On Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:53:58 -0400, Gene
wrote:

On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:51:25 -0400, Tom Francis - SWSports
wrote:

http://xkcd.com/645/

You may need to think about that for a minute. :)

ROFLMA....

My wife still thinks my old HP 23c is a thing of the devil.... she
actually thought I was kidding her about RPN until she tried it....

You, me, CaliBill and fretwell must be getting really old. :)

Your HP 23c reminds me. Back in the day myself and another senior
engineer were tasked to come up with a quick test for engineering
applicants for the research lab. We sat around for a while thinking
about it, then came up with this idea - we'd write a joke equation and
have the applicants solve it.

I don't remember the equation - I probably still have it in the files
somewhere if you're interested. Anyway, it was a kind of mathematical
shaggy dog story, but to get the key, you had to solve the equation.
We figured it would take at least an hour or so to solve it but we
gave them all HP calculators to solve it - part of the joke because
you had to use RPN. :)

Came the day of the interview rounds, we gathered all the applicants
in the conference room, explained that we were giving a test on
problem solving, handed out the calculators and tests and left them to
their own devices - we sat in the corner and watched them work.

So we have grads from MIT, Stanford, Wake Forest, Northwesten and one
internal interviewee with a technical degree from ITT - he was taking
engineering courses.

About fifteen minutes in, I noticed the ITT kid looking at his test
paper, scratched his head, looks again and busts out laughing.

Hired him on the spot. :)