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[The] main problem here is that software development is not an individual sport. Assessing technical traits means that we are looking at candidates as individuals. At the same time, we will put them in a team context and the project's success will depend on their teamwork. A person's resume or LinkedIn profile says close to nothing about their team skills.
What's more, we know quite a lot about what makes teams effective. Anita Woolley's research on collective intelligence [DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147] [DX] provides extremely valuable insight on the topic. First of all, how do we define collective intelligence? It's basically the skill of a group to solve complex problems. Well, it sounds like the definition of everyday work for software development teams if you ask me.
Why is collective intelligence so important? Exploiting collective intelligence, as opposed to going with the opinion of the smartest person in a room, is a winning strategy. To put in Anita Woolley's words: "Collective intelligence was much more predictive in terms of succeeding in complex tasks than average individual intelligence or maximal individual intelligence."
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday September 25 2017, @12:22PM
It seems like they got random groups to perform stupid tasks which might take 5 hours. They completely ignore the years of knowledge and practice it takes to become a skilled developer (or other knowledge worker). So the study is just idiotic in its simplicity. Nb: I didn't follow the paper trail to figure out what the subjects of the study actually did, I am just guessing from a few phrases in the paper.
Having done some courses on "this sort of thing" for work, I would say there is a common trend that social scientists take some very trivial or naive study like this and then make a big deal out of it. It is quite irritating.