The Standup with ThePrimeagen - Is College Worth It? (ft. DHH)

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

🔗 Sponsored by Code Rabbit https://coderabbit.link/primeagen-vscode ⸻ 🎓 Is College Still Worth It in 2025? Welcome to The Standup – where developers, creators, and founders debate the big questions. In this episode, we sit down with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp co-founder. 👉 Is College Worth It in 2025? We dive deep into: ⏳ The ROI of college in a post-AI world 🇺🇸 Why American higher ed is broken (from a Danish POV) 📉 Are CS degrees still worth $250K? 💸 The myth of the “four-year luxury cruise” 🤖 How AI is disrupting the junior dev job market 🔍 Hiring: Is college even a useful signal anymore? 🧠 IQ vs wisdom vs vibes – what really matters in hiring 🧰 Is programming a trade? Should we move to apprenticeships? 👨‍🌾 Why every dev wants to be a farmer (and why that’s delusional) Whether you’re considering college, hiring devs, or already knee-deep in student debt, this conversation pulls no punches and may just change how you think about education, hiring, and the future of software development. ⸻ 📌 Chapters: 0:00 intro 2:05 is college still worth it in 2025? 5:48 the cost of college in the U.S. vs Europe 6:57 sponsor: CodeRabbit 7:42 good point 9:10 DHH explains the Danish education system 13:02 is college just a luxury cruise? 17:45 what are you actually buying with a degree? 21:20 how companies *really* hire developers 26:11 Casey’s take: programming should be a trade 30:40 is college a filter for IQ or just vibes? 45:50 what skills matter more than a degree 49:20 how to actually learn to code in 2025 53:00 is college redeemable? final thoughts 57:15 wrap-up & what’s next on the podcast #IsCollegeWorthIt #DHH #CaseyMuratori #DeveloperPodcast #SoftwareEngineering #TechPodcast #BootcampVsCollege #ProgrammerLife #TechCareers #TheStartupPodcast

Welcome to the startup. Today we have on with us. We have Teach. Say hi, Tege. Hi, Tege. All right. We got Casey Muratory. Hello, everyone. And we got D.H. The race car driver himself. All right. All right. So, by the way, today we got a good topic. Topic is, should you go to college? I thought the topic was, is college worth it? That's a different question.

The topic is, is college worth it? Nailed the intro. He's got it. First try right here. All right. Anyway, sorry. Is college worth it? Hey, David, you are on the show for the first time, so why don't you kick us off? Is college worth it? And as the only non-American? Well, is it worth what? Is it worth $10? Yeah, I think it's worth $10,000.

Is it worth a quarter of a million dollars in debt? Absolutely not, unless you're guaranteed to be raking it in when you get out on the other side. I think the weirdness of all of this is coming from Denmark where the state will pay for your college education. The state will spend like last I looked it up, I think it was something like 10 grand to educate you. So to hear that people go to college where you can spend $90,000 a year for a four-year degree. And I think that's even without room and board. Just sounds insane. I don't understand why Americans married the idea of getting education with getting a four-year cruise.

Like, why did that have to be the same thing? Oh, you also get a five-star hotel thrown in, and by the way, you've got to pay for it for the rest of your life. That just seems insane to me. Not the idea that you have to or should get an education if you're so inclined to get high education, but that you're going to pay a ridiculous, ungodly sum for it, that you're going to carry on your back for the next 10, 15, 20 years. Is there any education that's worth it? That is worth the 250,000.

Like, is there some role that it's like, okay, it's fine? Because is it purely just because you're going to make money? Is that your argument? Like, so like a doctor. Doctors come out. They spend obviously hundreds of thousands of dollars because they have to go to, you know, college for eight, 10 years, just like me, but I'm not a doctor. And like, does that, is that the same thing?

Are you okay with that because you know they're going to make a lot? I think that's at least a financial sort of situation that can make sense. I know in Denmark there are educations where you spend a lot. If you want to become a pilot, that's really expensive. And you normally take on some sort of loan agreement or you sometimes take something on with the military. You're going to do this amount of years of service and they're going to teach you how to become a pilot. But in the U.S., this idea that you can spend four years learning Russian poetry and that's going to cost you 100 grand, 200 grand, 50 grand, 20 grand. On the other side, like, what the fuck are you going to do?

How are you going to make that money back? I think it's just absolutely mind-blowingly insane that there's a system set up where the loans are backed by the government, which means that there's no skin in the game for neither the lenders nor the educational institutions to actually produce something that will create a return, that someone is going to spend a proportionate amount on the education as to what they're going to get out of it from, a job. And I mean, I'm not even against Russian poetry. I think there should be people who study that, but they should be perhaps encouraged to take on an obscene amount of debt for prospects that just aren't there to ever, ever pay it off in the end. And I think that's really what just fires me up about all this stuff, is that the economics is so warped. And it all seems to a hinge on this

idea that, like, well, if we can just convince a, I don't know, a president to forgive all the loans without changing a damn thing about how the system works, somehow that's going to be good? No, no. The fundamentally flawed part is that there is, there's no skin in the game for the lenders, there's no skin in the game for the universities, and there's just a bunch of 18-year-olds being asked whether they would like free money to take a four-year fucking cruise to come out on the other side with a degree in Russian poetry that's going to pay $22,000 a year. Like, what the, why?

Why are you doing this to kids? I think that borders into something that's morally reprehensible. Even if you can say, like, well, you knew you signed on the dotted line. You could have read the, it's not even fine print. I mean, you actually do have to be slightly retarded to think that you can take on $200,000 or $100,000 worth of debt and that that degree in Russian poetry is somehow going to work out. But you know what? that's what 17-year-olds are.

That's what 18-year-olds are. They're retarded in the sense that their brains are literally not fully formed. I think the female brain formed a little earlier. The male brain, 25. That's by the time. In my experience, there's still sometimes a little time left to cook even after 25. So I think it's just, I mean, it's just a really bad construct to entice kids to take on these massive loan burdens with the entire pressure of a society telling them that if they don't go to college

and preferably if they don't go to a prestige college, they're fucked, right? Like their life is over. They're never going to make any money. They're going to be a loser, which, by the way, isn't true. There are plenty of losers who finish their four-year degree and again, saddled with a bunch of debt and can't get a job. And like, that's a fair definition of a loser. In fact, it's a worse definition of a loser than someone who doesn't go through all that

at least doesn't have the debt burden, right? But this idea that we've shuffled all kind of societal pressures towards you have to get a college degree because, hey, look at the statistics over time, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, also, we need some welders. We need some carpenters. We need a bunch of other professions to keep society fucking running. And some of them can be quite lucrative, right? So even just for an individual, there is something really scrambling. up about how the encouragement system goes. I think Mike Road and the whole 30 jobs things and so on

is absolutely spot on in my optics. But all right, not everyone wants to be a welder. And some folks should go to college. We should also have a bunch of educated people. We don't need to take that a desire and a need for education and marry it to a luxury cruise that's going to cost an obscene amount of money. Developers, are you tired of code reviews that just say looks good to me, or here's seven things I need you to change that are irrelevant to the PR? Well, meet CodeRabbit. AI reviews right inside your editor.

Starting with VS code, cursor and windsurf, sorry, no Vim yet. Hit review and bam. Outcomes feedback even before you open a poll request. CodeRabbit can help flag bugs that you're vibe coding with your LLM bots missed. And with one easy click, it can send all the context back. to your favorite agentic tools for quick fixes line by line. Code Rabbit offers a generous free tier with up to 50 code reviews per day. Grab the extension now at codrabbit.com slash primogen dash VS code.

Links in the description and ship cleaner code today. You bring up a really good point, which is these 18-year-olds can make a decision that's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they can't even buy alcohol because we think they're not responsible enough to be able to drink alcohol. Which is kind of like a really funny kind of world we live in where it's just like, yeah, they totally get a life decision that's going to saddle them with debt for the, for the next 20 potential years of their life. But hey, you can't rent a car yet.

Honestly, you're not, you're not capable to rent a car, but hey, you can definitely make this decision. Like, one is way worse than the other one, and it's just far more impactful. That's actually. Well, that's why the car company doesn't want to let them rent a car because they know they're going to make bad decisions. And the car company is going to have to be the one. Right. It's in the game. Yes.

If that 18-year-old. crashes the car and the company renting them can't recoup that money because the fucking 18 year old doesn't have any. They know, you know what, that wouldn't be smart. I should not rent this person my car because they're going to crash it and I won't be able to get my money back. Therefore, I'm not going to do it. And I think that's, by the way, at the root of all this is good intentions.

The good intention that if we underwrite the loans, the student loans, more people have access to loans, which means that more people will have access to education. and zero consideration has been taken to like the second order effect. What happens when there's just free unbacked money with no skin in the game? Yeah, prices are going to go to the moon and who's going to vacuum all the excess capital administrators? You've seen the graph, right? Like since whatever, 1960, complete flatline with professors and educators and adjuncts. And then you see from 1980 forward, the chart just goes parabolical when you look at a

administrators. What was the stat? Something like some college had a 10 to one ratio of admins to students or something just truly bizarrely really. I might be Columbia, I think, or something. Yeah, I remember seeing something like that. Yeah. And you just say, that can't be real. There can't be

100,000 administrators. He's not really exaggerating. I don't remember the exact report either, but like there were there were numbers that would be absurd, right? I remember it being, I'm going to fucking ask a. I. There was more. There's more ridiculous than you think. There's a number.

Yeah. It had to be like administrators to professors. For every single professor, there's 10 administrators. Because students would just be the most ridiculous thing. Yeah, it was something like 10 to 1 with students. It was like the same number or something. It was insane. Okay.

It's like having a company and you have more managers than employees. Like everybody's walking out like, we're managing. Oh, no, here it is. Thanks. Thanks, uh, chat, GPT. At Yale. 5,460 administrators managing fewer than 5,000 undergraduate students. More than a one-on-one ratio.

What? What? You don't think you're paying for that? You don't think you're paying for that hall monitor? Like, all the time, just dedicated to you and only you? It'd be one thing, too, if they, like, literally followed you around. They're like, yo, we're going to... We have a person who's sole job.

Is they're going to follow you for four years? We're going to optimize everything about your life. We're going to get you in the best... I'm going to be reaching out to people to get you internships. I'm going to be like, yeah, your personal assistant, your Yale personal assistant. Right. And also, like, it gets drunk for you, like, whoever that person is. They get drunk for you.

They get in fights for you. They date for you, all the stuff. And then you just get the outcome, whatever it is at the end of it. Imagine you could just be like, hey, can you ask out the personal assistant of so-and-so over there? And we can sort of figure out if we're a match. And then, like, we'll go on a date. I'm too busy studying and working hard. But it sounds like, what are these people doing?

Absolutely. What are these people fucking doing? Well, first of all, they're making your life fucking miserable. 100% the college experience that had a one-to-one ratio of admins to students is infinitely worse than the experience of 1967. That had 100 students to one administrator, whatever the ratio used to be. 100% that experience is worse. And I think, I mean, for me, the great illustration of this was during COVID, where student was just treated like, cattle in a cage.

And you're thinking like, wait, what? People are paying for this? They're paying for this fucking experience. They don't even get to go to classes. They don't even get to have the joy of that four-year cruise. They get to be confined into a dorm. And then there's an administrator that's going to run around and yell at them. If they walk outside without a mask on, well, what are you doing?

This is insane. And then, like, did they not just admit like, yeah, well, we, I know you guys didn't really learn anything this semester, so everyone just gets an A. They didn't even like pretend at the end of the semester. Like I had younger siblings in college like during COVID. And they're like, we just didn't do anything. And you're like, what do you? You still got the grade.

You didn't have to like repeat or anything. Oh yeah, I got a check for that. You're like, what? That's, I didn't even know that was a thing. That is, that's crazy. That's like the, okay. So I can't tell what is the worst part about, or the best part about college, whether it's the actual education or the fact that you're going through college with people of approximately your age,

learning the same topic and being able to kind of learn how to argue with each other and really become a full-formed adult and all that. If you're not even going to school or class during that time and you didn't get to be around other people, like the whole entire college experience doesn't make any sense. This is also my whole problem with remote education. There's a big push into like remotify all aspects of life. And it's just like, why would you ever pay to go to a university when like the true value of a university is in the moments of being around people and learning in some sort of co kind of way like those were those were single-handedly my best experiences in college and really where I learned how to become actually a good programmer was at was the after labs

after hours arguing about an acm programming competition figuring out how to solve the coin change problem because none of us were ever able to do it and there was no just chat gpt to spit out an answer it's like that's where the magic was well I would actually argue like one, one greater, or one more severe than that, I guess I would say, which is that college, what it really is, as far as I've been able to determine, is like a institution that is extracting money from you while getting the value from you. So it's basically a strictly one-sided thing. All of the students who come together, they're actually the value.

Like you interacting with the other students and stuff like that and being there and, you know, going through the process is valuable to you and valuable to the other students because of each other. But the actual education you're receiving is usually not very good compared to that, right? And compared to the other, you know, resources that you now have available for learning things. And the reason that I think that's somewhat, like, the reason I think there's a reasonable amount of evidence for that is just because people right now are doing. doing stuff like using chat GPT to cheat on their papers or whatever, right? And all this sort of stuff. If you were going there for the education, you would never cheat because that's like paying for something and then not taking the thing, right?

That's like buying a car and saying, oh, keep the car, I'm going to walk. It's kind of like getting a gym membership and never going to the gym? So we know, like basically it's like, no, the thing, what you were getting was whatever was happening with you and the other students and stuff. And the credential at the end is the part that you actually cared about and wanted to pay for, but the education isn't even can't be that good because people aren't even mad when they don't get it. Or like with COVID, people are probably like, sweet, I didn't have to read all the books for that class. I just got the A for free. That would never happen if you felt

like the thing you were getting was really valuable, right? You would never do that. You would like, oh my God, I object. Like, I want those classes back. I need to study that particular piece of Russian poetry. And you didn't let me do that, right? Yeah, I want to inject one thing, which is the reason why that's true is because, these kids are retarded. In the same way, we just talked about they're retarded taking on 200 grand worth of student loan debt, right? They're not literally, their brains are not formed. They are forming. That is what the university college experience is supposed to do, right? But in that moment, no, they don't have that. I didn't have that. I mean, I was always thrilled

whenever class was canceled. I was like, sweet. So they're not thinking long term because literally the brain is not done with the part that does long-term thinking. So when you're asking them like, hey, do you know what? Maybe you should study because who's going to care about this diploma? By the way, not a lot due by the time you get into, say, programming. If you're getting a diploma for programming and you don't know how to program, that diploma ain't worth shit, right? There's a status token in that diploma that may open some doors, may give you an opportunity, may give you an You still got to fucking act. You still got to be able to do the thing. I mean, it's all good that you can apply and you'll make the first cut of the recruiter sorting. Oh, this person went to Yale. Like, let's make sure that they are in the second round of this shit. And then you're going to be at the whiteboard and then fucking what? What are you going to do? You don't know anything because you just coasted through everything. You spend an enormous amount of money for a status token that's going to be revealed in a second to be. be worth nothing. Now, I don't know how it works in, I don't know, investment banking. Maybe the status

token there kind of opens some doors and everyone is full of shit in investment banking. You don't have to know anything. I mean, that's the stereotype programers would like to believe about finance people, I think, or maybe management or something. You go into management consulting, but also, I mean, I don't actually think that's true. I do think you're, you got to have some smarts to it, right? So I think you're exactly right. It's an awful deal, awful deal to pay way too much, even if it has something of value, it's an even worse deal to pay all that money for something of zero value. And I think, again, that's part of the, that's why kids go to school because they don't fucking know anything or everything. They have sort of-

They think they do. I remember. I remember knowing everything, BHA, okay. And I mean, that, by the way, that does have value, right? Like ignorance, I'm actually a big fan of when it comes to a lot of things. it has to be backed by some degree of competence or at least a trajectory towards competence. But if you have those things, ignorance is great, right? Like, it allows you to not know how hard it's going to be and you're going to start and you're going to be delusional about how big it's going to be. And you know what? Maybe it will be, right? Like, I started my programming adventure when I was 20-something well before my prefrontal cortex was fully formed.

So I'm not against that. I mean, I think what you said about how wonderful these years can be, how formative they can be, it 100% has value. 100% is something that I'd say anyone who's sort of cognitively inclined to pursue higher education should try to get. But why would you pick the most expensive version of that, right? So, you know what? I'm going to make a computer parallel here. I've been testing these mini PCs, right? and I bought this mini PC that's $313 from minis for him.

$313. I'm like, holy shit, I make a lot of money. I should just buy it the best, right? I buy this thing for $313 and I fucking can't tell the difference. I have a $2,000 computer next to it and a $4,000 computer next to that. I can't tell the difference. Like, if you're not just money is unlimited, you're a little bit. retard if you buy the $4,000 computer if the $3,000 computer can do, which that's how I look at

American education. Like, hey, if you just do in-state, if you just do in-state, like, what, 80% of it is paid for? Whatever, the state rate is something like $6, $7, $8,000 or something. $7,000 a year for me. Why? It's a lot closer to the Denmark model if you go in-state. Exactly, exactly, because it's closer to just like sheer cost. Why would anyone who does not have the money just to throw around, go into debt to get essentially the same product, right? Like, I understand there can be differences between colleges, but for most people getting most educations, like, you know what?

If you're not really going to class or trying to learn and you're just using chat. You're going for the sort of the social experience and all that good stuff. That's great. But I think it's just there's a weird prestige luxury product aspect of this that is just so actually repulsive in many ways when you think about what it is and what the consequences of it is. Like, do you know what, if you can afford to spend $20,000 on a watch and you just, it's nothing to you, great.

Like, do it. Yeah, I've done that. Great. That's the spoils of having succeeded in some ways. If you're spending $20,000 on a watch and you're making like $45,000 a year, again, You're a retard. What are you doing? No, the Casio, which, by the way, Casio makes some sweet-ass watches.

One of my favorite watches is an $18 cashio, right? What are you paying $20 grand? It tells the time worse. It's a luxury item for people where money at that scale just doesn't matter, right? It's the same thing with education. Don't do the House of State thing unless your parents are paying for it, unless there's some direct line where you can just see like, all right, if I do this, it's going to open that door.

I want to work at whatever, J.P. Morgan or some other company where I know the huddle goes through Yale or some other status token. Anyone else? Yeah, it's just dumb. So I guess can we put some blame on the industry here, though? Because I feel like if the industry at large, like, let's say like, you know, a couple of these big companies, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, whoever, if they actually came out and said, we're not going to look at college degrees anymore. Period. Like, HR's not going to use them for screening.

They're not going to get handed to the interviewer. They're off the resume. We just white it out and send it on. I think that would have a major effect, like overnight on whether or not people, because there probably are nowadays, especially with thanks to the internet and YouTube and all these things where people can hear more opinions,

they get more information, they can access other things. I do think people would be like, oh, cool, all right, awesome. Then I'll just study on my own or I'll just work with some other people, you know, in a study group on the internet, and I'll learn programming and I'll do this sort of stuff. And then I know I won't be disadvantaged when I go to apply to one of these jobs. But the reality is that the HR departments, who, by the way, none of them have any idea what programming is or how it works at all. Right. I can just tell you this. They have no idea what a good programmer looks like. None, right?

they still use to do first-pass screening and things like this. They will use things like CS degrees, and I've checked that recently, like I've asked people at companies like that. You know, is that slab? And it is. And so I feel like we're, we are to blame to some degree for still using this like expense plus attrition, plus whatever you want to call the like filtering process that college is. Like, could you grind through four years of having to listen to professors who themselves don't know how to program tell you? stuff and then still get through that and pay $80,000. If you can, maybe you're more slightly more likely to be a good employee for us.

So we're going to make you all do that first. If we could get rid of that. If we took it to mind ourselves to get rid of that, I think it would be a much better world. But the industry isn't. They're still doing that because there's a little bit of signal there. Probably, right? I think you're also, we're confusing a little bit, which is that there was a time in computer science when it was just computer science. And programming was like the expression of computer science.

It was just like, hey, Google, we're doctorates. We're researching better search algorithms. Oh, wow, we started a company. Hey, we are a bunch of doctors. And now we need to get other people to help us with this. We should hire other doctors, right? Like there's this actual computer science giving birth to something that was a product. But most of the things that are happening today are more akin to a trades job.

Like, hey, I need you to sit down and I need you to go to the pixel minds and swing that like pickax for the next eight hours to kind of just make some sort of of progress on our product and then I want you to go home and then I'm going to call you to in the morning when everything crashes and burns like that's what you're doing it's a 99% trade job it's a 1% like educational job whereas I think if you went backwards in time you would see much more hey this is closer related to research than it is closer related to a trades job and so I think there's a we're in this weird shift where we still have all the holding backs of the previous time and now we're in this kind of trades job because I'm sure there was other times where this existed in other industries.

I'm sure it has happened. But right now, I think that's why education is still accidentally important. Is that we still have this holdback. I mean, I can go backwards in time. I was born in 1976. And no, it could go backwards in. It never was. Like, there was never a time when the putting, you know, when actually dealing with the

reality of computing didn't require the trades job part, mostly. Like, in fact, if anything, back then, it was like, if you weren't programming a semil language, you probably weren't really going to have a pretty well-functioning product, whereas nowadays, no one does that, right? I mean, not no one. The FFMPEG team does, right?

Yeah. And occasionally some of the people at Rad Game Tools or whatever. But everyone else, right, we write in something at least slightly higher, even if we're doing performance stuff, usually. So I would say actually going back in time, there was even less of an argument for CS. Yes, it was a valuable thing to have a few people working on it. You know, you wanted your new, new dyxtras and stuff like that, doing work because we want to know stuff like how do we do shortest path algorithms or things like that but generally speaking

that's a very small number of people and you usually don't need very many of those people if any to make a software product even then you didn't need that many of those people to make a software product i would argue let me just deal man the other side for a second because there's too much agreement here and i don't like yes go for yeah go for it um do you know what i believe the 10x programmer is 100% real perhaps even an understatement because remember remember, the 10x programmer is not saying that the best program is 10 times better than the average programmer. It's saying that the best program is 10 times better than the worst programmer.

I think that it's a vast understatement. I think it's probably the 100x programmer is true. Or maybe even the 1,000 X program, 10,000 X programmers. I've seen some shitty programs written in my life. And I'm like, when I've looked at what that output is and I compared it to the best programs, the best programmers, I'm like, I would not trade. 10 of these idiots for one of these geniuses, right? Well, it's geniuses worth way, way more.

So to steal my, like, what if, and I don't fully believe this, but I'm going to present it anyway, what if the kinds of people who can make it through a Harvard CS degree were in the just abstract classical sense before DEI bullshit? Like this was actually the cream of the crop of the crop, right? Like, it was your perfect SAT score, individual, just like IQ 150. That individual has been filtered through because Harvard only has these few spots and like that, they get the very best. And then you get to arm that person with a CS degree and you let them loose on sort of run-of-the-mill software.

And what they do is they don't just do the thing, right? Like they make a machine to build more of the things. and that the leverage you get out of a 10 or 100 X programmer is actually worth it. Now, I don't actually think this is happening. And I don't even think Google knows it's not happening. Google did this multi-year study on their hiring processes where they were trying to figure out, like, what's the signal? Who ends up doing really well and who ends up not doing very well? They didn't find a signal.

They couldn't go like, oh, it's because they have an MIT right guy. Oh, it's because they have this or that. But at least the pursuit of it does make some sense in my mind because I've worked with a lot of programmers in my time and the capacity, the productivity of the very best is just on a completely different plane. So I don't disagree that companies, the very best companies, the most valuable companies, the richest companies in the world should try to find those. Because if you do find one, they can do things that most people are not going to do. Now, is your task worthy of that? Like, if you're some regional office for a third-tier rental company and you just need to have your form updated, like, is that worth the super genius to apply to that problem? Probably not, right?

Like, we need multiple layers of it. But everyone also wants the best, right? Or they want the best that they can get. So I don't actually, I a little bit sympathize with the idea that the Googles and the fangs and the fangs and. whatever worth trillions would go like but think about the cost right this is the way i look at it's like i i totally want them to be trying to get the best right and the problem is the college system doesn't do that filtering as far as i can tell and so what what i would love is if they took it more seriously and went okay how do we build something because what we know is that you could

spend $80,000 per person and still come out ahead on that filtering because that's how much Harvard or whatever is charging these people, right? Now I think it does get uncomfortable. Okay. Because if you're like, what are the raw materials that's worth that kind of investment? Okay. And I think, and I didn't, I've never taken an IQ chest in my life and I'm kind of afraid that if I do one, like, I'm not going to like the result.

Just do three of them. You'll score super high. You just once you do one, you get a higher score every time. I'm thinking 100. Yeah. Just take enough of them. You'll be like, I read this wonderful book about, I read this wonderful book about the correlations with IQ. And like, it was actually kind of sort of depressing because the amount of set trajectories or at least whatever, confidence in all set originate out of that point is actually rather great.

And that means that there are simply, there is a hardware difference. Right. Some people can make up for a lack of hardware with some incredible other ingenuity. But generally speaking, if you take mass numbers, you need a certain amount of hardware. And that's partly what the SAT is. It's an IQ test by another name. That's what lead code is. Lead code is essentially, hey, here's an IQ test or an IQ derivative. And it sucks, but it's going to produce a signal that at least like this individual has the hardware to perform at the top level.

Because you know what? There's no amount of smart tricks you can do at like 95. Like you're not, it's just, that's not going to be your profession. It's just not there, right? So I think all these ways we're searching for it to at least find this out of the potentials of the very, very best tie into that notion that both college, the admission to college and all the rest of it is essentially trying to suss out like, who's the smart cookies? Again, there's a million up, not a, there are many other variables. You're right.

Very few of them are as determined as that one. You have a point there, which is that at least in the US, I guess companies are sort of prohibited from using intelligence test as part of hiring as part of like various sort of civil rights legislations and things like this. I guess I've heard it said anyway. I've never actually looked to see what the case law is on it. but that they're not allowed to actually administer something that's roughly like how smart is this person. They're not. Yeah, they're not, right? And so I guess you could say, you know, if we want to be really blunt about it, is this just a legal issue?

Is it like, does that just need to go? And then it's like they could put a screening process in place that would allow anyone who could show sufficient ability to get through it without paying the $80,000. Or am I probably a master of saying it, $200,000? I don't know what cost to go to Harvard these days. It's probably absurd. I think it's in a 200. North and why are you seeing Harvard? I've actually never met a good programmer from Harvard.

Maybe they're actually horrible. All my Harvard experiences are actually horrible. Caltech. Caltech. Caltech. All the programmers that are from Caltech are unbelievably good, right? Yeah. So Caltech, whatever it is.

But point being, like, whatever that cost is, I feel like, you know, you would want some way that people could just demonstrate that they're good enough and they've studied enough on their own to get through it without having to go through that whole. process that simply isn't accessible for anyone who doesn't have a lot of money or isn't willing to go into a huge amount of debt, which isn't good? But also, isn't that, I mean, and I'm not a fan of it, and I fucking hate algorithm in general, right? But isn't that what lead code is? Like, lead code essentially, if you can crack the top tiers of that, I mean, unless you're doing it with AI, it is a intelligence test. It is a filter. And I think, at least from what I've heard from a lot of hiring

processes, a lot of it has sort of leaned heavily into that, that that becomes a qualify. If you can really smash lead code and have the tenacity and the time and whatever and the firepower up here between your neurons to grind it for three months and are able to do those hards, like at the very least, maybe you're not a great programmer, which I actually think there's something to that too. I meant some very, very smart people who are also programmers who I would not want to program my code. Yeah.

Right? But, but, I mean, I'd say on average, you'd rather want a smart person than a not-so-smart person working next to you as a programmer. So I think maybe actually the industry, what happened with lead code was some sense of trying to get towards that, right? Can we just route around the fact that universities are actually no longer, as you say, all that great of a filter? Like, they're broken in all these ways. They're not as meritocratic and as focused on. objective scores as they once were, and therefore they're not a great signal. Here's another kind of signal, which, by the way, has been completely blown out of the water, right?

Like AI killed lead code. Right. So, yes. I'm going to go with an opposite take on this one, which is I don't like the idea of intelligence tests. Because I think that intelligent tests, one thing that they largely lack the ability of is to identify wisdom in somebody. I'd much rather hire a wise, not so smart. programmer who's going to make the right decision given enough time than I would to hire the super smart person that can make fast decisions but their decisions may be incredibly unwise because

I always define just for everybody intelligence is the ability to solve a problem wisdom is the ability to know which problem to solve right like which one would you rather have and I don't think there is a standardized test that's going to be like and this right here is how wise you are here's your wise score sir right because it's just going to it's just going to be completely broken and it's going to be absolutely a crap test. And so for me, I don't like the idea of, like, gated things based on some sort of nebulous scoring, especially when it comes to things like IQ or leak code,

because the reason why I specifically don't like those is any of those tests, you take them more than once you'll do better. Like, that's a fundamentally broken test, that if you're like, hey, how intelligence is this person? Let's make him take a test. Okay, they did something. Let's make them take another test. They are now proportionally better than they were the last time they've done it.

There's something a bit broken. That's a very well-studied phenomenon. if you just get one. You can move it. You're not going to move it that much. You're still going to move it. But 10 points is a generation of intelligence. You're not going to move IQ 10 points.

I mean, I'll send you some references on this topic. Because, I mean, what's interesting about IQ testing is one of the few areas of psychology that replicates. We're basically like everything else done in the last goddamn 80 years seems to fail replication time and again. IQ testing and its correlation with positive outcomes and other aspects of life and professional performance is very well established. Not to a total degree. And I completely agree with you in the sense that I've met some very smart people who are also incredibly stupid, right?

Like they have the firepower, but it's not been programmed well, right? Like there's like, hey, you got an M4 chip here and you're running some shitty ass software on it. Like this chip could do amazing things and you're not doing that. Now, either way, I think the fundamental problem is no one is cracked hiring. And I say that as someone who's currently in the final stages of trying to hire three programmers. Two, we're trying to hire who are juniors and one who's a senior. And fuck, it's really difficult.

It's really goddamn difficult. And it's actually only gotten more difficult now that the best test that we've used, used for years and years, which is sort of an at-home programming test. Not even test. Well, maybe it is. You build a product or something at home? We give you a constrained part of one of our applications, like something that resembles the work you would be doing day to day, and we ask you to extend it in some specific ways. And I've always found it's so fascinating how this test has been able to reveal to me almost right away whether I would want to work with this person or not. In ways that all the other signals, as you say, like, oh, this person went to Yale.

Like, I'd be actually inclined to go if you could make it through a four-year program at a Ivy League institution. At least historically, you would have to be pretty smart. So that's a good signal. It's just, it's not the determinant signal. To me, the determining signal, and now I can look back upon 25 years of hiring other people, hiring other programmers. Seeing someone work with the real kind of code that will be working on on a day-to-day basis with me is, I've found no better measure. The problem with that is, A, it's hard to do at scale.

So the test that we ask applicants to do, they take like four to six hours. Not only do they take 46 hours, which is a lot to ask for someone who's applying for a job, you better well be quite a ways down the pipeline before that request comes up, right? Like, you don't want to give that test to a thousand people. It also takes quite a while to assess it, right? I can't process a thousand applications that had that kind of a test in it. So it's a late stage, but really nice test. And now I kind of fear AI fucked it.

Yeah. Right. Oh, absolutely. But I mean, I say that. And then we actually, this last test, we were just about to get, we gave it to all the models. Right. Like every, I think we did like six models. Like, all right, solve the thing.

And some of the models you're like, do you know what? That's not actually bad. And what was interesting about it was the solutions that model come up with would be quite reminiscent of a lot of junior code. And you're like, shit, we're trying to hire junior programmers. And if I can't tell anymore whether it's AI doing it or not, because I'm giving a lot of allowances, right? If you're hiring a junior programmer, you're not going to ask the same things. None of the models were even remotely close to the bar I would set for a senior programmer in terms of like the code and so on. I heard there's not just a new

whatever, Clawed 4 Sonnet 4, just drop that people are freaking out about in my feet. So maybe now we're all the way up there. But at the junior end of scale, it's really hard. How are you going to figure out who you're going to give a chance?

Yeah. I do want to rewind a little bit. Can we rewind a little bit? Yeah, I wanted to rewind with you, Prime, actually. Okay. So where are you rewinding, too? I would like to be a touch more focused on college more itself in the sense that we haven't quite answered if college is worth it. We've all,

I think we all universally agree, you probably shouldn't go $400,000 into debt, especially over an education that is like largely based in trades, if you will with programming. Like I think there is a good argument to be made in that. But there's also the argument that there are countries where you, you must get a degree if you expect anything. Like if you go to India, if you, if you were born and raised in India, you can't just be like, ah, I'm just not going to get a degree and succeed. Like, they don't have a culture around that. You're going to largely fail simply because you didn't go to school. Also immigration, like a lot of countries' immigration requirements, including the United States,

you get preferential treatment if you have a degree in something that you're getting hired for. You will get preferential treatment in many countries because the government uses that as a stand-in for competence. And what I would say is the reason I think we're talking about the screening process part at the prime is because that's the problem. The problem is that companies don't have the ability to put in a good screening process. I understand your uneasiness with something like an IQ test. And I kind of share that with you because one of the problems I find. I'm no eugenics. I can't.

Eugenics. All that is, IQ is based. No, I just can't. Well, sure. Yeah. I mean, whatever. There's a bad history. But also, I think the process has a couple issues, too, which is that because they're

trying to do a standardized test with something like an IQ test, They're focusing on your ability to concentrate on very small problems. So problems that have very low scope. And especially in the world of programming, one of the things that I find that people who I would consider very smart but are terrible programmers, usually the reason for that is their ability to conceptualize large scope does not exist. Like the degree to which they can spend a lot of time thinking about larger things or to hold the larger things in their head is compromised for whatever reason.

but they do have tremendous firepower on a tiny thing. So, you know, that's not to say they're necessarily going to be a horrible programmer at all things. You could really clearly just go optimize this loop or something. And maybe they could really do that because it's so tiny. But when you're talking about, I want someone, you know, like David was saying senior programmer, someone who's going to conceptualize a system and know, like, not to do stupid stuff. They can't do that, right, even if they may be high IQ because they can't hold the whole thing in their head, right? Whereas some of the other things like, is what could this person be a great?

novelist or something. That actually probably bears more on could you be a great systems architect because you're holding all these things in your head and knowing how some fuzzy things will interrelate with each other and will they play out well. And so while I share your concern about that, I would say it's still, no matter what you think the screening thing is, it's still a screening problem at the end of the day. And outsourcing that screening by saying what we're going to do is have this four-year thing that kids go to that they pay all this money for and then they get a degree and by the way the entrance to that is basically an IQ test. It's just, it's ridiculous, right? It's not, it's a nonsensical solution to this problem that probably made sense in the past when

it was hard to bring people together, right? You, having professors in one place to work on stuff together made a lot of sense before the internet, right? Nowadays, it's like, do we need these antiquated ideas of buildings where the people gather? Like, can we do something better? And can we do something better than charging people $200,000 or whatever to go to certain ones with limited accessibility so only 3,000 people can go through it, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, it just seems antiquated like a horse and buggy. And my question is just, can we make that pipeline that's part screening, part education? Can we make it better? And I think the answer has to be yes. And unfortunately, we're not trying. That's what I would say. I Q test aside. I think you're also

focusing on, we're focusing on unique colleges. There are a good university. right now. You may not, I know this going to sound like I'm just kind of toot my own horn here, but the school of mines in South Dakota, A, they've been in the ACM world competition with, there's only been like, what, 17 of them, 20 of them, has been hosted here because of that, because of how good this school is at, like, just problem solving, right? But on top of it, every single graduating class universally gets just hired out by Google every single time. All 50, just go straight to Google, straight into this pipeline. And so I do think there are some schools that are just objectively better. and they have created a culture

and everybody that goes to the school, it's not just about learning, because I think that's one thing that we're kind of breaking down. This is why IQ tests, again, fail completely, is that a job is not simply your ability to apply knowledge. It is also your ability to, like, interact with others. And you will never get that in the day and age of on the internet.

That's why I think, like, Discord, as great it is, is also a really kind of bad thing for a lot of people because they abstain from having real relationships, real interactions, being able to look somebody in the eye, and talk to somebody for a while, and instead they have this kind of nice filtered screen, and they don't ever have to do that. I actually, during college,

one of my interviews was for the Naval Underwater Warfare Group up in Seattle, and the reason why I got selected out of all the kids to go and do the on-site interview is the lady was like, you're the only person that looked in my eyes while you talked to me. Not a single other student made eye contact the entire time. And it's just like, I won by simply being sociable. Like, that's how I got in. It had nothing to do with whether I was smart or not.

I would like to think I was smart. But nonetheless, it's just because I was able to just talk to another human being, which is a skill I fundamentally received by being around people my age, doing the same thing, solving the same problems. I think that's where, like, the real, again, that's where I think a lot of the value is, is that I think it's just in the group with some sort of smart person, hopefully at the head leading people. TJ, you haven't said a single thing, so TJ, you've got to get in.

Thanks. I've been trying, but, you know, you keep popping in, Prime. It's just been yours fault. I got another thing to say. I'd like to say it right now. No, okay, go to me. I'm going to mute you right now. I have that power.

So, Prime, you can talk again in a little while. No, I'm just kidding. I do that I have to touch Riverside and ruin everything. Anyway, so the thing that it feels like so often, there's two things that I feel like, for some reason, a lot of hiring doesn't at least try and factor in. I don't know how you do it. I've had experience with doing the take home project before. That's my favorite interview that I've ever had. It was at the first startup that I worked on.

submitted it at the end of the week, blah, blah, blah. It was great. They paid me for my time, which was cool because it was a big ask, whatever. But one is, like what you're saying, Prime, programming, like in a company, is way more than, like, typing into the computer. You have to, like, figure out what your customers want, what your clients want, what other people on your team want, what historical decisions were made for the company because of differing business expectations six months ago or a year ago or 10 years ago or 40 years ago, depending. on where you work and like what are the things that are coming up so there's a whole bunch of like social and like relational things and like a lot of businesses relationships anyways outside of just like can you even get your product working it's like why does someone stay with your product or

whatever so and like you know a bunch of these have no factor it seems like they're just like the only way they test that is the first phone screen where they're like oh are you a human and like you talk to some HR person and they're like, cool, you can accurately reflect your birth date and your name. Congratulations, you've made it past the first round. And you're like,

that was it? That's the only thing we're going to find out if I want to work with this guy later. And then the second thing, which is kind of like, it's related to the idea of like 10x programming is that, like the worst software developers are like way negative X programming in the sense that they, not only do they not do the thing you're looking for,

they actively set your entire company back, either by like literally taking down prod all the time, like the most obvious one, but they can just make code that makes it worse to write more code in the future. So it's not only that, oh, well, we just had to wait six months and Billy finally finished the feature. It would have been cool if that was six days, but it took six months. It's like, no, Billy took six weeks to make this and now no one else can ship to prod. No, like, no one else can figure out what Billy. did and now it's broken forever. So that like, and the long tail of that is like, there's a lot of

area under that curve of people I have, like, worked with or seen where they actively just make the entire product, uh, worse. And then the last thing, too, is that there's some scales where you can't even compare. Like for me, I can't run a marathon. Like I, like, physically I wouldn't be able to like finish one. I would get eliminated. I would get discriminated. I would get discloser. qualified, right? Like, I wouldn't be able to finish it in time. You literally can't get disqualified, but somehow you'd figure it out, TJ. Well, they like close it down. At some point, they're like, people have to drive on the road again. You know what it? It's DNF, did not finish. Yes, right. This exists in a marathon. Yeah. And that's the same thing. It's true for a bunch of

software projects. I've worked with people who like, no matter how much time you gave them, no matter how, whatever, they're just not ever going to fix this particular problem due to technical complexity or handling all the scope or like figuring out the way that the customer actually wants to use the thing. So that's like infinity X programmer. Like there's no comparison. It's it never happens or someday it happens. There's infinity difference between the two.

And like all of those things, it feels like just it doesn't seem like people care about. Maybe it's because HR departments at the big companies are in charge of a lot of the hiring process. I don't know. That's where I feel like, I'm taking it. crazy pills over here. Can I say one thing really quick before we get in two like before the YouTube comments just fill up?

Yeah. It'd be an undefined difference between programmers, not infinity, because I just know, I know that's going to be the top comment if I don't say that. So okay, keep going. Okay, I'll go get my math degree out and then I'll have to burn it because I have a mathematics major.

Yeah, yeah. I have a mathematics major and I failed them. Sorry. Sorry. Because it's a divide by zero, right? So you have, you know, you've got this person finished it in six days, and this person will never finish it. So it's six over zero is the ratio between those two. And it's not infinity. Infinity times zero will never be six.

I mean, I'm sure there is a mathematician somewhere who's like actually, in this particular type of group it is. And I'm like, so that will be the second top comment. So I had to say that as well. But I just, you know. So it's approaching infinity. Oh, go ahead, Brian. No, it's just undefined.

It's approaching affinity. This is not, you want a mathematician, not me to tell you this. So, but it's undefined because there's no, there is no ability to reach it. Period. Not at infinity. It will never happen. This discussion is the zero X programmer one who never finishes. All right. Anyway, go ahead. Well, yeah, so anyway, so those are just some of the things where I feel like college. College can help you in some of those verticals, right? Where like you can get some skills for learning how to work with people if you're like actually trying at college. Like I went to a small little. liberal arts college. I lived at home to save money and like, you know, didn't have to pay room and board. Thanks, mom and dad. Shout out mom and dad. They didn't make me pay rent while I was living at home. You know, and like, but I did activities at school. I met people. I made relationships. Talk to my

professors. You know, like they helped me get internships, whatever. I learned how to work with people and make connections. Awesome. Those things would have been a lot harder for me like otherwise because my dad's an accountant and he doesn't know anybody. My family is far from tech adjacent. You know, like, my mom's a music teacher and my dad's an accountant, right? Like, there was no connections to get into like software world. So like that can be that first vertical can help you out a lot in college if you're paying attention and trying. But you could also spend your whole day on Discord like you're saying Prime, playing video games and never talking to a real human at school, which seems crazy. It seems like that would be impossible, but it's definitely possible.

Twitch chat can back us up. Half of them are that guy. Go out and talk to somebody. Right? And then it can also help you with some of the other problems because you can like talk to your professors and figure out how these things. Like you can just, you got to do some of those things though. It's not going to be the school handing those to you, I think. Yeah.

For me, the bottom line here is if you, I mean, we're talking to programmers here. If you aspire to be a programmer, I think going to college is totally. worth it at the right price. And it's all about the price. A product isn't bad or good. I mean, some products are just truly bad at any price. But a lot of things that exist in this world are bad or good depending on how much they cost, right? Yes.

Like you have completely different expectations about what you get out of something if you didn't spend the next 20 years worth of salary on it. If it was something more affordable, more approachable. I'd say it'd be far more of a no-brainer. There's a lot of kids in the U.S. where I just feel like, no, it wasn't worth it for you. Even if you got a decent education, the price was just too high. It's like Warren Buffett always said, like there's not a good or a bad stock. There's just a good or bad price for it.

Again, caveats of a company going out of business is literally worth zero. But with almost everything, it's all about what is the price. Yeah, and I think, too, like the opportunity, Like I was just talking with a guy who was in the middle of school and then, I don't know if I can say the company. Some nice company that is doing well offered to hire him. And so he just left school. And then he's working there. And it's like the opportunity cost was go stay at school and maybe get the same job later or just like go there and work for two years.

And then if he needs to, he can go finish the other two years of school. Awesome. Good for him. I was like, dude, that's so awesome. I'm so hyped for you. He's moving to San Francisco. go, he's going to go do his thing. That's really good.

I tried to convince my younger sister. She's 10 years younger than I am. She just graduated school. But when she was starting, I was like, yo, I will, you can come work with me for four years. And you only have to pay me half of what your tuition was. She didn't take me up on the offer. But I was like a little bit serious, actually, that if she really wanted to like try and work with me, like we could do basically like a tradesman thing, I wouldn't have actually charged her money.

I wish there was more. that. I was just talking to someone about that. That programming in general seems exceedingly well suited for the apprenticeship model. Exactly for all the reasons you guys were mentioning that this is more of a trade in many ways. If you take the total sum of all programmers out there, the vast majority of them are tradespeople. And they would learn more, quicker, better if they were apprenticing under someone. Yeah. And I was like, your resume will look cooler. Like you have real job experience for four years as opposed to like one little degree spot that gets discarded like at a lot of places. But there were other, you know, there were other factors or whatever. But I was like, I would,

you know, that would have been cool like to be able to do that. And I think if there were more options like this or ways for this to happen, it would be really exciting to see. Because I think like the tradesmen, like I have a bunch of friends. One of my buddy, one, one semester of college was like, this sucks, quit, started plumbing immediately. He was a professional plumber long before I graduated school, was doing great, owned a house, married, you know, the whole thing. And it was like, that was awesome for him. But they do the apprenticeship model.

He went and he followed a plumber around and did plumbing things, you know? And it's like, that would have been way better if those opportunities, I think, existed in programming more often. Do you think, so do you think spending four years at an accrued? credited place in the site of AI now that it's coming down and all that, do you think that it is still just practically worth it? At the right price, yes. I want to say that what David said is exactly the way to think of it.

It's like you have to know how much you're spending. And if you don't know how much you're spending on it, then I don't think you could make that decision. Because it certainly does change the equation. It means that now, like, you know, if you don't think you're going to be very, very, good at this thing eventually, then a high-price school is simply not, it should never really be considered at that point, right? Because AI will be taking some of the hiring away, presumably, right? If for no other reason than, like, the junior programmer thing where it's like, if you

have someone who's never really going to get all that good, well, AI, at least what I've seen of the programming from AI, it looks like somebody I would never hire, but that I know does work at a number of these companies. That's what AI looks like. It looks like I would never let this thing anywhere near any code I was working on, but I know a ton of code basis where this is just a like accepted commit.

The Microsoft Start menu. Right? Oh yeah. Like for example. The AI could just produce the same quality as that, right? Like, you know, brought to you that by the people who said that it would take a very long time for them to figure out how to make it so that you could put it back on the top again

like it used to. That was like a huge thing. They were like, well, there's a lot of work that would have to go into that. I'm like, yes, that's the AI would be operating at about the same level as that start menu, right? But I guess I would say that does affect the market, though, because plenty of programmers were currently in that tranche of, you know, not very good. And so that does remove, that does change the market dynamics. Even if AI never really gets any better than today, it still changes those market dynamics at least a little bit, which means, that price that you should be looking for is going to change.

That price for education can't be as high. It has to be a little bit less if economics is, you know, if economics works the way we think it does, right? And the other opportunities can't be like as good. That's the other thing that I feel like, because if more people are like hiring or like trying to do apprenticeship or like you can even just try, like, I'm not a huge boot camp guy or anything, but like you could try a boot camp for way less money and see if you can get hired for,

And you grind on that for a year instead of going to school. Like just even making money for three years instead of paying money at like any ratio. It's like that adds up really fast. Like even if you're making 40,000 and not spending 10. Yeah. That's 200K difference in your life. Like that's a lot of money. You know?

So the other opportunities, I'm interested to see what's going to happen with like AI and with what is software development going to look like. what, what, or like, what our crud software development jobs going to look like, you know, because there's a huge portion of the market where it's like, I don't know. I don't know what that's going to look like. Market, yeah, they're just like market firms that just build simple sites for people. That's a big thing. And people need them. So, yeah. All right. There's a common thing that everybody says, and I'd love to get everyone's, Brian, DJ's got to go soon. Oh, okay. DJs, I want your 15 seconds, super hot take on this one. Shoot. Every single, programmer says that they want to be a farmer.

Are they delusional or is it true? They're absolutely delusional. I don't think most programs say that have actually ever spend a day on a farm looking at what it is. But I also do, I do think there's something true in it in the sense that working with a computer all day can be alienating in a sense that I don't actually get from as many people as I know who have worked farming. That it isn't deeply alienating in the same way.

So I totally get the aspiration, but I think it is delusional and the vast majority of people. Actually, it would do better not to test a delusion because it's the delusion that gives them hope. Do you know what? Life sucks right now. This week sucks right now. But you know what? I can imagine I could be a farmer and I'd be happy. And if you test out that delusion and you find out it's not true at all and you can't hack it for four hours, milking cows, what are you left with?

No hope at all, right? like total nihilism. So like keep your little illusions around. Like keep them little jars of illusions. Because if you take them down and examining them too close, you might find like, yeah, do you know what? A little alienation can get replaced real quick by existential dread. Love it.

That was absolutely great ending. All right. Thanks so much for having me on. That was really fun. Thanks for coming. Yes, my pleasure. Today's show was sponsored by. Code Rabbit, and so I just wanted to take a quick little moment to shout them out. Developers,

are you tired of getting code reviews that just say LGTM or NIT? Please take these seven things. Hey, your variable name is Res. It should be resolved and reject. No. Meet Code Rabbit. AI reviews right inside your editor, starting with VS Code, Cursor and Winserve. Sorry, no VIM yet. I know my heart is broken. Hit review and bam. Feedback appears before you even open a poll request. Code Rabbit can help you flag the bugs, your vibe code LLM, Bob Mist, and with one easy click hand of the context back for fixes line by line to some of your frantic tools. They offer generous free tier 50 reviews a day, no cost, grab the extension at coderivit.

dot link slash primogen dash VS code and ship cleaner code today. Link in the description. Link in the description. In the future. Thanks, T.J. Oh, yes, it worked. I just, dude, I set up a second scene for three, people just to see if this would work and oh my gosh it worked let's go let's go i did not expect this to

work anyways uh hey that was awesome by the way are we are we raided i had never met i had never met him before and he what a fantastic guest oh my god he was he is one of my favorite people in the are we still live yeah we're still live okay all right just making sure i thought we were still live i meant to say that live if uh if possible because i i really enjoyed it i really enjoyed what he had to say. Yeah, no, I absolutely, I absolutely am just a huge fan of what he has to say. And I think he, he's right on a huge portion of things. Now, I'm still not on your guys' team with the whole IQ testing, but I do, I do appreciate it. I didn't even get to say anything about IQ. So don't lump me into anybody. Well, like I said, that was more his thing than mine, because like, like I said,

I, I don't feel like it captures, I don't feel like IQ tests capture what I'm really looking for in a programmer, because they would only really tell me, like, how hyper fixated they can be on small things. So like, I don't know. And, you know, I'm not up on the psychology research here. Maybe it's true that IQ generalizes out to that more or less, like, or as well as any other test we have, and that could be true. But at least for me, I prefer screening to be something more action-oriented.

Like, okay, here's this, like, larger pool of things. Go sort through it, figure out how to do something with it, right? And that kind of stuff. If you were going to do something for screening, I would think it would be more like that and not like an IQ test. But I, so I'm not really, I'm not on the same page as DHH was, I guess, if he's actually suggesting that an IQ test would be useful. But I am on the same page in the terms of like, it'd be better, even an IQ test would

be better than the system we have now. Yeah, I think it was just saying, really bad. College is like a very roundabout method of like IQ plus and other stuff. I would also say I've definitely seen and or seen some code by 155. IQ Haskell geniuses that nobody in the world should have ever written and should be wiped from the face of the earth. So if it's just IQ, then they would get hired and they would bring the company to an end. Goodbye. That's the end of the episode. See you guys later. Bye everybody.