How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers

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Summary: Mount Fuji falls like a ton of bricks on puzzle interviews!
Review: I'll admit that I bought this book initially to learn more about the fabled Microsoft puzzle interview to prepare for an interview with a company notorious for...puzzle interviews. As far as that goes, it did a good job of focusing my preparation and making sure I knew how to solve all the different kinds of puzzles (and I passed the interview).

What I found far more valuable was the discussion of what was wrong with being overly dependent upon puzzle solving in the hiring decision. Now don't get me wrong--I grew up reading Martin Gardner columns in Scientific American and I love solving puzzles. I believe that the ability to solve puzzles is a valuable trait, particularly if I can get a high-paying job just because of it.

But as Mr. Poundstone points out, puzzle solving in an interview can be subverted by advanced preparation and suffers from the Aha! factor of solving a problem by a stroke of inspiration rather than logical thought. Duh, part of the rationale for his book is to help you subvert the system. The best and final chapter gives suggestions for how to conduct interviews that are more fair--fair in the statistical sense of being unbiased and giving uniform results.

I recommend this book to interviewees that want to outsmart lax companies, but I would wonder why you want to work for people dumb enough to let you do that? I really recommend this book to interviewers who want to know what the candidates are up to so that they can do a better job of finding smart rather than outsmarting people.



Rating:
Summary: Come again?
Review: If Microsoft is hiring (as Poundstone claims) "the world's most creative thinkers," why are Microsoft's products so drearily deriviative? Of course, the point of Poundstone's book is not really to talk about Microsoft at all, except as an example of his central thesis on problem solving and hiring practices, which is well-done enough. That he would choose to throw yet another undeserved accolade at Bill, Steve and company makes him suspect at the outset. If you want a real life tale of Microsoft inventiveness, find a clip of Ballmer's "Monkeyboy" act on the web-now THAT'S typical Microsoft creativity!

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Summary: Fun and easy to read
Review: If you are interested in innovation, this book will be a welcome addition on your bookshelf. The thought provoking questions and related answers give you a reality check as to the level of your thinking. This book is worth every cent. Additionally, I absolutely recommend the "Rate Your Thinking" questionnaire at OptimalThinking.com to determine how much of your thinking is in your best interest. (It's free!) Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self is the most important book to learn how to make the most of thinking, feelings, resources, opportunities, and bring out the best in others. With these two books, you will have everything you need to CREATE and OPTIMIZE everything within your control.

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Summary: A Fun - Quick Read!
Review: If you want a fun quick read that challenges your intellectual cabilities with a myriad of puzzles and brainteasers, buy the book.
But do not think it is a primer on how to prepare for and "ace" a Microsoft interview. A close friend went through the process and her only preparation was a good nights sleep. In two half day sessions, AM and PM, she had wall to wall interviews and ended up with two job offers. Of note, one of the interviewers put forward a brainteaser for her to solve and he presented the problem wrong. She quickly figured out his mistake and gently took him through his description of the problem and suggested how he "probably" meant to present it "this way". Needless to say, she was hired apparently for several reasons, her problem solving ability as well as her tact in assisting the interviewer in better understanding the problem he was attempting to present to her.
Final thought, do not let a Microsoft interview become larger than life. They are real people trying to do a real job but do not assume you are working with a bunch of math geniuses ...bright yes;genius no ...it is becoming a warmer/friendlier place without compromising the people quality!

One last thought, interviews and the comments are kept in an on-line file so if you have ever interviewed in the past and do so again, remember that it is easy for the current interviewer to refer to past comments from years ago.

Rating:
Summary: A Fun - Quick Read!
Review: If you want a fun quick read that challenges your intellectual cabilities with a myriad of puzzles and brainteasers, buy the book.
But do not think it is a primer on how to prepare for and "ace" a Microsoft interview. A close friend went through the process and her only preparation was a good nights sleep. In two half day sessions, AM and PM, she had wall to wall interviews and ended up with two job offers. Of note, one of the interviewers put forward a brainteaser for her to solve and he presented the problem wrong. She quickly figured out his mistake and gently took him through his description of the problem and suggested how he "probably" meant to present it "this way". Needless to say, she was hired apparently for several reasons, her problem solving ability as well as her tact in assisting the interviewer in better understanding the problem he was attempting to present to her.
Final thought, do not let a Microsoft interview become larger than life. They are real people trying to do a real job but do not assume you are working with a bunch of math geniuses ...bright yes;genius no ...it is becoming a warmer/friendlier place without compromising the people quality!

One last thought, interviews and the comments are kept in an on-line file so if you have ever interviewed in the past and do so again, remember that it is easy for the current interviewer to refer to past comments from years ago.

Rating:
Summary: WHAT IDIOT RATES AND REVIEWS A BOOK WITHOUT READING IT?
Review: just had to try to counter the incredibly ignorant reviewer from april 28, ephod who didn't even read the book but chose to rate it and say, "this book won't get necessarily get you hired at microsoft."

that's not the intention of the book, ephod you nimrod.

okay, anyway, the puzzles they list are absolutely fascinating. as someone who loves logic puzzles, it was great reading them, and i spent a very happy afternoon in a coffee shop completely engrossed in them. the bulk of the book discusses the history and application of aptitude testing as well as the microsoft interviewing process. while it's a very interesting read, it's mostly just expository reporting, and i didn't find any keen insights, which is why i'm rating the book 4 stars instead of 5. but i actually read the book.

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Summary: Mistitled
Review: Missing from this analysis is the observation that the "world's smartest company," with its "top 10 percent of the top 10 percent" of the brains, almost invariably turns out wretched, bloated, buggy software. A subtitle more apropos to Ma Bill's success in open competition might be "How the World's Smarmiest Company Needs to Select the World's Nastiest Lawyers."

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Summary: How long would it take to move Mt. Fuji? is the question.
Review: Most of the puzzles aren't very different from stuff you find at the back of a Discover or Scientific American magazine. The whole point, basically, is don't blurt out an answer, reason your way through the question out loud and don't assume any information pertaining to the question.

I didn't find the puzzle questions or their solutions to be very interesting, except for how they make M&Ms, which I probably wouldn't have figured out.
I really liked the rest of the book more - the history behind it and all the little tidbits thrown in about Gates, Microsoft culture, and interviewing in general.

Reading this book won't get you through a Microsoft interview with flying colors. It will be obvious if you're regurgitating information or if you're thinking a problem through. Chances are they're not going to ask you anything in here since it's all common knowledge now.
If you've no experience working through word problems and logic puzzles, then by all means get the book to see the kind of stuff they might ask you, and what typical approaches to those types of problems can be. But think of this merely as a mental guide and not an answerbook.

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Summary: Indispensible for anyone in the job market!
Review: Mount Fuji is one of the best nonfiction books I've read in a long while. If epod would read it, I think he'd agree. The book is *NOT* some simplistic cheatsheet. It's a serious, nuanced, critical look at employee evaluations. Needless to say, one cardinal theme is that you don't ace these interviews by memorizing right answers. It's all about showing the interviewer how you approach a problem. Unless you do that, you're dead. With some questions, it's good to come up with a unique answer the interviewer hasn't heard . . . It's also interesting to learn of the backstage voting on candidates, which is hilarious and scary. I learned a lot from this book, and unlike most books of its kind, it's written in a style that makes it fun to read.

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Summary: The scoop on Microsoft interviews--with answers!
Review: Now comes a new book, How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers by science writer William Poundstone. Poundstone talked to various people who have been involved in Microsoft hiring, including those who were interviewed, and those who gave interviews (full disclosure: I worked at Microsoft for ten years and was one of the people he talked to). He includes a lengthy list of questions, and most interestingly for many people, he also includes answers.

In the book, Poundstone traces the origins of this type of question, providing some fascinating information on the history of intelligence testing. He then chronicles how a certain type of puzzle interview caught on in the high-tech industry. Microsoft was not the first company to ask such questions, but it certainly popularized it.

Poundstone explains that responding to a problem you can't solve could be thought of as the fundamental problem in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and then continues,

"The problems used in AI research have often been puzzles or games. These are simpler and more clearly defined than the complex problems of the real world. They too involve the elements of logic, insight, and intuition that pertain to real problems. Many of the people at Microsoft follow AI work closely, of course, and this may help to explain what must strike some readers as peculiar--their supreme confidence that silly little puzzles have a bearing on the real world."

It could be--or maybe Microsoft employees assume that since they were hired that way, it's a great way to hire (and complaints from those who were not hired are just sour grapes). Most developers I knew thought of AI as a pretty academic discipline, and were more concerned with putting a dialog box up at the right location on the screen than trying to pass the Turing Test.

Nevertheless, as companies seek to emulate Microsoft, the questions have caught on elsewhere. And as Poundstone put it, such questions have now "metastasized" to other industries, such as finance.

This makes the effectiveness of these questions an important issue. Poundstone first presents evidence that "Where do you see yourself in five years" and "What are you most proud of" are fairly pointless questions. In one experiment he describes, two trained interviewers conducted interviews with a group of volunteers. Their evaluations were compared to those of another group who saw a fifteen second video of the interview: the candidate entering the room, shaking hands, and sitting down. The opinions correlated strongly; in other words, when you are sitting in an interview telling the interviewer what you do on your day off and what the last book you read was, the interviewer has already made up his or her mind, based on who knows what subjective criteria. As Poundstone laments, "This would be funny if it weren't tragic."

Puzzle interviews could hardly be worse than that, but it turns out the evidence that they are better is doubtful. Poundstone shows how intelligence tests are on very dubious scientific standing, and points out that Microsoft's interviews are a form of IQ test, even though Microsoft does not admit that publicly. In his 1972 book of puzzles Games for the Superintelligent, Mensa member James Fixx wrote, "If you don't particularly enjoy the kinds of puzzles and problems we're talking about here, that fact alone says nothing about your intelligence in general". Yet virtually every Microsoft employee accepts the "obvious" rationale, that only people who do well in logic puzzles will do well at Microsoft.

There is another important point about puzzle-based interviews: although you would think that they were naturally more objective than traditional interviews--more black or white, right or wrong, and therefore less subject to interpretation by the interviewer--in fact, interviewers' evaluation of answers can be extremely subjective. Once you have formed your impression of a candidate from the enter/handshake/sit-down routine at the start of the interview, it is easy to rationalize a candidate's performance in an interview, either positively or negatively. They needed a bunch of hints to get the answer? Sure, but they were just small hints and it's a tough problem. They got the correct answer right away? No fair, they must have seen it before.

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? is worth reading even if you don't plan on interviewing at Microsoft. It has some interesting history, a few good Microsoft tidbits, and puzzles that are entertaining on their own. For those considering a job at Microsoft, the book may ratchet up the "arms race" of questions. Microsoft employees may assume that people interviewing have read the book--so if you are going to interview there, or anywhere else that imitates their style, you should probably read it too.

--From Slashdot, Adam David Barr