Australian Air Force's Recruiting Puzzle Shown To Be Unsolvable

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 29, 2013 @03:21AM from the we-meant-to-do-that dept.

KernelMuncher writes "Australia's Royal Air Force has been left red-faced after a job ad asked applicants to solve a complex math problem that was revealed to be unsolvable. The service posted the puzzle in a bid to attract the country's best minds to its ranks. 'If you have what it takes to be an engineer in the Air Force call the number below,' it read, above a complicated formula which candidates had to crack. But there was a slight difficulty: The problem had typos and ended up not giving potential operatives the correct contact information."

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Re:Obviously they need brighter people by gdeles · 2013-06-29 06:04 · Score: 3, Insightful

A wise person knows what they do not know. I used to interview entry level programmers. I would ask harder SQL questions until they could not provide a good answer. Usually "what is a left outer join". The best non answer was "I am not sure, it is similar to this, and I know were to look it up". The worst answer (in a valley girl voice). "It is like a regular join, except like outer.".