The Impossible Question : Part 6

How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers
by William Poundstone

(Page 6 of 6)

Future Tense

Microsoft's interviewing practices are a product of the pressures of the high-technology marketplace. Software is about ideas, not assembly lines, and those ideas are always changing. A software company's greatest asset is a talented workforce. "The most important thing we do is hire great people," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated more than once.

But how do you recognize great people? It is harder than ever to equate talent with a specific set of skills. Skills can become obsolete practically overnight. So can business plans. Microsoft is conscious that it has to be looking for people capable of inventing the Microsoft of five or ten years hence. Microsoft's hiring focuses on the future tense. More than most big companies, Microsoft accepts rather than resists the "job candidate as blank slate." Its stated goal is to hire for what people can do rather than what they've done.

Because programming remains a youthful profession, Microsoft hires many people out of college. There is no job experience to guide hiring decisions. Nor is Microsoft overly impressed by schools and degrees. "We fully know how bogus [graduate school] is," one senior manager is reported to have said. This attitude has changed somewhat - Harvard dropout Bill Gates now encourages potential employees to get their degrees -but Microsoft has never been a place to hire people because they went to the right schools.

Microsoft is also a chauvinistic place. The private suspicion in Redmond seems to be that Sun, Oracle, IBM, and all the other companies are full of big, lazy slobs who couldn't cut it at Microsoft. The only kind of "experience" that counts for much is experience at Microsoft. So even with job candidates who have experience, the emphasis is on the future tense. Microsoft does not have a time machine that lets its human resources people zip ten years into a subjunctive future to see how well a candidate will perform on the job. Predictions about future performance are perforce based largely on how well candidates answer interview questions.

"Microsoft really does believe that it can judge a person through four or five one-hour interviews," claims former Microsoft developer Adam David Barr. Barr likens the interview process to the National Football League's annual draft. Some teams base decisions on a college football record, and others go by individual workouts where the college players are tested more rigorously. At Microsoft, the "workout" - the interview - is the main factor in hiring all but the most senior people.

Why use logic puzzles, riddles, and impossible questions? The goal of Microsoft's interviews is to assess a general problem-solving ability rather than a specific competency. At Microsoft, and now at many other companies, it is believed that there are parallels between the reasoning used to solve puzzles and the thought processes involved in solving the real problems of innovation and a changing marketplace.

Both the solver of a puzzle and a technical innovator must be able to identify essential elements in a situation that is initially ill-defined. It is rarely clear what type of reasoning is required or what the precise limits of the problem are. The solver must nonetheless persist until it is possible to bring the analysis to a timely and successful conclusion.

What This Book Will Do

The book will do five things. It will first trace the long and surprising history of the puzzle interview. In so doing, it will touch on such topics as intelligence tests for employment, the origins of Silicon Valley, the personal obsessions of Bill Gates, and the culture of Wall Street.

The book will then pose the following question: Do puzzle interviews work as claimed? Hirers tout these interviews, and job candidates complain about them. I will try to supply a balanced discussion of pros and cons - something that is often missing from the office water cooler debates. The book will present a large sample of the actual questions being used at Microsoft and elsewhere. Provided your career is not on the line, you may find these puzzles and riddles to be a lot of fun. Many readers will enjoy matching their wits against those of the bright folks in Redmond. For readers who'd like to play along, there's a list of Microsoft puzzles, riddles, and trick questions in chapter four (most of which are in widespread use at other companies as well). A separate list of some of the hardest interview puzzles being asked at other companies is in chapter seven. I will elaborate in the main narrative on some of these questions and the techniques used to answer them but will refrain from giving answers until the very end of the book.

The final two chapters are addressed in turn to the job candidate and the hirer. There is a genre of logic puzzle in which logical and ruthless adversaries attempt to outsmart each other. This is a good model of the puzzle interview. Chapter eight is written from the perspective of a job candidate confronted with puzzles in an interview. It presents a short and easily remembered list of tips for improving performance. Chapter nine is written from the opposite perspective -that of an interviewer confronted with a candidate who may be wise to the "tricks." It presents a list of tips for getting a fair assessment nonetheless.

If this appears a paradox, it is only because these interviews have been touted as being difficult or impossible to "prepare" for. Most logic puzzles exploit a relatively small set of mental "tricks." Knowing these tricks, and knowing the unspoken expectations governing these interviews, can help a candidate do his or her best.

The hirer, in turn, needs to recognize the possibility of preparation and structure the interview accordingly. The merits of puzzle interviews are too often defeated by the hazing-stunt atmosphere in which they are conducted and by use of trick questions whose solutions are easily remembered.

Copyright © 2003 by William Poundstone

About the Author

William Poundstone is the author of nine books, including Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, Prisoner's Dilemma, Labyrinths of Reason, and the popular Big Secrets series, which inspired two television network specials. He has written for Esquire, Harper's, The Economist, and the New York Times Book Review, and his science writing has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.