Careful, Interns Are Sharp
It’s shaping up to be a great summer here in Lincoln with our summer interns joining us soon. We’re pretty excited to see them flex their development muscle and to let them take a peek at just what goes on around here. We’ll post more details about the program later, but for now let’s look at some interesting stats.
This summer we’re sending our interns to BigOmaha for a day to check out some sweet speakers, meet some cool people, and hopefully learn a ton.
Instead of just having them choose which day they wanted, we made it a bit more interesting. They were sent this picture and told to find the clue hidden somewhere in the image to get their choice of days (yes, it’s a very low quality image):
Did you figure it out yet?
SPOILER ALERT!
If you view the binary/hex contents at the beginning of the file (rename it with a .bin extension and open it in Visual Studio), you’ll see something interesting:
That was the original puzzle (pretty easy, but certainly not trivial). A couple people noticed that the text happened to match up with the “Program Name” field on the image metadata. This wasn’t planned, but I’m glad they found it.
So how did our interns do? Pretty well. The first response was received in 5 minutes! It’s a busy time of year for college students, so this probably wasn’t their first priority. Here are some bogus conclusions based on an Excel graph:
- The trend shows the first response with a negative time, so this intern has obviously built a time machine.
- Breaking the 10 hour barrier was believed impossible for some time.
- Our last response will be sometime in mid-June.
An alternate to this puzzle was to name 20 of our employees in the picture. This was a bit tougher, but we had one person get 21 and another get 13. Not too shabby.
Look for more updates on our interns this summer.
Is anyone else going to Big Omaha this year?
