My grandfather loved telling me this story, particularly when I started drifting towards scientific careers. “Make sure you taste before adding anything and don’t assume! They could be watching for it!”. Though I don’t know if he attributed it to Edison.
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I’ve heard this said about diner eggs, which is a lousy test, since diner eggs are assumed to be salt-free since people add condiments to taste. Soup, I can see how that would be served salty, even in a diner.
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Who seasons food before tasting it? I mean, unless you’re eating somewhere, that’s a known (bland) entity.
As a hiring manager myself, I’m a fan of these sorts of “character games” as interesting anecdotes, but I don’t think I’d ever use one myself. big reason being the outcome is just an assumption; unless you’ve gone and given soup to, say, 100 of your best-known “question askers” and seen that they didn’t season before eating, then you are the assumption-maker for assuming they won’t season first.
Or, everyone just knows that you make bland soup.
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This is probably a combination of Edison’s commitment to testing as well as lack of understanding of Bayesian statistics.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” - Tesla
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Yep. This is standard hiring manager BS.
I have known a few who won’t hire someone who shows up not wearing a watch. I knew one who wouldn’t hire someone who didn’t wear nice shoes to the interview.
He probably failed to hire some pretty good people.
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Considering the origin of the word salad is “salt”, I don’t feel kidded at all.
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Sounds like Edison was an assumption-maker.
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That’s fairly common and more over it’s good. Many restaurants actually do that as well.
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And it’s where salad gets its name!
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This test also takes me back to being a child and my dad admonishing me that I needed to have good table manners because in a job interview they might take me to dinner and will judge me. While I don’t think I ended up particularly bad or great at manners (and I never did learn how to properly eat a lobster, an example he always gave), I am glad I ended up in a profession where eating together isn’t part of the process.
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If I go into an interview and an eccentric rich guy gives me soup and watches intently… I’m not eating the soup. The Borgias probably had similar hiring processes. This is the guy who electrocuted an elephant to make a point.
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Edison: “Let us have some soup during the Interview”
Me: “OK” (tastes a spoonful) “Needs Salt”
Me: [removes top from salt shaker and pours entire contents into soup]
Me: (slowly stirring soup) “So how am I doing so far?”
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I don’t understand his rationale here. If I were served soup, I would assume that it was seasoned properly and would only add salt if I had already tasted it and found it lacking (frankly, even if it was not seasoned properly I’d probably just eat it as-is…it’s a job interview where they are feeding me…I’m not going to be fussy). That’s the opposite behavior of an “assumer” that he is expecting but still makes me an assumer.
It ain’t necessarily so…
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Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy, had an interview chair where the front legs were sawn too short so the interviewee would have to lean forward uncomfortably. There was another identical chair in the room that was fine. He much preferred people who weren’t afraid to tell the Admiral that the chair was fucked up – and grab the decent one – he wanted to know folks weren’t afraid to report an error rather than just get along with the boss.
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To smear a competitor.
IIRC a lot of the executions were done with Edison’s DC, not the claimed AC. Or by fudging things by using not particularly dangerous DC voltages, and ridiculous AC ones. They even rigged a bid for the first electric chair to make sure it was powered by an AC generator, though I think the chair itself was DC.
I think the association between Topsy and this campaign or Edison is a myth though. It took place well after and Edison’s only involvement seems to be the Edison Company making that famous film of the killing.
Even the original PR campaign ran through a proxy, was shockingly revealed via press expose a few years after.
Yeah I first heard this as a probably apocryphal pithy quote from Ben Franklin.
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Changing the headline back to soup doesn’t invalidate your answer.
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On the other hand, if the applicant added Laudanum to his (always his) soup, he was hired on the spot
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