<i>Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success.</i><p>I don&#x27;t mean to be nit-picky but I enjoy an internally consistent burden of proof in a blog post.  In this post he seemed to move the goal posts.  He dismisses intelligence as valuable because it doesn&#x27;t meet an impossibly high burden of evidence.  But then argues you should instead should use drive, curiosity, and ethics without substantiating his claims.<p><i>For example, test programmers on basic algorithms -- linked lists, binary searches.<p>Just in pseudocode -- it doesn&#x27;t matter if they know the relevant Java library calls.</i><p>Programming and algorithms are two different sets of skills.  Writing a stable, easy to use, useful java&#x2F;ruby&#x2F;python&#x2F;javascript library is a very different skill set from solving algorithmic puzzles, which are both unrelated to recreating a linked list from scratch in 10 minutes on a whiteboard.