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Comment by AaronM | Hacker News Reader

What does having some sort of puzzle actually do for Reddit? I get that its supposed to help filter out people who may not be that interesting in the job, but the questions they asked seemed more like trivia than anything else.

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If they didn't, they'd get applications from thousands of semi-interested, likely unqualified redditors. Also, the kind of people who like solving puzzles like that are the kind of people you want to hire, especially if the other four employees are the kind of people who like making those puzzles. With so few employees, finding that fit is immeasurably important.

maybe but IMHO makes very little sense to provide puzzles not requiring programming skills. If you want to filter, filter for smartness and not for determination on solving a non cool puzzle.

I think that puzzle requires a decent baseline in terms of math skills/tech knowledge/research ability to provide a minimal baseline to weed out unsuitable candidates. Also, it's reddit, not the NSA. They're looking to make the application process interesting and unique more than selecting for the best possible programmers. They'll still get dozens of qualified applicants to choose from.

Trivia or not, they're reducing the number of applications they have to wade through. Sifting through half-ass interested resumes is a huge drain on HR--anything that increases the overall quality of a candidate pool is a win.

It's really more a test of your ability to use Google than your knowledge of trivia. Even if you're completely non-technical it shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to solve. It might take two guesses if you're not sure on the ICMP code, but other than that it's pretty straight forward. I was able to get the right answer pretty quickly even though I don't know any of that stuff and am completely unqualified for the position.

Well, the entire point of it taking 20 minutes is that gets rid of the spur of the moment 'why not? totally not qualified, but may as well try' or 'let's do it for jokes!' submissions. And this being the internet, there's quite a lot of those (for the lulz I believe is the technical term).

I would think the reddit staff to be intimately familiar with that type of behavior.

Not at all. I'm gainfully employed with no intention of moving to Reddit, but the last time they put up a puzzle I solved it just for the fun of it, and wrote a cover letter just to stay in the habit.

One of the most important skills for any technical job is being good at googling stuff.

I knew nothing about any of these subjects before doing this puzzle and I got it within 45 minutes, and the majority of that was digging through the ICMP RFCs to figure the first one out. It's definitely a test of if you can figure these things out unless you happen to know ICMP header codes, the weight of gold in an olympic-sized swimming pool, which company's data-link layer address starts with 08:00:09, and the html entity codes all off the top of your head.

Knowing some of the content obviously makes it easier: I'm currently in a 4th year CSC networking class (helped with A and C) and it took me 10 minutes. I made a trivial error on B, which added a couple minutes!

Not only trivia, but indeterminable trivia. An olympic-sized swimming pool has no maximum depth and therefore no maximum weight if filled with gold. I'd bet they're accepting /apply/* (type anything in and you get a log in screen with "really, it was that easy? only one way to find out")

They say 'minimum depth' and not maximum, and there are rules for a swimming pool to be considered "Olimpic Size". See the wikipedia entry for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-size_swimming_pool

It says "of minimum depth."

From the article:

    ... how much an Olympic-sized swimming pool of the minimum depth would weigh ...

It says minimum depth, not maximum, and I'd be very surprised if Olympic-sized swimming pools didn't have a minimum depth. They may have edited it since you read it, of course.

Thanks. I probably just missed it.

Here's the relevant info from FINA:

FR 2.3 Depth - A minimum depth of 1.35 metes, extending from 1.0 metre to at least 6.0 metres from the end wall is required for pools with starting blocks. A minimum depth of 1.0 metre is required elsewhere.

http://www.fina.org/project/index.php?option=com_content&...

They are asking for the minimum depth, which is 2.0m according to FINA.

And no! If you try to apply using a random URL, it will show a message saying that it is the wrong code.

There is a programming problem to work on after you complete the puzzle.

Their last one was somewhat more relevant.

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