The thread became about whether a good interview question for an engineer was how she thought GPS works. HeyLaughingBoy thinks that the qualities a question like that seeks to explore are irrelevant for a programming job.

I think that it is a good question for any engineer. One explanation for why HeyLaughingBoy might have disagreed was that HeyLaughingBoy was making a distinction between a programmer and an engineer.

I thought that highlighting the distinction between what HeyLaughingBoy wrote (programmer) and the parent (engineer) was a parsimonious way of expressing this.