Given that it's pretty obvious you'd have a three-figure IQ as an adult, this would have put your 8-year-old IQ at over 200 - which from what I recall is well into the realm of "figures here are not very useful as indicators, and are probably not accurate".
Probably because a 200-point IQ is about equivalent to one in five billion people mathematically, yet children have been found who fluctuate up to 250 on a good day :)
From what I can research, one standard deviation is about sixteen points. That 158 in the image up there should, if it were accurate, indicate about the top 0.01%, or one in ten thousand people. In other words, out of the 6.5 billion people in the world, I'd be smarter than approximately 6.499 billion of them.
That's a lot of people to be smarter than. And another reason I'd take that test with a pinch of salt.
Off on a tangent, there are some pretty weird high-IQ societies. Mensa if you're above 132 (1 in 50). Triple-Nine and OATH above 150 (one in a thousand). Prometheus and Ultranet above 164 (one in thirty thousand), and Mega and Pi for the 176+ crowd (one in a million). There's a scattering of others up and down the range.
I do have one question for these brainbox gatherings - wouldn't it be smarter to NOT advertise that you can outthink almost anyone? ;)
"figures here are not very useful as indicators, and are probably not accurate"--Bingo. That particular test didn't go further than 200, but I got everything right on it, so they gave me a "200+" rating. The upshot of that was I got to read whatever I wanted to during reading class, which took a *little* pressure off the teacher since there were about 40 kids in that class.
Well, since that was the last "official" IQ test I ever took, I can't really say what my current IQ is, but depending on what Internet test I take, it's been as low as 105. ;) What to believe?
As for the high-IQ societies, part of me is afraid that if I took a test I wouldn't end up being as smart as I hope I am, and part of me is afraid that if I did get in and went to a meeting, I'd get laughed out of the room for having a phone monkey job. You can't win with these people! ;)
Heh, I hadn't ever heard of any of these besides Mensa. Been giving it a lot of thought?
Eh, not terribly much. I figure that if I ever wanted to join these societies - and why, really? - I'd go take a bunch of IQ tests, take a couple of months doing brainbooster exercises, take the tests again, and then take the better set of results to the societies.
Well, I'm all for joining anything that I think will get me out of the Roach Cave. I just don't know if that would do it. Also, when you join something like that, like you said, do you put it on your C.V.... or not?
I wouldn't, mostly. It probably falls into the same category as having a PhD - if you put that on an application for a phone monkey job, the instant reaction is "this person will be bored stiff, ask questions we don't want asked, and leave in six months for a much better job, leaving us to find and train another replacement."
Or most jobs, really. Even the kinds of jobs that usually go to super-smart people either look at past accomplishments or the person's reputation. Putting "I score highly on standardised IQ tests" down doesn't count as a 'real-world' accomplishment and smacks of desperation. It's the same reason no-one puts their school grades on any job app apart from (possibly) intern.
And to be painfully honest, almost no recruiter for any kind of job is looking for someone smart with no qualifications or experience. Unless it's a figurehead position - "Look, we hire Mensans for our ThinkyTank thing! We must produce incredible products! Hey you, tankie, get me a coffee." The general expectation is that well, if you're that great, how come you're not telling me stuff that will get you hired?
Brutal and illogical, but accurate. Fortunately, although much of the game has well-worn paths and standard procedures, there are a lot of shortcuts and rough areas that people don't talk about. There are even ways to escape the map completely...
I wish I knew what they were, because frankly, the only impressive thing about me is my education and test scores. I have never done anything worthwhile with work. All my "management" experience has been in theater, and I've been told repeatedly that that doesn't count and people do not read that part of my resume.
so if I'm not my education or my test scores,
I am a phone monkey, indistinguishable from any of the people they are hiring now who barely graduated high school and cannot spell their own names.
A lot of it is spin, or at least pointing out the relevant bits that may be lurking in and amongst the stuff they consider irrelevant.
All my "management" experience has been in theater, and I've been told repeatedly that that doesn't count and people do not read that part of my resume.
Lies. I bet there's a bunch of stuff in there that could be stripped back to its management-related bones and presented in a way that recruiters are primed to accept. Like a QnD program with no input checking, you need to screw with your parameter syntax until you match what they're expecting.
There's also other lightweight craptastic stuff that can be started around the office to look good on a resumé. Suggest a certificate of recognition for the person who processes the most calls, or any other kind of stat that you think you have a good chance of winning. Either you win it, or you get credit for "instigating, implementing and managing a wide-ranging team-building appreciation system", or you get "Contributed most significant and wide-ranging suggestions to team-building project," even if your suggestion is completely dismissed.
There have been a couple of positions I've gone for where they were looking for something - ANYTHING - to fit some obscure criterion that someone had thrown into the ring. No-one else had anything or wanted to have anything to do with that criterion because of its uselessness. So I spent five minutes here and half a lunch break there doing or writing things which could technically fall under that classification. And the best thing was that I could then recycle and reuse that one item endlessly for years on any other job apps - instant +2 to save against failure :)
hee, that sounds cool. My res. has been in the hands of I think ten different people to tweak it, all of whom outrank me, and many of whom work in H.R., and still nothing can be done to it to make it worthwhile.
That's because if any of them knew how to tweak one properly, they wouldn't be stuck doing the jobs they're doing now :)
Besides, are the people who will be saying 'yea' or 'nay' to your hiring the same people who are doing the tweaks? Different people from different areas in an organisation tweak things in different ways.
The best way, if you can manage it, is to get hold of copies of resumes that were successful in getting their submitters the kind of job you want, and seeing if you can emulate them. You may find out that they're actually quite different from what the tweakers *think* makes a good one.
Some yes and some no, to the question about whether they'd be hiring for the same types of jobs I'd be going for. Unfortunately, we're Bureaucracy Central around here and resumes are not something they'd consider viewable by someone at my level.
One of my friends got hired out of the helpdesk (but stayed in the company) for a job where she gets to write papers and do presentations and stuff--all things I'm great at (she is too, of course). I looked at her res and it's substantively no different from mine--except that I went to a better college. *shrug*
Your employer is unlikely to fold up and disappear any time in the next year or so, allowing you a relatively solid base from which to look for the next step in your career?
There are always jobs open somewhere in the company?
There are any number of interesting and nonstandard opportunities to tweak the upper levels into hiring you at a much higher pay scale? This is separate and distinct from applying for advertised positions, of course.
2. True, and I've been applying for them for nearly five years. That's never going to happen.
3. Sort of. Any upper level who would actually speak to me? No. My emails get moved into a delete basket (there is proof of this) and calls are not returned. Since we work in the roach cave, there is no opportunity to run into any of them in person, either.
Probably because a 200-point IQ is about equivalent to one in five billion people mathematically, yet children have been found who fluctuate up to 250 on a good day :)
From what I can research, one standard deviation is about sixteen points. That 158 in the image up there should, if it were accurate, indicate about the top 0.01%, or one in ten thousand people. In other words, out of the 6.5 billion people in the world, I'd be smarter than approximately 6.499 billion of them.
That's a lot of people to be smarter than. And another reason I'd take that test with a pinch of salt.
Off on a tangent, there are some pretty weird high-IQ societies. Mensa if you're above 132 (1 in 50). Triple-Nine and OATH above 150 (one in a thousand). Prometheus and Ultranet above 164 (one in thirty thousand), and Mega and Pi for the 176+ crowd (one in a million). There's a scattering of others up and down the range.
I do have one question for these brainbox gatherings - wouldn't it be smarter to NOT advertise that you can outthink almost anyone? ;)
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Well, since that was the last "official" IQ test I ever took, I can't really say what my current IQ is, but depending on what Internet test I take, it's been as low as 105. ;) What to believe?
As for the high-IQ societies, part of me is afraid that if I took a test I wouldn't end up being as smart as I hope I am, and part of me is afraid that if I did get in and went to a meeting, I'd get laughed out of the room for having a phone monkey job. You can't win with these people! ;)
Heh, I hadn't ever heard of any of these besides Mensa. Been giving it a lot of thought?
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Can't really see the point, though.
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And to be painfully honest, almost no recruiter for any kind of job is looking for someone smart with no qualifications or experience. Unless it's a figurehead position - "Look, we hire Mensans for our ThinkyTank thing! We must produce incredible products! Hey you, tankie, get me a coffee." The general expectation is that well, if you're that great, how come you're not telling me stuff that will get you hired?
Brutal and illogical, but accurate. Fortunately, although much of the game has well-worn paths and standard procedures, there are a lot of shortcuts and rough areas that people don't talk about. There are even ways to escape the map completely...
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so if I'm not my education or my test scores,
I am a phone monkey, indistinguishable from any of the people they are hiring now who barely graduated high school and cannot spell their own names.
I am the same.
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All my "management" experience has been in theater, and I've been told repeatedly that that doesn't count and people do not read that part of my resume.
Lies. I bet there's a bunch of stuff in there that could be stripped back to its management-related bones and presented in a way that recruiters are primed to accept. Like a QnD program with no input checking, you need to screw with your parameter syntax until you match what they're expecting.
There's also other lightweight craptastic stuff that can be started around the office to look good on a resumé. Suggest a certificate of recognition for the person who processes the most calls, or any other kind of stat that you think you have a good chance of winning. Either you win it, or you get credit for "instigating, implementing and managing a wide-ranging team-building appreciation system", or you get "Contributed most significant and wide-ranging suggestions to team-building project," even if your suggestion is completely dismissed.
There have been a couple of positions I've gone for where they were looking for something - ANYTHING - to fit some obscure criterion that someone had thrown into the ring. No-one else had anything or wanted to have anything to do with that criterion because of its uselessness. So I spent five minutes here and half a lunch break there doing or writing things which could technically fall under that classification. And the best thing was that I could then recycle and reuse that one item endlessly for years on any other job apps - instant +2 to save against failure :)
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Oh well. It gives me time to LJ! :)
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Besides, are the people who will be saying 'yea' or 'nay' to your hiring the same people who are doing the tweaks? Different people from different areas in an organisation tweak things in different ways.
The best way, if you can manage it, is to get hold of copies of resumes that were successful in getting their submitters the kind of job you want, and seeing if you can emulate them. You may find out that they're actually quite different from what the tweakers *think* makes a good one.
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One of my friends got hired out of the helpdesk (but stayed in the company) for a job where she gets to write papers and do presentations and stuff--all things I'm great at (she is too, of course). I looked at her res and it's substantively no different from mine--except that I went to a better college. *shrug*
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As for the rest of it - ain't red tape a pain?
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There are always jobs open somewhere in the company?
There are any number of interesting and nonstandard opportunities to tweak the upper levels into hiring you at a much higher pay scale? This is separate and distinct from applying for advertised positions, of course.
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2. True, and I've been applying for them for nearly five years. That's never going to happen.
3. Sort of. Any upper level who would actually speak to me? No. My emails get moved into a delete basket (there is proof of this) and calls are not returned. Since we work in the roach cave, there is no opportunity to run into any of them in person, either.
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