HSD: Too easy—solved in minutes

If you went to Perthnow.com.au or News.com.au today (Thursday, 3rd October) you would have seen the following picture somewhere near the top of the site.

This was from an advert from BigCommerce for Software Engineers (who can solve complex problems).

Click on the picture to go to the article at News.com.au.

But in order to call the company and apply for the job you first had to decode the phone number. Only those who could decode the phone number could apply for the jobs.

At the time I saw this on News.com.au (about 4:30 p.m. Perth time on the 3rd) they were saying that nobody had called the encoded phone number.

Seriously, for anyone of my era in the IT field used to working in bases of 2, 10, and 16 this was an easy peasy puzzle. I simply assumed it was base 36 and the resulting number that you get is eight digits and is the correct phone number.

I have witnesses. One of my witnesses (Cameron) called the number and we were told “Congratulations. You have solved the code. Please leave your name and contact details after the tone and we will contact you”. I didn’t want to work in Sydney and my coding skills are old (Fortran, COBOL, and Pascal) so I did not leave my name and number.

So, if the News.com.au report was correct, I was possibly the first person in Australia to solve this code, and I did it within minute of seeing the puzzle.

I won’t put the number in my post in case BigCommerce are probably still looking for applicants, but your hint is Base 36.