to justify their existence. Anyone halfway decent at hiring can interview a candidate and have a decent idea of if they're a good fit or not.
That's completely and totally false. Please read the cited meta analysis, which is directly on that topic. What you proposed is literally the worst means of conducting selection outside of flipping a coin.
Literally everyone I ever hired performed almost exactly as I expected them to, but whatever guess I should have been flipping coins.
This test says I'm going to be a stellar quarterback.
Haha, don't worry, we all make fun of them for pushing super hard with the NFL
The U.S. basically made them illegal in workplaces in the 70's, when it was shown that employers were using so-called intelligence tests unrelated to job functions to discriminate on the basis of race. Plus, in the 90's they passed a law banning discrimination on the basis of disability. Now workplace testing needs to be shown to be directly related to job responsibilities, so general purpose tests are pretty much too much of a compliance nightmare to be worth the effort.
Maybe they're still common in some other countries, but they're really rare in the U.S.
I took a “personality” test in 2007 for my first job (union btw). Some pretty obvious basic questions that I imagine only a selfish sociopath would fail but maybe that helped filter at the time.
American (CA) engineer here, I had to take one of these for a job I ended up getting in 2012. It was for a big company too! They might argue that cognitive ability is directly related to engineering.
I actually do have a cognitive disability, ADHD. But I'm like a one-legged stripper... It might seem counterintuitive, but just watch me dance for a minute and then it will make sense.
I don't know they still find ways to sneak them in. I took a "logic" test as part of an application recently for a job with the government. The questions weren't related to anything I would be doing. It definitely felt l like they were trying to suss out intelligence.
Hehehe never apply to Canonical. I sat 6 interviews, 2 psychometric evals including an IQ-adjacent evaluation, submitted a take home assessment and was asked about my high school math grades just to be offered a job with a more advanced title paying 20k less than what I was currently making. I only sat it through because I wanted to post the offer on glassdoor/levels so others didn't have to waste their time either. (And because I wanted to see if I could pass their famously grueling application process)
So yes I've seen companies (big ones) do this sort of thing.
Canonical's hiring process is wild. The number of stages is a deal breaker in itself, but the bizarre questions and the tests you mentioned don't do them any favors either.
I lost interest in the first stage with them asking for an essay about things like what kind of student I was in high school. The full email was massive.
I think theirs is the only company I've seen ask for a GPA on the initial application. I've been out of school so long I don't even remember, nor did I particularly care since the knowledge was the actual point.
Yes, I went through this too, dumbest interview process ever but it had the positive result to make me look into how dumb a company canonical is and start using debian rather than Ubuntu. I call it a hard fought win
My wife's workplace tried to have them do dream journaling and then had them come back and report back to the group on what they dreamed about. This is a fortune 500 company that you've absolutely heard of before.
LLMs are good for something: wasting the time of people who are wasting your time.
Yeah, at best, that would result in a whole lot of "I didn't dream last night" from me.
You could never do this with an IT team .... every single engineer would answer something like:
"I dreamt of leaving this god forsaken job and moving to a farm in a very rural town with 500 inhabitants then never having to touch a computer again"
relevant: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/fired-microsoft-engineer-takes-up-goose-farming-as-new-career-check-viral-linkedin-profile/articleshow/109771197.cms
See, for me it's not as much the computers that's the issue. It's the people. Oh God the people. Makes me want to go deep into the middle of nowhere where there's not even light pollution
It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste their stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Find you a B2B position .... it's still glorified service desk, but at least you're dealing with your own kind instead of shudders Normies
Edit: I just realize B2B can still be the general computer literate populace ... I don't quite know how to call this type of job. L3 support?
We deal with other engineers, the customer's in house IT team calls us for support with our specific product, but we don't deal with the end users or the stakeholders, only engineer to engineer.
Which doesn't really quarantee much. I'm a sysadmin in a corporate with offices in multiple countries and even continents. Part of the job is to build services for other offices and help their local IT guys with their stuff. I've seen multiple times when "IT guy" plugs in wrong cables multiple times even via monitored video call, creates loops to the network, pulls both power cables from a running ESX servers (production critical, of course) and so on.
Gladly there's also competent guys and then it's a breeze. They have their strenghts and knowledge on their local setup, I know my shit and we speak the same language so I get competent requests and detailed descriptions on support tickets while knowing that they don't do anything stupid after I finish my part of the task.
Ah yes, the core switch local loop ... my favorite way to force the network team to enable STP
I'm a step off from it at an MSP so it's not like it's just anyone calling in. But the number of c suite people who apparently can't do their job without AI these days is concerning
The one thing C suite execs and AI have in common is that they're both really good at being confidently wrong.
Or I have this recurring dream about the head of HR performing oral sex on me.
That would end that really quick.
Because they finally vetted a proper candidate that will submit to HR's oral sex requests?
Nice.
I frequently dream about dying in horrific ways.
Okay, so there is this big aspartagus, now it's a moving reckless 8mm european slider from a german window that can open in many ways. One way comes and absorbs itself without any blue ingredients except light pickles that were brought into ransom from andorra in 1800 and 1800BC, the small spring is a irish chair is conscious, it feels warmth.
I worked for a huge huge company you've totally heard of. We had a large event where we were all given bells and mallets and told to ring them as a team to make beautiful music. My coworker beat his bell flat.
"I find beauty in silence." "Poetic but that's not really..." "Would you like to be beautiful?"
Companies really like to spend money on the most BS of things; anything other than giving their employees a raise lol
A company I worked at had a required cognitive a bility test one of the venture firms had forced on them. It was as long as I remember the SATs being, and a combination of math questions and stuff that felt like it belonged on a Myers-Briggs exam. Apprently if you did bad enough you could get fired?
My field has a physical coordination and spatial reasoning test you have to pass before you're accepted into grad school, and a lot of employers in the field will retest you before hiring.
Apparently there was an issue with a certain portion of people being able to pass the book learning aspect of the field but then getting injured or being afraid of the machinery we work with.
I am legitimately struggling to figure out what grad school field has a spatial reasoning test. Civil engineering? Physical therapy?
A company called Aptean does