What exactly does "near WM" mean? Does this improve working memory on a long term basis or does near mean near in time? I feel like that might make it worth doing for me as a programmer as WM feels like a useful thing to improve even if it doesn't directly translate to IQ.
There's a bunch of WM tasks floating around, all slightly different: forward digit span, backward digit span, verbal spans, complex spans using arithmetic, game-like WM tasks designed for children, suites of WM tasks like Cogmed, tests included in quantified-mind.com or Lumosity or Cambridge Brainsciences, etc. These are what I mean by n-back may 'near' transfer to other WM tasks which are not themselves n-back.
As to how valuable WM is, I'm not sure. There were a bunch of positive papers from people like Klingberg, but these tend to use subjective measures or WM-related measures, and there seems to be an absence of studies tying the WM training to concrete useful changes like improved grades or standardized exam scores.
This is completely unsupported intuition, but I won't be surprised if programming especially benefits from working memory more than other aspects of intelligence. That is, it seems possible improved working memory improves programming, without improving grades or exam scores.
I think that's possible too, but I have no idea how one would study that. The empirical study of programming languages is still in its infancy - we can't even say with high confidence whether dynamic or static languages are better to work in, much less show that WM increases cause programming improvements.
