Seriously? Are those even practical skills? For all we know, your parents are great at parlor tricks and terrible at their jobs. What engineer works without a computer these days?
A calculator is a computer. Hewlett Packard made calculators, which is why Steve Wozniak wanted to work there until Steve Jobs convinced him to start Apple. The expert wasn't being asked to figure out 3/16ths by memorization, he was being asked if he knew what math was, and then how to execute it on a calculator. That the expert equated such a request with pulling numbers "out of thin air" (if he's being honest, and not just covering up a mistake that he now realizes he made) means that he does not actually understand the very fundamentals of math. It is virtually no different than if he were asked, "Is 1 equal to 1?", and he responded, "I'm not just going to make up the answer for you, we need to use the computer program to get the truth"
Very few of them, but this isn't even middle school level math that he seems to be forgetting. Anyone calling themselves an engineer should know fractions cold, no question.
