Disappointed. For some reason, I wanted to learn that he had misophonia and intended to weed out the slurpy eaters.
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he did have more than 1,000 patents
Because he was an asshole and a litigious patent trolley.
https://www.historicmysteries.com/did-thomas-edison-steal-inventions/
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As a hiring manager, if I could, my test would be to ask the applicant to take me for a drive through city freeway traffic in their own car. This would speak worlds to me. What kind of car, what condition is it in, how messy. Then, the driving itself. Is the applicant focused? Calm and courteous or aggressive and dangerous? There are so many mental problems to solve when driving a car, it would be a good window into the person (though not necessarily their skills for the job, unless we’re hiring a driver).
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Rickover’s interviews were… something.
One story is that Rickover set an applicant the task to “piss him off”.
So the guy cleared Rickover’s desk with one broad sweep of his arm. And got the job.
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Random coincidence: Mr. Maggi was born in Frauenfeld, Switzerland
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Perhaps he should served soup but only provided a fork.
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Everyone at college breathlessly repeated this job-interview canard (albeit noone ever mentioned “Edison”): it was a current-day interview trick, used by all the smart, modern corporations. (Alternatively, you’d receive a casual request by the interviewer to open a nailed-shut window: stress, flop sweating, nervous laughter, breaking the window would all be grounds for failure, of course.)
All these are almost certainly apocryphal. I doubt this Edison version as well. “Salt and pepper”? In the version I heard, it was salt only. And, it wasn’t so much that whether you’d salt before tasting (although that is important). The principle behavior being observed was: did you shake the shaker onto your wrist first, to see a representative amount delivered? Or, like some heedless Visigoth barbarian, did you blindly tilt this unfamiliar cellar on your food with no idea just how much sodium you’d be heaping into your dish at first pour?
But, this pepper issue. Really? You are virtually assured that the pepper level of a dish is almost none. Who puts “too much pepper” onto their dish? If anything, it’s always too much salt, never pepper. For this reason, I believe this “Edison” provenance to be false. It would appear, Mr. @Frauenfelder, that this so-called interview test 
is the result of a game of telephone.
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Tom was always kind of a dick. Many of “his” inventions were stolen from his workers, the excuse being that the Edison name ensured success. Fine, but he took credit for other people’s work. This example also goes against manners. If you add salt or pepper to your food before you taste it, you’re saying that you like salt or pepper in your food, not that the food is not good in your opinion, which is one way that adding condiments to your food after you taste it might imply.
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This is why I always bring my own soup for an interview.
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Nice, snopes to the rescue. I had long ago been told this story in the version attributed to Henry Ford and believed it until this day, but the moment I read the Edison post I figured, “Whoops, all apocryphal.”
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I’m not sure if it was a character game, or just happened, but at one place the person I was to see was tied up for a bit and I was shunted to the empty lunch room to get a coffee.
The coffee maker was empty of even the guilty dribble of last cup avoidance, so I emptied the basket and started a new pot. While I continued to wait, at least two people came in, wondered who I was and were happy that there was coffee. When I explained that I was waiting for an interview, they said “yeah, we need you”.
The interview seemed a formality, and I think that word had gotten back about the coffee.
It was a good place to work at, but they were terrible at starting a new pot.
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At work, we once had a receptionist that would eat lemons with salt at her desk. Makes my mouth hurt thinking about it. Perhaps Edison would have recognized the potential for a battery and would have hired her.
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Maybe Edison just want to make sure that his peons were happy surviving on thin gruel?
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I don’t add salt to anything anymore - high blood pressure. But I add black pepper to damned near everything, especially soups.
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The movie Men In Black did a riff on this idea, with several applicants for the resident Secret Agency given a form to fill out and no useful place to place the form to do so. Will Smith’s character gets up and laboriously drags a table across the room to use, and thus passes this particular test.
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Read this, and talk to your doc.
Yes and no. Early Edison was an actual inventor. Late Edison was just a CEO.
I’m sure the story is apocryphal, but the real horror is that so many people think this kind of neoliberal just-so story is admirable rather than, you know, prickish.
Job interviews aren’t meritocratic. They’re a chance to scope out a candidate’s skin tone, social class, neurotypicality, and all the other stuff you can’t ask in writing. And elaborate interviews are a test of shit-eating ability. So that’s what being good at interviews says about you.
And fine, whatever, we all need cash. You don’t have to be a Renfield about it though.
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