11 ms·

What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know

136 points by davidvaughan 14y ago

nathanb 14y ago
Would he appreciate an intelligent guess? If I didn't know how much a square foot of air weighed, could I represent it with x and then give a formula? If he asked me who discovered the south pole and I asked him to clarify whether he meant who first reached the south pole, who first postulated that the earth, being spheroid, must have a southernmost extremity, or who first realized that the earth produces a magnetic field, would he be impressed or merely annoyed? I'd be more interested to know how he reacted to the answers than the fact that he asked the questions.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  From what I've inferred by reading about Edison, he probably would have feared you more intelligent than himself; and wouldn't have hired you on that basis, after taking the opportunity to chastise you for your lack of knowledge.
scarmig 14y ago
These... honestly aren't that bad. Not that I know all of them, but many of them, totally. And those that I don't are pretty context dependent, particularly those about sectors of the economy that have been de-emphasized or historical tidbits that have been de-emphasized. Replace "what city produces the most laundry machines" with "which American city is known for producing cars" and "from where domestically do we get sardines" with "what part of the United States is known for producing wine"? Note also that there are some ostensibly hard questions that seem blindingly obvious to people here now: "Where is Korea?"
- absconditus 14y ago
  Why are any of these good interview questions?
  - trentmb 14y ago
    because he knew the answers to them.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    Never said they were good interview questions, but the implication elsewhere has been "these are impossible to know the answers to!"
  - numbsafari 14y ago
    Perhaps if you are going to run an international business that may be interested in expanding to the Pacific countries, having employees that can physically locate Korea might be important. Apparently he couldn't "just assume" that every college graduate had ever spent time curiously inspecting a globe and developing a general knowledge of different parts of the world.
  - GabrielF00 14y ago
    They aren't good questions for, say, a software engineer, but they might be useful for executives, which is how the Times article says they were used. If you're going to be analyzing potential business opportunities you probably should have a sense of different markets, their size, their relative strengths and weaknesses, etc. You should probably have a basic idea of where we get products and materials from and a basic sense of what different types of materials do. In our post-industrial society we don't care so much about sulphur and rubber and borax, but would you hire a tech executive who didn't know where electronics are manufactured? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify the regions of the US where the tech industry has a large presence? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify "six big businessmen in the United States"? If you can't answer these questions than you don't know anything about the industry and you probably aren't curious or engaged enough to keep yourself well informed. If we updated this list to include things that are relevant to today's world, I would expect that a well-educated, well-informed person would be able to answer most of these questions.
  - qxf2 14y ago
    I can see general knowledge type of questions useful for several reasons in the time Edison lived: a) How good is the candidate at saying 'I don't know'? b) Can the candidate handle repeated failures i.e., a string of "I don't know"? c) Can they BS? Instead of leaving a blank, can they BS about something tangential? d) Building hype around Edison. Imagine if the smartest person in your town failed to get hired. In the days of telegraph, the word of mouth would be 'only the best and brightest can become inspectors at Edison's factories.' e) Head fake. Perhaps Edison really judged the candidates in some other way but made a big show of 'ignorant college grad' to prevent people from gaming the interview. f) Make people that pass the test feel privileged. Its a common recruiting tool. I think Edison was a good at spotting and using talent (yeah, using) for his own ends. I give him the benefit of the doubt on the interview process.
tjr 14y ago
I wonder if Edison viewed a lot of these bits of information as truly pertinent to his work (e.g., many of the questions seem to be about building materials and where to get them), and then just tossed in a few items of random trivia for good measure.
eshvk 14y ago
This reminds me so much of so many software engineering interviews.
gambiting 14y ago
All of those are what I would call common knowledge that an average human being should know. Not that they are relevant in any way to the job Edison was offering - but they would serve as a GREAT way to indicate whatever a person answering these questions is well educated and well oriented in the world surrounding them.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Common knowledge as an indicator of business fit has been proven to be useless (and should be obvious on examination). Knowing which small town is in which country is simply irrelevant to whether a candidate apply for a management position can improve morale or productivity, or whether a candidate applying for a marketing position has any idea on how to convince customers to purchase a product. Common knowledge simply has no relation to actual skill in a set field and neither does it have any relation to intelligence. This is doubly so true today with any of these questions being answerable within seconds on a smartphone, and the thoughts instead turned to actually using the information to accomplish something useful.
  - Houshalter 14y ago
    It's possibly a good indicator of how well they absorb information and/or how much they read or pay attention to the news, or wherever they are learning these random facts from. I'm not saying that means a lot though, and I definitely would have failed this test.
    - RyanZAG 14y ago
      Not necessarily, there are too many variables. The person in question may not own a radio. He may have spent a number of months in hospital because his wife got sick. An older person may have learned one of the facts over twenty years ago, and has since forgotten it. By random chance, one of the facts may have been heard by the candidate 10 minutes beforehand. In short: it's a good indicator of so many random variables as to be simply an indicator of chaos itself. Don't use anything like this in any kind of test in which the results count - you will invariably get the short end of the stick with one or more candidates. Stick to measures that directly affect the job at hand, and culture fit.
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codex_irl 14y ago
Just like a software interview - demonstrate that you know a bunch of stuff that we, in our company have & never will use. For many software jobs...its like hiring a mailing man based on his understanding of mail-delivery-cart mechanics.
aroman 14y ago
Reminds me of Google's fabled interview process. And on that note, I find it very interesting that virtually all of these questions could be answered almost verbatim by Google or WolframAlpha.
- eshvk 14y ago
  I don't work for Google. However, I have never heard of their interview process involving trivia factoids. There are several other companies in the valley that are guilty of this crap but Google at least focuses on algorithm questions, scaling etc. To give you an example of what I am talking about: 1. Figure out if a binary tree is a mirror image of another binary tree. vs 2. Describe X where X is a language specific feature. More amusingly, in machine learning interviews, pick one out of millions of algorithms that are out there that the interviewer knows very well, demand that the candidate answer and derive every single part of that algorithm. There is a distinct difference between demanding that people rely on memory to solve a problem vs problem solving abilities to solve a problem. While both are certainly useful for a job, I am honestly not sure how exclusively devoting yourself to the former is better than the latter.
- hakaaaaak 14y ago
  Google once required you to put together factual trivia with technical knowledge. One question in an interview was something like: How many possible IP addresses are there per square meter of the Earth?
loboman 14y ago
http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison-education.html http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison... 'While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. (...) A reporter asked him a question from the test. "What is the speed of sound?" If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not "carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison's view of education. "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said.'
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  Thomas Edison invented the cylindrical Phonograph, and movies were beginning to just show up in 1921. I'd imagine knowing the speed of sound - especially how it relates to syncing with video - was of major importance to him, much more than it was to Einstein. Context is everything.
  - tieTYT 14y ago
    Regardless of the context, it's still a fact that that information is readily available in books.
    - numbsafari 14y ago
      Why is that so many people on this forum feel that the information pointed to by this link is of such great importance: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 I don't know if that information is contained in a particular book, but it is certainly readily available all over the web. Why do we care? Could Edison have had a similar interest, though focused more on his own business? Separately, what good is knowledge of theory if you have no practical experience upon which to understand it? The candidates given this test were also supposed to be in line for the executive ranks. Having a general knowledge of geography, geopolitics and trade would seem to be fairly important. It's also unclear from the article exactly how Mr. Edison interpreted or used the results. Frankly, it sounds like many of those quoted in the article were offended by being asked such "simple questions"... despite not being able to answer them. Perhaps Mr. Edison was interested in finding executives who didn't believe that common sense, mundane facts or important business details were beneath them and best left to others.
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raintrees 14y ago
Link is to a pdf... (Don't we normally indicate this in the title?)
- Houshalter 14y ago
  So what? It's not like a research paper or anything, just an article that has been scanned.
deepblueocean 14y ago
I wonder what Nikola Tesla asked prospective assistants?
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  [T/F] Thomas Edison is a brilliant man of impeccable morals and character. * And I bet if you circled "T", he'd zap you with a Tesla Coil and have you thrown out.
d0m 14y ago
Still, before there was no google/wikipedia so common knowledge and general interest was much more important.
vitno 14y ago
My first response was indignation. A lot of those questions are seemingly irrelevant. However, I think we need to put them in perspective of the business and time. Once you do that, A lot of them become something I would expect people to know.
hnriot 14y ago
Many of these have ambiguous answers, like the country that makes the best optical lenses, who invented photography, axe handle wood etc. There are different answers because they are either subjective (Leica, I presume he meant, but Zeiss would be a solid choice too), Photography was possible the french guy Niépce, or Fox Talbot in the UK and there were many US contenders for the title also. Axe handles are made out of many types of wood... These questions seem rather pointless, it's a case of I know this, so you should too. If Edison had been born on the west coast he would have likely asked a different set of questions.
- gravedave 14y ago
  He probably relied on the popular options. If all your neighbours think of Leica as the best, there's no way you'd pick Zeiss in a pre-internet world without a Wikipedia that has a disambiguation page for every other term. Sure, people on the other coast might pick Zeiss, but how many people were willing to travel across a whole continent for a job interview in those days?
mumrah 14y ago
+1 for use of ampersand ligature in "&c", i.e., "et cetera"
gwern 14y ago
> "Only some thirty of the several hundred applicants have managed to pass the test, it is true, but those who did and thus became inspectors of the factory have made good in every case." Of course, there's no control group... One might expect his half-baked trivia test to work a little bit (being a poor IQ test), but there's no way to know.
couchnaut 14y ago
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla yes - and we should we give a f.ck about Edison's views? The man was no better than a lowlife
- MSM 14y ago
  And you're willing to admit that a webcomic convinced you of that?
  - _Dude_ 14y ago
    That's just a neat visual summary that everyone can quickly scan. Kinda like that post about another thief of ideas - Zynga.
- gravedave 14y ago
  Heard of Ad Hominem? It seems to affect you. He might have been a thief, but he was a quite capable business man that many could learn from.
sown 14y ago
To be sort of fair, Mr Edison was an engineer, and it was back in a time when there was more 'empirical' methods rather than predictive theories of why such and such happened. So, when there's an emphasis on building things, knowing all of this can be helpful. There's also a business type question in there, perhaps to keep an engineer's awareness of business needs in mind. For example, as Engineering Guy Bill explains, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo, the method for discovering light bulb filaments was very much a search problem, so knowing as much seemingly distant facts about barrel wood, cork, optical facets might actually be important. Questions about Cleopatra and so forth may have been to see how educated an applicant was. I wonder if those helped or hurt a candidate. I.e., did this person learn this on their own through curiosity or did they pick it up at school... Disclaimer: I am not qualified to give opinions on any topic.
appleflaxen 14y ago
The prune question must be very important; it's on there twice.
- numbsafari 14y ago
  You could say it came up regularly...
enraged_camel 14y ago
I have mixed feelings over this. On the one hand, knowledge is different than education. Knowledge is the possession of information. Whereas education is the ability to find information quickly and efficiently, and pass it through a filter of critical thinking. Questions like the ones on Edison's list measure knowledge, but not education. On the other hand, in my personal experience people who possess seemingly "random" pieces of information such as the location of countries on a world map or the birthday of a jazz singer tend to be much more productive. Not because the random bits of knowledge they possess are related to the work they are doing, but because information like that gives them a wider perspective on everything and allows them to be better at "pattern-matching", i.e. drawing connections between seemingly unrelated fields and subjects. This is a very, very important skill for any knowledge worker.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  There is a compound effect to knowledge though. The more of the bits you've got the more the bits you already had start to make sense. And at some point knowledge starts to beget new knowledge all by itself, ideas and hypothesis about how unknown stuff could work based on what you already know, and sometimes completely new stuff. So even if knowledge does not automatically mean understanding or education it can be a precursor to it and it can make it easier to attain the latter. Silly facts (baseball scores for instance) do not have that effect. So there is a definite division between the kinds of facts that you can digest and their future effects.
dkarl 14y ago
More than anything, this makes it sound like Edison only knew how to get useful work out of somebody whose brain worked like his.
arbuge 14y ago
Some of these might have been more valuable in the days when you couldn't just Google anything in an instant to find the answer.
richardjs 14y ago
Part of me wonders if Edison wasn't concerned so much with the actual answers to the questions as how an applicant went about answering the questions, and how the applicant reacted in the face of the test. Or perhaps he cared about some questions, and threw in a bunch of random ones to see what the applicant would do.
moron4hire 14y ago
Was he serious with these questions, or were they sideways questions designed to suss out how the tested person thinks?
stox 14y ago
And the most important question of all, "Are you a big enough sucker to believe I will give you the $50,000 I promised for building the invention I asked for?"
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heironimus 14y ago
I think this list would certainly fail a lot of good, smart candidates, but it probably didn't pass many idiots. It's not likely that someone would know all of these facts and not be well-educated and intelligent. If he was truly getting hundreds of applicants and he didn't mind skipping some geniuses who didn't know facts, this seems like a good way to weed people out. Plus, it's pretty easy to grade.
tokenadult 14y ago
Thanks for sharing the link to the interesting series of questions. As I read along, I tried to think about what the correct answer was--or how it would be defined--for the various questions. I imagine that today many of the questions about geography would be less asked, although knowing about other countries still matters for international business. We often talk about company hiring procedures here on Hacker News. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes... EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. Thomas Edison's test might face the same challenge today. Thomas Edison or anyone else defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.) The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes. http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl... Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann: "Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure." http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri... But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)." One thing I have to say about this whole issue, after a thoughtful comment from another HN participant off-forum, is that hiring managers have to be prepared for the development of their workers. The programmer you hire today may be a manager three years from now. Being sensitive to how workers grow in the workplace is at least as important for managers as making a good hire at the beginning.
zach 14y ago
Basically, it seems Edison wanted his executives to have his intense intellectual curiosity (he was a notable autodidact). If he knew the kind of people he felt he could lead effectively, and this was his perhaps-crazy way to identify them, this seems like a good test for those circumstances. One of the most damaging things is when you have what Gabe Newell calls "rent-seeking inside the corporation," which is a neat economic way of describing bureaucratic political power struggles. And this is totally normal, expected behavior unless you find someone who is pre-aligned with the mission, goals and values of the organization. This becomes totally crucial at huge corporations like Edison's. So this, in a sense, is a cultural test more than a knowledge quiz. Thomas Edison didn't want people who could win at 1920s Jeopardy!, he wanted people who were driven by the same non-monetary pursuits he had, possibly because it was his best chance to avoid BS artists, pleasant-but-ineffective workers and political strivers. I also have to think that it was because he was a pretty narcissistic dude, but that's another story.
ynniv 14y ago
So what you're telling me is that people have always sucked at evaluating job candidates.
patfla 14y ago
I'm speaking only from my own experience but as a software engineer observing other software engineers a surprisingly large percent of the the (imo) very best have striking degrees of general knowledge. That is, that could speak very well to many topics other than just software engineering and they have eclectic and deeply developed 'outside' interests. I believe this runs counter to the current politically correct understanding of intelligence or if you prefer intelligence(s) - although I do believe in the latter.
_Dude_ 14y ago
Useful if you want to hire someone you could steal ideas from... Someone like Tesla.
jleader 14y ago
I found the test very interesting. You have to keep in mind that Edison was a prolific inventor, who at the time was in the business of disrupting as many industries as he could. From that perspective, he was looking for people who knew a lot about the current state of technology and business, and also able to bring to bear knowledge from apparently unrelated areas.. Many of the questions are trivia related to the technology of the time ("who invented photography?", "where is platinum found", etc.). I think the expectation was that someone who was actively interested in technology would have picked up a lot of that sort of trivia along the way. Some of the less technological questions ("what's the capital of Alabama?") are probably just trying to evaluate how aware the candidate is of the world around them. A similar list today, say for a candidate to help run a high-tech incubator, might consist of questions like "who founded Google? which is preferable to a seller, a 2nd price auction or a standard auction? where was the web invented? what's the geopolitical and technological significance of tantalum? are lithium batteries riskier than other battery technologies, why or why not? what's a typical price for web advertising (per click, or per impression)? what's a zero-sum game? what's a derivative?" (Those are just off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a better list if I thought about it for 15 minutes). In other words, not things that you must know in order to do the job, but things that anyone capable of doing the job would likely have picked up along the way.
pessimizer 14y ago
This reads like a "smart test" rather than anything written by an actual engineer. Of course, I've never seen any evidence that that Edison had any engineering ability other than the ability to demand engineers invent things, and then to engineer that he receive the credit for them.
afterburner 14y ago
Did Edison treat his engineers well? If not, should I care what trials he put potential candidates through? If he was the overly manipulative type, perhaps he was mostly interested in humbling the candidate...
pfedor 14y ago
Is there any reason to believe the connection between this list and the questions Edison actually asked is any better than, say, the connection between what a Google interview actually looks like and how the newspapers like to portray it?
SparrowOS 14y ago
How would God hire? God says... sleep the sleep of death; 13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. 13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. 13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me. 14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. 14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. 14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. --- Shakespeare?
SparrowOS 14y ago
sleep the sleep of death; 13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. 13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. 13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me. 14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. 14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. 14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
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136 points by davidvaughan 14y ago

Would he appreciate an intelligent guess? If I didn't know how much a square foot of air weighed, could I represent it with x and then give a formula? If he asked me who discovered the south pole and I asked him to clarify whether he meant who first reached the south pole, who first postulated that the earth, being spheroid, must have a southernmost extremity, or who first realized that the earth produces a magnetic field, would he be impressed or merely annoyed? I'd be more interested to know how he reacted to the answers than the fact that he asked the questions.

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
From what I've inferred by reading about Edison, he probably would have feared you more intelligent than himself; and wouldn't have hired you on that basis, after taking the opportunity to chastise you for your lack of knowledge.

scarmig 14y ago

These... honestly aren't that bad. Not that I know all of them, but many of them, totally. And those that I don't are pretty context dependent, particularly those about sectors of the economy that have been de-emphasized or historical tidbits that have been de-emphasized. Replace "what city produces the most laundry machines" with "which American city is known for producing cars" and "from where domestically do we get sardines" with "what part of the United States is known for producing wine"? Note also that there are some ostensibly hard questions that seem blindingly obvious to people here now: "Where is Korea?"

absconditus 14y ago
Why are any of these good interview questions?
- trentmb 14y ago
  because he knew the answers to them.
- scarmig 14y ago
  Never said they were good interview questions, but the implication elsewhere has been "these are impossible to know the answers to!"
- numbsafari 14y ago
  Perhaps if you are going to run an international business that may be interested in expanding to the Pacific countries, having employees that can physically locate Korea might be important. Apparently he couldn't "just assume" that every college graduate had ever spent time curiously inspecting a globe and developing a general knowledge of different parts of the world.
- GabrielF00 14y ago
  They aren't good questions for, say, a software engineer, but they might be useful for executives, which is how the Times article says they were used. If you're going to be analyzing potential business opportunities you probably should have a sense of different markets, their size, their relative strengths and weaknesses, etc. You should probably have a basic idea of where we get products and materials from and a basic sense of what different types of materials do. In our post-industrial society we don't care so much about sulphur and rubber and borax, but would you hire a tech executive who didn't know where electronics are manufactured? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify the regions of the US where the tech industry has a large presence? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify "six big businessmen in the United States"? If you can't answer these questions than you don't know anything about the industry and you probably aren't curious or engaged enough to keep yourself well informed. If we updated this list to include things that are relevant to today's world, I would expect that a well-educated, well-informed person would be able to answer most of these questions.
- qxf2 14y ago
  I can see general knowledge type of questions useful for several reasons in the time Edison lived: a) How good is the candidate at saying 'I don't know'? b) Can the candidate handle repeated failures i.e., a string of "I don't know"? c) Can they BS? Instead of leaving a blank, can they BS about something tangential? d) Building hype around Edison. Imagine if the smartest person in your town failed to get hired. In the days of telegraph, the word of mouth would be 'only the best and brightest can become inspectors at Edison's factories.' e) Head fake. Perhaps Edison really judged the candidates in some other way but made a big show of 'ignorant college grad' to prevent people from gaming the interview. f) Make people that pass the test feel privileged. Its a common recruiting tool. I think Edison was a good at spotting and using talent (yeah, using) for his own ends. I give him the benefit of the doubt on the interview process.

tjr 14y ago

I wonder if Edison viewed a lot of these bits of information as truly pertinent to his work (e.g., many of the questions seem to be about building materials and where to get them), and then just tossed in a few items of random trivia for good measure.

eshvk 14y ago

This reminds me so much of so many software engineering interviews.

gambiting 14y ago

All of those are what I would call common knowledge that an average human being should know. Not that they are relevant in any way to the job Edison was offering - but they would serve as a GREAT way to indicate whatever a person answering these questions is well educated and well oriented in the world surrounding them.

RyanZAG 14y ago
Common knowledge as an indicator of business fit has been proven to be useless (and should be obvious on examination). Knowing which small town is in which country is simply irrelevant to whether a candidate apply for a management position can improve morale or productivity, or whether a candidate applying for a marketing position has any idea on how to convince customers to purchase a product. Common knowledge simply has no relation to actual skill in a set field and neither does it have any relation to intelligence. This is doubly so true today with any of these questions being answerable within seconds on a smartphone, and the thoughts instead turned to actually using the information to accomplish something useful.
- Houshalter 14y ago
  It's possibly a good indicator of how well they absorb information and/or how much they read or pay attention to the news, or wherever they are learning these random facts from. I'm not saying that means a lot though, and I definitely would have failed this test.
  - RyanZAG 14y ago
    Not necessarily, there are too many variables. The person in question may not own a radio. He may have spent a number of months in hospital because his wife got sick. An older person may have learned one of the facts over twenty years ago, and has since forgotten it. By random chance, one of the facts may have been heard by the candidate 10 minutes beforehand. In short: it's a good indicator of so many random variables as to be simply an indicator of chaos itself. Don't use anything like this in any kind of test in which the results count - you will invariably get the short end of the stick with one or more candidates. Stick to measures that directly affect the job at hand, and culture fit.

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codex_irl 14y ago

Just like a software interview - demonstrate that you know a bunch of stuff that we, in our company have & never will use. For many software jobs...its like hiring a mailing man based on his understanding of mail-delivery-cart mechanics.

aroman 14y ago

Reminds me of Google's fabled interview process. And on that note, I find it very interesting that virtually all of these questions could be answered almost verbatim by Google or WolframAlpha.

eshvk 14y ago
I don't work for Google. However, I have never heard of their interview process involving trivia factoids. There are several other companies in the valley that are guilty of this crap but Google at least focuses on algorithm questions, scaling etc. To give you an example of what I am talking about: 1. Figure out if a binary tree is a mirror image of another binary tree. vs 2. Describe X where X is a language specific feature. More amusingly, in machine learning interviews, pick one out of millions of algorithms that are out there that the interviewer knows very well, demand that the candidate answer and derive every single part of that algorithm. There is a distinct difference between demanding that people rely on memory to solve a problem vs problem solving abilities to solve a problem. While both are certainly useful for a job, I am honestly not sure how exclusively devoting yourself to the former is better than the latter.
hakaaaaak 14y ago
Google once required you to put together factual trivia with technical knowledge. One question in an interview was something like: How many possible IP addresses are there per square meter of the Earth?

loboman 14y ago

http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison-education.html http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison... 'While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. (...) A reporter asked him a question from the test. "What is the speed of sound?" If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not "carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison's view of education. "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said.'

run4yourlives 14y ago
Thomas Edison invented the cylindrical Phonograph, and movies were beginning to just show up in 1921. I'd imagine knowing the speed of sound - especially how it relates to syncing with video - was of major importance to him, much more than it was to Einstein. Context is everything.
- tieTYT 14y ago
  Regardless of the context, it's still a fact that that information is readily available in books.
  - numbsafari 14y ago
    Why is that so many people on this forum feel that the information pointed to by this link is of such great importance: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 I don't know if that information is contained in a particular book, but it is certainly readily available all over the web. Why do we care? Could Edison have had a similar interest, though focused more on his own business? Separately, what good is knowledge of theory if you have no practical experience upon which to understand it? The candidates given this test were also supposed to be in line for the executive ranks. Having a general knowledge of geography, geopolitics and trade would seem to be fairly important. It's also unclear from the article exactly how Mr. Edison interpreted or used the results. Frankly, it sounds like many of those quoted in the article were offended by being asked such "simple questions"... despite not being able to answer them. Perhaps Mr. Edison was interested in finding executives who didn't believe that common sense, mundane facts or important business details were beneath them and best left to others.

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raintrees 14y ago

Link is to a pdf... (Don't we normally indicate this in the title?)

Houshalter 14y ago
So what? It's not like a research paper or anything, just an article that has been scanned.

deepblueocean 14y ago

I wonder what Nikola Tesla asked prospective assistants?

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
[T/F] Thomas Edison is a brilliant man of impeccable morals and character. * And I bet if you circled "T", he'd zap you with a Tesla Coil and have you thrown out.

d0m 14y ago

Still, before there was no google/wikipedia so common knowledge and general interest was much more important.

vitno 14y ago

My first response was indignation. A lot of those questions are seemingly irrelevant. However, I think we need to put them in perspective of the business and time. Once you do that, A lot of them become something I would expect people to know.

hnriot 14y ago

Many of these have ambiguous answers, like the country that makes the best optical lenses, who invented photography, axe handle wood etc. There are different answers because they are either subjective (Leica, I presume he meant, but Zeiss would be a solid choice too), Photography was possible the french guy Niépce, or Fox Talbot in the UK and there were many US contenders for the title also. Axe handles are made out of many types of wood... These questions seem rather pointless, it's a case of I know this, so you should too. If Edison had been born on the west coast he would have likely asked a different set of questions.

gravedave 14y ago
He probably relied on the popular options. If all your neighbours think of Leica as the best, there's no way you'd pick Zeiss in a pre-internet world without a Wikipedia that has a disambiguation page for every other term. Sure, people on the other coast might pick Zeiss, but how many people were willing to travel across a whole continent for a job interview in those days?

mumrah 14y ago

+1 for use of ampersand ligature in "&c", i.e., "et cetera"

gwern 14y ago

> "Only some thirty of the several hundred applicants have managed to pass the test, it is true, but those who did and thus became inspectors of the factory have made good in every case." Of course, there's no control group... One might expect his half-baked trivia test to work a little bit (being a poor IQ test), but there's no way to know.

couchnaut 14y ago

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla yes - and we should we give a f.ck about Edison's views? The man was no better than a lowlife

MSM 14y ago
And you're willing to admit that a webcomic convinced you of that?
- _Dude_ 14y ago
  That's just a neat visual summary that everyone can quickly scan. Kinda like that post about another thief of ideas - Zynga.
gravedave 14y ago
Heard of Ad Hominem? It seems to affect you. He might have been a thief, but he was a quite capable business man that many could learn from.

sown 14y ago

To be sort of fair, Mr Edison was an engineer, and it was back in a time when there was more 'empirical' methods rather than predictive theories of why such and such happened. So, when there's an emphasis on building things, knowing all of this can be helpful. There's also a business type question in there, perhaps to keep an engineer's awareness of business needs in mind. For example, as Engineering Guy Bill explains, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo, the method for discovering light bulb filaments was very much a search problem, so knowing as much seemingly distant facts about barrel wood, cork, optical facets might actually be important. Questions about Cleopatra and so forth may have been to see how educated an applicant was. I wonder if those helped or hurt a candidate. I.e., did this person learn this on their own through curiosity or did they pick it up at school... Disclaimer: I am not qualified to give opinions on any topic.

appleflaxen 14y ago

The prune question must be very important; it's on there twice.

numbsafari 14y ago
You could say it came up regularly...

enraged_camel 14y ago

I have mixed feelings over this. On the one hand, knowledge is different than education. Knowledge is the possession of information. Whereas education is the ability to find information quickly and efficiently, and pass it through a filter of critical thinking. Questions like the ones on Edison's list measure knowledge, but not education. On the other hand, in my personal experience people who possess seemingly "random" pieces of information such as the location of countries on a world map or the birthday of a jazz singer tend to be much more productive. Not because the random bits of knowledge they possess are related to the work they are doing, but because information like that gives them a wider perspective on everything and allows them to be better at "pattern-matching", i.e. drawing connections between seemingly unrelated fields and subjects. This is a very, very important skill for any knowledge worker.

jacquesm 14y ago
There is a compound effect to knowledge though. The more of the bits you've got the more the bits you already had start to make sense. And at some point knowledge starts to beget new knowledge all by itself, ideas and hypothesis about how unknown stuff could work based on what you already know, and sometimes completely new stuff. So even if knowledge does not automatically mean understanding or education it can be a precursor to it and it can make it easier to attain the latter. Silly facts (baseball scores for instance) do not have that effect. So there is a definite division between the kinds of facts that you can digest and their future effects.

dkarl 14y ago

More than anything, this makes it sound like Edison only knew how to get useful work out of somebody whose brain worked like his.

arbuge 14y ago

Some of these might have been more valuable in the days when you couldn't just Google anything in an instant to find the answer.

richardjs 14y ago

Part of me wonders if Edison wasn't concerned so much with the actual answers to the questions as how an applicant went about answering the questions, and how the applicant reacted in the face of the test. Or perhaps he cared about some questions, and threw in a bunch of random ones to see what the applicant would do.

moron4hire 14y ago

Was he serious with these questions, or were they sideways questions designed to suss out how the tested person thinks?

stox 14y ago

And the most important question of all, "Are you a big enough sucker to believe I will give you the $50,000 I promised for building the invention I asked for?"

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heironimus 14y ago

I think this list would certainly fail a lot of good, smart candidates, but it probably didn't pass many idiots. It's not likely that someone would know all of these facts and not be well-educated and intelligent. If he was truly getting hundreds of applicants and he didn't mind skipping some geniuses who didn't know facts, this seems like a good way to weed people out. Plus, it's pretty easy to grade.

tokenadult 14y ago

Thanks for sharing the link to the interesting series of questions. As I read along, I tried to think about what the correct answer was--or how it would be defined--for the various questions. I imagine that today many of the questions about geography would be less asked, although knowing about other countries still matters for international business. We often talk about company hiring procedures here on Hacker News. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes... EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. Thomas Edison's test might face the same challenge today. Thomas Edison or anyone else defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.) The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes. http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl... Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann: "Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure." http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri... But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)." One thing I have to say about this whole issue, after a thoughtful comment from another HN participant off-forum, is that hiring managers have to be prepared for the development of their workers. The programmer you hire today may be a manager three years from now. Being sensitive to how workers grow in the workplace is at least as important for managers as making a good hire at the beginning.

zach 14y ago

Basically, it seems Edison wanted his executives to have his intense intellectual curiosity (he was a notable autodidact). If he knew the kind of people he felt he could lead effectively, and this was his perhaps-crazy way to identify them, this seems like a good test for those circumstances. One of the most damaging things is when you have what Gabe Newell calls "rent-seeking inside the corporation," which is a neat economic way of describing bureaucratic political power struggles. And this is totally normal, expected behavior unless you find someone who is pre-aligned with the mission, goals and values of the organization. This becomes totally crucial at huge corporations like Edison's. So this, in a sense, is a cultural test more than a knowledge quiz. Thomas Edison didn't want people who could win at 1920s Jeopardy!, he wanted people who were driven by the same non-monetary pursuits he had, possibly because it was his best chance to avoid BS artists, pleasant-but-ineffective workers and political strivers. I also have to think that it was because he was a pretty narcissistic dude, but that's another story.

ynniv 14y ago

So what you're telling me is that people have always sucked at evaluating job candidates.

patfla 14y ago

I'm speaking only from my own experience but as a software engineer observing other software engineers a surprisingly large percent of the the (imo) very best have striking degrees of general knowledge. That is, that could speak very well to many topics other than just software engineering and they have eclectic and deeply developed 'outside' interests. I believe this runs counter to the current politically correct understanding of intelligence or if you prefer intelligence(s) - although I do believe in the latter.

_Dude_ 14y ago

Useful if you want to hire someone you could steal ideas from... Someone like Tesla.

jleader 14y ago

I found the test very interesting. You have to keep in mind that Edison was a prolific inventor, who at the time was in the business of disrupting as many industries as he could. From that perspective, he was looking for people who knew a lot about the current state of technology and business, and also able to bring to bear knowledge from apparently unrelated areas.. Many of the questions are trivia related to the technology of the time ("who invented photography?", "where is platinum found", etc.). I think the expectation was that someone who was actively interested in technology would have picked up a lot of that sort of trivia along the way. Some of the less technological questions ("what's the capital of Alabama?") are probably just trying to evaluate how aware the candidate is of the world around them. A similar list today, say for a candidate to help run a high-tech incubator, might consist of questions like "who founded Google? which is preferable to a seller, a 2nd price auction or a standard auction? where was the web invented? what's the geopolitical and technological significance of tantalum? are lithium batteries riskier than other battery technologies, why or why not? what's a typical price for web advertising (per click, or per impression)? what's a zero-sum game? what's a derivative?" (Those are just off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a better list if I thought about it for 15 minutes). In other words, not things that you must know in order to do the job, but things that anyone capable of doing the job would likely have picked up along the way.

pessimizer 14y ago

This reads like a "smart test" rather than anything written by an actual engineer. Of course, I've never seen any evidence that that Edison had any engineering ability other than the ability to demand engineers invent things, and then to engineer that he receive the credit for them.

afterburner 14y ago

Did Edison treat his engineers well? If not, should I care what trials he put potential candidates through? If he was the overly manipulative type, perhaps he was mostly interested in humbling the candidate...

pfedor 14y ago

Is there any reason to believe the connection between this list and the questions Edison actually asked is any better than, say, the connection between what a Google interview actually looks like and how the newspapers like to portray it?

SparrowOS 14y ago

How would God hire? God says... sleep the sleep of death; 13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. 13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. 13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me. 14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. 14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. 14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. --- Shakespeare?

SparrowOS 14y ago

sleep the sleep of death; 13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. 13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. 13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me. 14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. 14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. 14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

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