How would you move Mount Fuji?
For years, Microsoft and other high-tech companies have been posing riddles and logic puzzles like these in their notoriously grueling job interviews. Now "puzzle interviews" have become a hot new trend in hiring. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, employers are using tough and tricky questions to gauge job candidates' intelligence, imagination, and problem-solving ability -- qualities needed to survive in today's hypercompetitive global marketplace. For the first time, William Poundstone reveals the toughest questions used at Microsoft and other Fortune 500 companies -- and supplies the answers. He traces the rise and controversial fall of employer-mandated IQ tests, the peculiar obsessions of Bill Gates (who plays jigsaw puzzles as a competitive sport), the sadistic mind games of Wall Street (which reportedly led one job seeker to smash a forty-third-story window), and the bizarre excesses of today's hiring managers (who may start off your interview with a box of Legos or a game of virtual Russian roulette). How Would You Move Mount Fuji? is an indispensable book for anyone in business. Managers seeking the most talented employees will learn to incorporate puzzle interviews in their search for the top candidates. Job seekers will discover how to tackle even the most brain-busting questions, and gain the advantage that could win the job of a lifetime.
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7recommend
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2007–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- If you like this type of puzzle, I can recommend the book: “How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle”.
- I'm familiar with other books by the author of How would you move Mount Fuji? Thanks for that book suggestion. I have just requested the book from my county library system for use in updating my FAQ document for posting on my personal website.
- I have seen a few google questions, and feel they are good quality, and nothing like the quoted question. I suspect google learned from the points rasied in thr book "how would you move mount fuji" (a now famous microsoft question). The book is well researched and has some well thoughtout advice at the back. The quoted question looks like an old microsoft question, but, I might be wrong.
- Terman and IQ are also mentioned in "How Would You Move Mount Fuji" (http://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-Mount-Fuji/dp/031677849...). I recommend it to anyone interested in brainteasers and how Microsoft and a lot of other companies use them during the interviewing process...
Now back to the article: it was an enjoyable read, but I believe the title is somewhat misleading. High IQ does not make you less creative. However high IQ does not imply creativity. The converse is also not true. I am a bit tired of IQ being used as some kind of objective measure of capabilities, let alone success. Is there any other test that would be more representative of one's mental abilities?
- I agree that the puzzles are bad interview questions.
But if you want a _specific_ job, it's always a good idea to find out about the interview culture (if you can, it's almost impossible for small companies) and then prep for the interview at hand.
I guess that falls under "motivated enough" :)
If you want to be prepared in a general sense, get "How would you move Mount Fuji", a book on those interview puzzlers. The upside of most of those puzzles is that the answer is blindingly obvious once you read it the first time. So read that book, and you're done ;)
- There is a book that has some of the same questions, and a lot more. It's "How would you move Mount Fuji" by William Poundstone (http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts-Puzzle/dp/...). As stated in some of the comments already posted, asking this kind of questions in interviews is by now "deprecated" (or even "considered harmful"), because they are in the public domain.
