What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know

<a href="http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison-education.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison...</a> '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.'

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>For example, as Engineering Guy Bill explains, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo</a>, 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.<p>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...<p>Disclaimer: I am not qualified to give opinions on any topic.

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.

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.<p>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.

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.

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.<p>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"?<p>Note also that there are some ostensibly hard questions that seem blindingly obvious to people here now: "Where is Korea?"

Just like a software interview - demonstrate that you know a bunch of stuff that we, in our company have &#38; never will use. For many software jobs...its like hiring a mailing man based on his understanding of mail-delivery-cart mechanics.

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.

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.

Would he appreciate an intelligent guess?<p>If I didn't know how much a square foot of air weighed, could I represent it with x and then give a formula?<p>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?<p>I'd be more interested to know how he reacted to the answers than the fact that he asked the questions.

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

I have mixed feelings over this.<p>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.<p>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.

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.

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.<p>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<p><a href="http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...</a><p>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.<p><a href="http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p><a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&#38;q=Griggs+Duke+Power&#38;hl=en&#38;as_sdt=2,24" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...</a><p>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.)<p>The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&#38;oi=fnd&#38;pg=PA271&#38;dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&#38;ots=iCXkgXrlOV&#38;sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&#38;q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;id=SRv-GZkw6...</a><p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&#38;oi=fnd&#38;pg=PA95&#38;dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&#38;ots=iCXkgXrnMW&#38;sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&#38;q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;id=SRv-GZkw6...</a><p>Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.<p><a href="http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full" rel="nofollow">http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full</a><p><a href="http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...</a><p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;id=frfUB3GWlMYC&#38;oi=fnd&#38;pg=PA9&#38;dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&#38;ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&#38;sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&#38;q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;id=frfUB3GWl...</a><p>Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt &#38; 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:<p>"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."<p><a href="http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...</a><p>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 &#38; De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, &#38; Page, 1999; Scholarios &#38; Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, &#38; Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, &#38; 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 &#38; 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)."<p>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.

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...<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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

<a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla" rel="nofollow">http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla</a><p>yes - and we should we give a f.ck about Edison's views? The man was no better than a lowlife

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.

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

&#62; "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."<p>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.

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.

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

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?

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...

+1 for use of ampersand ligature in "&#38;c", i.e., "et cetera"

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?"

I wonder what Nikola Tesla asked prospective assistants?

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.

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

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

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

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