Your question about relevance is fair. The author of the blog post kindly submitted here complains that she [I wrote "he" before edit prompted by kind reply below] gets math quiz questions when applying for programming jobs. That's a mistake on the part of the hiring companies in two ways.
1) The main thing to look for when hiring programmers is programming work samples. In general, for any kind of work, a work-sample test will tell you more relevant information about which person to hire than any other kind of hiring procedure. (Some other kinds of hiring procedures have incremental validity in addition to work-sample tests, but none have higher validity than work-sample tests.)
2) Insofar as a math quiz question purports to figure out which applicants are smart and which are not, it is legally risky, as are IQ tests and AS ARE EDUCATION CREDENTIAL REQUIREMENTS if the quiz question is not validated as related to bona-fide job requirements. The company that publishes the Wonderlic personnel test hires a lot of psychometricians and lawyers to be able to defend the use of that test for hiring for dozens of kinds of jobs, and I think the balance of the evidence across hundreds of studies on many different job categories in multiple countries shows that general mental ability matters for performing most kinds of jobs well. But in the United States, a smartness test that a hiring manager just makes up is legally risky. It's a good idea to hire smarter rather than dumber job applicants, but it's an especially good idea (for legal protection in the United States) to make sure that the smartness test you use has been validated for your workplace.
The research I'm referring to is more generalizable across more occupations than you suggest. In other words, the usual relevance of my FAQ about company hiring procedures in the frequent HN threads about company hiring procedures is that companies almost always go wrong by 1) NOT using work-sample tests, a very good way to find competent workers, and 2) often go wrong by posing trick question tests, presumably to find smart people, without validating those tests and ensuring that those tests don't have disparate impact on applicants. Companies can and should do better, and research tells them how. The people who often complain on HN about company hiring procedures are largely correct, but usually just share anecdotes about what they would do differently if they were hiring, or what they would like hiring managers to do the next time they apply for a job. Research on this topic is abundant, and it applies to people seeking work as programmers as well as to most other occupations.
Thanks for pointing that out, for English pronoun usage at the very least. My eyes blazed right past the blog heading that uses (as I suppose) the author's given name. I didn't see any other author information on the post or on the about page for the blog.
I read the domain ("count aleph") and associated "count" with male nobility -- when in reality, now that I look more carefully, it must instead be a very clever pun on math, which makes lots of sense given that she (the author) likes math puzzles.
In the UK, it's illegal to block people from getting the job for anything which doesn't fall under the General Operating Requirements (GOR) of the job. This means that you can refuse to hire someone in a wheelchair for a bricklaying job (for the sake of pedantry, lets assume they cannot physically do the job) but you cannot just because someone has a certain religion.
It's a shockingly sensible piece of legislation.
Some interesting consequences that I know have been tested in court:
You can't be 'over-qualified' for a job, that's a form of age discrimination. An over-qualified person shouldn't be less able to do the job.
You can fire someone for wearing a niqab if it stops them from doing their job (e.g. teaching English to young students to whom English is a second language).
So, if you can show that not having the qualification doesn't disadvantage you then I would expect that'd be a legal issue.
Did you just say that education requirements are legally risky?
Yes, I did say that. I was surprised to find, upon a close reading of the Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case,[1] that the Supreme Court held in that case that not only was an IQ test an illegal hiring requirement, in the circumstances of that case, but so was a high school diploma requirement. The usual headline description of that case mentions only the holding about the IQ tests, not the holding about school credentials. Either kind of requirement could be challenged by a rejected job applicant based on that Supreme Court precedent.
The Duke Power decision was unconstitutional, and it involved total racial segregation and galling defiance of the courts. It has very little applicability to highly-educated employees, if for no other reason than there are virtually no Africans capable of doing the jobs.
Uh, why the downvotes? There are virtually no such Africans. It's an established fact, you just go around and take a census. Plenty of farm boys from Idaho, Japanese, girl engineers from rural China, guys from India with accents thick enough to stop bullets, you name it. All are welcome in the universities, all succeed and prosper. Just no Africans. You don't have to worry about illegally performance testing them during a job interview, because it is a fact that there are virtually none.
And if you still disagree, don't downvote to express your mindless politics. Simply give me the names of the vast horde of African engineers and scientists waiting for a chance. I will hire them and become the world's first trillionaire.
But anyway back when I was living in France I've had the chance of studying and then working with a lot of great engineers (electrical engineers mostly) coming from Africa: Marocco, Tunisia, Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda, etc.
This is neither a rare nor surprising occurrence: engineers coming from african countries are plentiful and very competent. Maybe you didn't find them because they are not waiting for you to give them a chance: turns out they are as hard and expensive to hire as anyone else...
If I was hiring, I would hire homosexual Martian Nazis if they made good employees. The few African colleagues I have had were skilled and pleasant. The trouble is that, at least in the U.S., that they are very rare.
I suspect that a lot of what you were seeing in France was selection bias. The most talented third-worlders immigrate at a very high rate to the former imperial states. France gets the Africans because they colonized Africa extensively and were not especially vicious. If you moved your company to Rwanda, you would find that very very few locals would be trainable for engineering work.
They're only risky to the point where you can't make a case for them. In the Duke Power case, there was little reason whatsoever to require a high school diploma. Using education requirements for exempt job with more autonomous decision-making and reliance on knowledge wouldn't be a problem.
1) The main thing to look for when hiring programmers is programming work samples. In general, for any kind of work, a work-sample test will tell you more relevant information about which person to hire than any other kind of hiring procedure. (Some other kinds of hiring procedures have incremental validity in addition to work-sample tests, but none have higher validity than work-sample tests.)
2) Insofar as a math quiz question purports to figure out which applicants are smart and which are not, it is legally risky, as are IQ tests and AS ARE EDUCATION CREDENTIAL REQUIREMENTS if the quiz question is not validated as related to bona-fide job requirements. The company that publishes the Wonderlic personnel test hires a lot of psychometricians and lawyers to be able to defend the use of that test for hiring for dozens of kinds of jobs, and I think the balance of the evidence across hundreds of studies on many different job categories in multiple countries shows that general mental ability matters for performing most kinds of jobs well. But in the United States, a smartness test that a hiring manager just makes up is legally risky. It's a good idea to hire smarter rather than dumber job applicants, but it's an especially good idea (for legal protection in the United States) to make sure that the smartness test you use has been validated for your workplace.
The research I'm referring to is more generalizable across more occupations than you suggest. In other words, the usual relevance of my FAQ about company hiring procedures in the frequent HN threads about company hiring procedures is that companies almost always go wrong by 1) NOT using work-sample tests, a very good way to find competent workers, and 2) often go wrong by posing trick question tests, presumably to find smart people, without validating those tests and ensuring that those tests don't have disparate impact on applicants. Companies can and should do better, and research tells them how. The people who often complain on HN about company hiring procedures are largely correct, but usually just share anecdotes about what they would do differently if they were hiring, or what they would like hiring managers to do the next time they apply for a job. Research on this topic is abundant, and it applies to people seeking work as programmers as well as to most other occupations.