A perfect "be sure to drink your Ovaltine" moment! If anyone is unfamiliar, it refers to the movie "A Christmas Story". The moment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU

I first saw that movie a only a couple years ago and quickly realized how many pop culture references come from it. It does such a good job of capturing a period of time in North America. Even before I saw the movie, eating out at a Chinese restaurant was a thing for me and my family. I had no idea it may have been related! Also... one day I'll own that lamp.

This is great, thanks. I haven't seen this movie or heard of it. This scene is delivered very well and really explains the 'be sure to drink your ovaltine' concept

A Christmas Story is classic Americana

The movie was a childhood staple, but the book is even better - literally LOL'ed, snorted, etc. "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" by Jean Shepherd. There are lots of additional short stories there not featured in the movie.

Growing up in the 90's my family would make it a point to watch this every year around the holidays, good times. If you are ever in Cleveland, OH, you can actually tour the house they filmed most of it in.

It was a reference to an actual ad campaign, I believe, for a real product

Seems meta. As far as references to ads in movies I enjoy Demolition Man. I loop the classy cover of the jingle for Jolly Green Giant from time to time to endear me to my (close) colleagues. It's burnt deep, whelp time for a listen.

Fascinating aside on Demolition Man: some versions have all restaurants as Pizza Hut rather than Taco Bell [1]. The version I saw as a kid was Pizza Hut, so when I said “in the future all restaurants are Pizza Hut”, a friend said “you mean Taco Bell” and we both learned something :).

> For some non-American releases, references to Taco Bell were changed to Pizza Hut. This includes dubbing, plus changing the logos during post-production. Taco Bell remains in the closing credits. In the Swedish release the subtitles still use Taco Bell while the sound and picture has been altered as above. The original version released in Australia (on VHS) contained Taco Bell, yet the newer version on DVD was changed both in logo and dubbing to Pizza Hut (in the scene where the restaurant patrons are looking through the glass windows to the fight scene outside, Taco Bell can be seen etched into the glass, even in the modified version).

[1] https://tacobell.fandom.com/wiki/Demolition_Man

Indeed, in my youth I downloaded a version that had this and I was alarmed at first. Some further research showed that it was an international release as Pizza Hut has a broader brand globally. The scene in San Angles where Westley Snipes attacks a bunch of police and he learns of his programming was filmed in Irvine, CA. I've got a few photos of the location and now would be a good time to take some shots since it isn't as busy. Also tripped out that the Mall scene in Kindergarten Cop was shot at the Main Place Mall in Santa Ana.

> Just telling people to apply to domain.com/jobs is pretty lame. So, basically the same door that anyone else goes through when they click the "Careers" link in your site's footer? Reminds me of when I solved one of the CTF challenges for a website only for my reward to be "We're hiring! Apply at jobs.example.com!"

That reminds me of MI5’s Coding Challenge [1][2][3].

[1] https://cixtor.com/blog/mi5-coding-challenge

[2] https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/opportunities/coding-challeng...

[3] https://www.mi5.gov.uk/sites/default/files/styles/puzzal_ima...

One of the defence agencies in Australia made a puzzle quite a long time ago; I can't find it now. It was a bunch of hex in a banner advert; the hex was actually x86 assembly, which if 'run' would write a string into memory.

The string was just the URL of their recruitment portal. I was so disappointed, once I got it running I was hoping to hear helicopters or a knock on the door!

>I was so disappointed, once I got it running I was hoping to hear helicopters or a knock on the door!

They probably need a lot of people with some tech knowledge. This way they can probably gain the widest audience that is still useful.

If it's too hard to crack, it's unlikely your investment of time in this recruitment measure will actually yield results.

The point is that if you crack it, they should send you to some unique link. Even if it's not super hard, it at least proved some level of technical competency and do should allow you to prioritised interview access (maybe at least skipping initial screening).

It works in reverse - you probably wouldn't want to work in such an environment with frustrating practices towards developers.

What frustrating practices? I'm a developer (and mathematician), and I love puzzles :)

Not everyone is working on awesome stuff at an intelligence agency. They still need people to work on their 20 year old hellscape of an ERP system in hated language(java,ada,cobol, etc).

sure, but how much of the actual job will be solving puzzles? Seems unlikely to be representative of the work so the people who enjoy the actual work might begrudge the interview and the people who enjoy the interview might not enjoy the work.

At an intelligence agency? Possibly quite a bit.

A valid stance. Incidentally, that's why I've never had any interest in working at a certain couple of FAANG companies.

I assume the solutions to these can be found publicly pretty quickly. So your secret bypass first filter loses utility after the first couple of people.

The reason you put this riddles online is to get to know people who love this kind of challenge. This is still the case if the solutions are available online, even though I would include a plead into my job ad not to post solutions online for fairness with respect to other potential applicants who mananged to solve the riddle.

When in a job interview, it should be very easy to find out whether the person found the solution online or he "cheated"; simple ask some detailed questions how the person came up with this and that part of the approach.

The person that knows how to Google for solutions may be the right person for the job.

Perhaps filtering out the people who can neither solve it nor Google it is enough of a filter by itself. Not suggesting it should bypass more than initial screening, naturally.

Why do they call it Ovaltine?

The mug is round. The jar is round.

They should call it Roundtine.

I know you're joking, but I looked it up :)

'Ovaltine was developed in Bern, Switzerland, where it is known by its original name, Ovomaltine (from ovum, Latin for "egg", and malt, which were originally its key ingredients).' [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovaltine

Ha, as a Swiss, from the Bern region, I was thinking whether this strange sounding Ovaltine has anything to do with Ovomaltine and was about to look it up.

In Switzerland, Ovomaltine is among the products with highest brand recognition ever and has a cult status because of their advertisement in the 80s and 90s.

Never knew it was a thing outside of Switzerland

I am from South America and I drink Ovomaltine every day. It has a lot less sugar than the local brands, which is a plus in my book. More actual taste than just sugary overload.

Used to be pretty big in Italy in late 70s/early 80s, then Nestlé destroyed all competition with their Nesquick. You can still find Ovomaltine in large supermarkets but it's clearly a bit player.

I wonder if it's a generational thing as well?

It is still sold as Ovomaltine in Germany and some other countries[1].

[1] https://www.ovomaltine.com/country-locator

And oval also comes from ovum. So it's a sibling rather than parent relationship.

Oh! That explains why I’d always get really sick after drinking/eating Ovaltine based products!

Because of the malt? Egg and egg products are no longer used.

It's a Jerry Seinfeld bit.

cerved was referencing an episode of Seinfeld

That's gold, cerved! Gold!

Google Foobar does it right and lets you skip to actually be considered, which is nice.

Has Google even bothered with Foobar for like past 2-3 years? It appears so frequently on non-incognito searches that surely every developer must have seen it by now.

I've never seen it, I assume it's just a US thing

I've never got it and I've been googling programming stuff for almost a decade now.

However, maybe I'm remembering wrong, but a few years ago I was reading an article about it and someone showed a search term that brought it up for them and I tried that term and got it. Dont remember what the search term was, but I think it was something related to one of the popular leetcode-esque algorithms I've never had to do in my hobbyist or professional work.

I've never seen it, but other people in my (non-US) country claim to have seen it. I always assumed it was either my taste in porn or the fact that I'm usually logged out and regularly clear tracking cookies.

FooBar is still being considered. I solved some problems few months ago and was contacted by their recruiter one month after that, they did mention FooBar as the main signal.

I’ve never seen it on any of my searches. I got sent a link…

I’ve never seen it, live in the US, and I google developer things all the time. Maybe it’s because I work in Ruby and not one of the more googley languages?

I've never seen it, but I assume they only target people in the US.

I've had it hit me twice over the years.

Can't say I've seen it. Guess Google isn't hiring in my country.

I've seen it in the UK last November.

fwiw, a few of them say "mention this header"—so perhaps there is some accelerated path that it goes on.

Alternatively, they're tracking how many applications they get through that path.