Re: I had to read this bit twice to get my head round it.
Aren't aircraft designers supposed to know about things like drag coefficients?
Nope, the people who make it to the technical interview these days has cleared two hurdles on the selection track already (actually, a third if one counts the whole page job-add in a glossy and expensive printed media glorifying the generic greatness of the organization): The recruitment con-sluttants with their hoodoo-based personality testing and then the locale HR-people. Since the first two "filters" know nothing of the subject matter, they will do box ticking on the CV and niceness testing on the candidate.
The end results are a set of genuinely nice candidates (and sometimes one or two psychopaths) with limited domain knowledge, not really what we asked for - but now we have spend thousands on The Recruitment Process and we are Late so we have to pick One, not "non of the above", and just hope that it works out - and they will be using Big-Money design tools like Comsol and anything Dassault, so maybe it will be OK in the end!?
Which it will be in a way... because In the end we recruit The Specialist Consultant to fix the mess, The Consultant is consulting because he/she absolutely knows their stuff but due to many factors like them also being bastards, they will never make Recruitment.
Civilisation is collapsing, I say.
Paris, 'cause she could work in HR.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
