Reddit is hiring

[AaronM]

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.

[redthrowaway]

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.

[ABrandt]

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.

[j_baker]

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.

[_ouxp]

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")

[fragmede]

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

[jim_dot]

Their last one was somewhat more relevant.

[jbyers]

Thanks Reddit, because now I know that a sydharb is a unit of measurement equivalent to 200,000 Olympic swimming pools. Or the volume of the Sydney Harbor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...

[hsuresh]

Distance Measurement Tool on google maps has a long list of units of measurements for distances. Really geeky.

[zbruhnke]

is it bad that I solved this just for the hell of it? I was tempted to send in a doc that just said i am not looking for a job, however your puzzle was a fun waste of 11 minutes so i just wanted to say thanks!

[xstaticdev]

It would actually depend on the construction materials used in the pool itself since they ask how much the pool would weigh vs the actual content of said pool. :)

Do I get the job? :)

[brianobush]

If only real-world puzzles were this easy to step through...

[blantonl]

If you make a mistake in any of the answers, are you automatically disqualified?

[collision]

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'"

[redthrowaway]

Considering it would make it impossible to apply, then yes.