
What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know - davidvaughan
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40F10FB355B1B7A93C3A8178ED85F458285F9
======
loboman
[http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-
edison...](http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison-
education.html) '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
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
Regardless of the context, it's still a fact that that information is readily
available in books.

~~~
numbsafari
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>

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.

~~~
chc
Those numbers are of practical importance to programmers in particular. They
directly affect nearly everything we do to some degree. On the other hand,
without knowing anything about you, I can pretty confidently guess that the
identity of Leonidas and the process of tanning leather are not practical
concerns for you at all.

Also, I would argue that memorizing those numbers themselves is unimportant
and putting too much stock in them is a mistake (some are very likely a bit
different on the computer you're working with than they were on the one used
to compile the list — for example, hitting L2 cache is slightly faster than a
branch misprediction on the i7 IIRC). The important takeaway IMO is the orders
of magnitude at work.

~~~
jleader
If you were developing technical products in 1921, the process of tanning
leather was probably very relevant, as were questions about the density of
different kinds of wood, the sources and production of various metals, etc.

Just as a programmer should know the orders of magnitude of latencies, an
industrial engineer in Edison's time should have a sense of the
characteristics of materials he might be choosing between. For example, should
the handle of a new tool you're inventing be made of leather-wrapped steel, or
hickory (traditionally used for ax handles)?

------
zach
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.

------
sown
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>, 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.

------
gambiting
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.

~~~
AaronBBrown
Really? You think the voltage on a street car and the wood that kerosene
barrels is made of is common knowledge? I would say that I knew _maybe_ 1/3rd
of the questions in that list.

~~~
gambiting
Yes. Will I boast if I say that I honestly don't know just 3 things on this
list?

Back when I was at school, we had all the subjects as mandatory, chemistry,
physics, biology, history - there was no choice like you get today. So yes, I
happen to know the weight of the air,or the lightest/heaviest types of wood.
And if you like researching things(in my case - spending hours on wikipedia)
questions like the one about optical lenses are easy.

And I am pretty sure that's what Edison was looking for - people who are
curious about stuff and research it themselves. Common knowledge in my
opinion,because in an ideal world I would like everyone to be that curious
about the world that surrounds them.

~~~
Taylorious
I wouldn’t say you were boasting, I’d say you were lying. You happen to know
off the top of your head that: African black wood is the heaviest lumber.
That’s the first thing you thought of? Really? What wood kerosene barrel would
have been made of in the 20’s. What the voltage of a street car was in the
20’s. Where Spitsbergen is (unless you have been there or in the area). What
war material Chile exported to the USA in WW1. What the highest rise of tide
is in North America . What state has the largest amethyst mine. Who invented
the modern paper making machine (modern in the 20’s). What ingredients are in
the best white paint. What the populations of Germany, Japan, England,
Australia, and Russia are. What part of Germany you get toys from.

Uh-huh. You should go on Jeopardy, you would make Ken Jennings look like a
clown.

~~~
gambiting
First one,yes. Second one - I actually used to work in a wolframium mine in
Panasqueira, Portugal,when I was 17 and learned A LOT about mines in general
in my spare time. Kerosene has been used a lot in mining lamps,so yes, I did
read about it. I did research about one of the first electric cars in the
UK,that was used widely as a milk delivery truck - back from the same period,
so I happen to know the voltage. Why did I need to be near Spitsbergen to know
where it is? I used to know a guy who was a fisherman on the Barents Sea - he
would tell stories of where they went, hence Spitsbergen. Also, I live in
Europe, so I am fairly comfortable with pointing out where stuff it. I
mentioned before, we had all the subjects at school, there was no choice like
you get now. Write a couple of essays about WW1,you will come across random
stuff like the war material exported from chile, guaranteed. Highest rise of
tide I remember from looking up the tides when I was wondering as a kid how
comes that Netherlands is not flooded by tides constantly, so I read a lot
about it. No, I don't know which state has the largest amethyst mine, one of
those 3 I didn't know from the top of my head. I know what is used in the
white paint nowadays - I guess that counts,since I have no way of knowing what
could be the best answer in the 1920. The same goes to population - but again,
living in the middle of Europe helps with that. And toys are easy if you live
in a country that imports loads of things from Germany,having a border with
it.

And no, I am not interested in Jeopardy.

~~~
Steko
"All of those are what I would call common knowledge that an average human
being should know."

"I actually used to work in a wolframium mine"

Credibility shot.

------
jleader
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.

------
tjr
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.

------
scarmig
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
Why are any of these good interview questions?

~~~
GabrielF00
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.

------
codex_irl
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
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
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.

------
vitno
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.

------
nathanb
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
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.

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

------
enraged_camel
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
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.

------
pessimizer
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.

------
tokenadult
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%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

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...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

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=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

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-
GZkw6...](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)

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://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...](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)

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/prepri...](http://geb.uni-
giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

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.

~~~
graeme
This is useful information, and a good, well-documented discussion.

However, I'm finding it kind of tiresome to see it at the top of every job
discussion, particularly since it's so lengthy. I don't think this Edison post
was meant as a serious suggestion for how hiring can be done.

Perhaps you could make a blog post or pdf that contains the copy-pasted text,
and then produce a summarized comment that links out to this info for anyone
interested?

I'm sensitive to the argument that hiring related submissions will give bad
advice if this context isn't provided. But on the other hand the status quo is
tiresome for those of us who have seen this comment over and over.

~~~
tokenadult
The FAQ included in my comment is slated to be a new page on my personal
website. I certainly intentionally miss some opportunities to post the FAQ
here on HN, as discussions of somebody's article or post about how to hire
come up here more than once per week on average. Those threads often have very
active discussion. Sometimes I post the FAQ, and other times I just lurk.

------
hnriot
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
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?

------
patfla
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.

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

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

------
couchnaut
<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
And you're willing to admit that a webcomic convinced you of that?

~~~
_Dude_
That's just a neat visual summary that everyone can quickly scan. Kinda like
that post about another thief of ideas - Zynga.

------
heironimus
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.

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

------
gwern
> "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.

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richardjs
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.

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d0m
Still, before there was no google/wikipedia so common knowledge and general
interest was much more important.

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pfedor
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?

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afterburner
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...

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

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stox
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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deepblueocean
I wonder what Nikola Tesla asked prospective assistants?

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
[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.

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arbuge
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.

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moron4hire
Was he serious with these questions, or were they sideways questions designed
to suss out how the tested person thinks?

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

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

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

~~~
numbsafari
You could say it came up regularly...

