Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com