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

288 Pages·2004·3.55 MB·English

by  William Poundstone

Employers, job seekers, and

puzzle lovers everywhere delight in

William Poundstone's

HOW WOULD YOU MOVE

MOUNT FUJI?

"Combines how-to with be-smart for an audience of job
seekers, interviewers, Wired-style cognitive science hobbyists,
and the onlooking curious. . . . How Would You Move Mount
Fuji? gallops down entertaining sidepaths about the history of
intelligence testing, the origins of Silicon Valley, and the
brain-jockey heroics of Microsoft culture."

— Michael Erard, Austin Chronicle

"A charming Trojan Horse of a book While this slim book is
ostensibly a guide to cracking the cult of the puzzle in
Microsoft's hiring practices, Poundstone manages to sneak in a
wealth of material on the crucial issue of how to hire in
today's knowledge-based economy. How Would You Move
Mount Fuji? delivers on the promise of revealing the tricks to
Microsoft's notorious hiring challenges. But, more important,
Poundstone, an accomplished science journalist, shows how
puzzles can — and cannot — identify the potential stars of a
competitive company.... Poundstone gives smart advice to
candidates on how to 'pass' the puzzle game.... Of course, let's
not forget the real fun of the book: the puzzles themselves."

— Tom Ehrenfeld, Boston Globe

"A dead-serious book about recruiting practices and abstract
reasoning — presented as a puzzle game.... Very, very valuable
to some job applicants — the concepts being more important
than the answers. It would have usefulness as well to
interviewers with a cruel streak, and the addicts of mind/
word games."

— Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun

"Poundstone offers canny advice and tips for successfully
confronting and mastering this seemingly perverse type of
pre-employment torture."

— Richard Pachter, Miami Herald

"How would you design Bill Gates's bathroom? Now that's one
question you've probably never asked anyone in a job
interview (or anywhere else). But how an applicant answers it
could reveal more about future performance than the usual
inquiries about previous positions, accomplishments, goals,
and the like. At least that's the thinking at Microsoft, where
hundreds of job seekers have been asked the bathroom
question as part of the legendary 'interview loop' — a rigorous
ritual in which candidates are grilled by their future col-
leagues with a barrage of puzzles, riddles, and bizarre
hypothetical questions. The process has been one of
Microsoft's closely guarded secrets. But science writer William
Pound-stone sheds light on it in How Would You Move
Mount Fuji?"

— TahlRaz,Inc.

"A fun, revealing take on an unusual subject.... At once a study
of corporate hiring, an assessment of IQ testing's value, a
history of interviewing, and a puzzle book."

— Publishers Weekly

"This book is not just for those in the job market. Anyone who
wants to try some mental aerobics will find it useful and
enjoyable.... Poundstone is a veteran science author who
specializes in simplifying complex material. His engaging,
easygoing writing style steers readers through difficult
material.... A fun read."

— Bruce Rosenstein, USA Today

"Science writer Poundstone's eight previous books are based
on a single premise: we can choose to use logic, and society
can benefit as a result....How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
would appeal not just to employers and human resources
professionals but to anyone who loves a good riddle."

— Stephen Turner, Library Journal

Also by William Poundstone

BIG SECRETS
THE RECURSIVE UNIVERSE
BIGGER SECRETS
LABYRINTHS OF REASON
THE ULTIMATE
PRISONER'S DILEMMA
BIGGEST SECRETS
CARL SAGAN: A LIFE IN THE COSMOS

HOW WOULD
YOU MOVE
MOUNT FUJI?

Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle

HOW THE WORLD'S SMARTEST COMPANIES

SELECT THE MOST CREATIVE THINKERS

William Poundstone

Little, Brown and Company
New York Boston

Copyright © 2003 by William Poundstone

All rights reserved.

Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com

Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company,
May 2003
First paperback edition, April 2004

The third quotation onp. vii is used by permission of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art: Huang Binhong (1865-1955); Insects and Flowers;
Chinese, dated 1948; Album of ten leaves; ink and color on gold-flecked
paper; 12 ½ X14 in. (31.8 X 35.6 cm); The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, in memory of La Feme Hatfield
Ellsworth, 1986 (1986.267.204a-j).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Poundstone, William.
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.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-316-91916-0 (hc) / 0-316-77849-4 (pb)
1. Employment interviewing. 2. Microsoft Corporation. I. Tide.
HF5549.5.I6P682003
658.3'112 —dc21 2002040619
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Q-FF

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi/Digitext
Printed in the United States of America

To my father

"Like any other value, puzzle-solving ability proves equivocal
in application.... But the behavior of a com munity which
makes
it
preeminent
will
be
very
different

from that of one which does not."

—
Thomas Kuhn

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

"As, in a Chinese puzzle, many pieces are hard to place, so
there are some unfortunate fellows who can never slip into
their proper angles, and thus the whole puzzle becomes a
puzzle indeed, which is the precise condition of the greatest
puzzle in the world — this man-of-war world itself."

—
Herman Melville
White-Jacket

"To understand that cleverness can lead to stupidity is to be
close to the ways of Heaven."

—
Huang Binhong
Insects and Flowers

Contents

1. The Impossible Question
3

2. The Termans and Silicon Valley
23

3. Bill Gates and the Culture of Puzzles
50

4. The Microsoft Interview Puzzles
78

5. Embracing Cluelessness
91

6. Wall Street and the Stress Interview
111

7. The Hardest Interview Puzzles
118

8. How to Outsmart the Puzzle Interview
121

9. How Innovative Companies

Ought to Interview
130

Answers

147

Acknowledgments

247

Notes

249

Bibliography and Web Links

257

Index

263

X Contents

HOW WOULD
YOU MOVE
MOUNT FUJI?

One

The Impossible Question

In August 1957 William Shockley was recruiting staff for his Palo
Alto, California, start-up, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.
Shockley had been part of the Bell Labs team that invented the
transistor. He had quit his job and come west to start his own
company, telling people his goal was to make a million dollars.
Everyone thought he was crazy. Shockley knew he wasn't.
Unlike a lot of the people at Bell Labs, he knew the transistor
was going to be big.

Shockley had an idea about how to make transistors

cheaply. He was going to fabricate them out of silicon. He had
come to this valley, south of San Francisco, to start production.
He felt like he was on the cusp of history, in the right place at
the right time. All that he needed was the right people.
Shockley was leaving nothing to chance.

Today's interview was Jim Gibbons. He was a young guy, early

twenties. He already had a Stanford Ph.D. He had studied at
Cambridge too - on a Fulbright scholarship he'd won.

Gibbons was sitting in front of him right now, in Shockley's

Quonset hut office. Shockley picked up his stopwatch.

There's a tennis tournament with one hundred twenty-

seven players, Shockley began, in measured tones. You've got one
hundred twenty-six people paired off in sixty-three matches, plus
one unpaired player as a bye. In the next round, there are sixty-four
players and thirty-two matches. How many matches, total, does it
take to determine a winner?

Shockley started the stopwatch.
The hand had not gone far when Gibbons replied: One

hundred twenty-six.

How did you do that? Shockley wanted to know. Have you

heard this before?

Gibbons explained simply that it takes one match to

eliminate one player. One hundred twenty-six players have to be
eliminated to leave one winner. Therefore, there have to be 126
matches.

Shockley almost threw a tantrum. That was how he

would have solved the problem, he told Gibbons. Gibbons had
the distinct impression that Shockley did not care for other
people using "his" method.

Shockley posed the next puzzle and clicked the stop-

watch again. This one was harder for Gibbons. He thought a
long time without answering. He noticed that, with each
passing second, the room's atmosphere grew less tense.
Shockley, seething at the previous answer, now relaxed like a
man sinking into a hot bath. Finally, Shockley clicked off the
stopwatch and said that Gibbons had already taken twice the lab
average time to answer the question. He reported this with
charitable satisfaction. Gibbons was hired.

Find the Heavy Billiard Ball...

Fast-forward forty years in time — only a few miles in

space from long-since-defunct Shockley Semiconductor — to a

4 How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

much-changed Silicon Valley. Transistors etched onto silicon
chips were as big as Shockley imagined. Software was even bigger.
Stanford was having a career fair, and one of the most popular
companies in attendance was the Microsoft Corporation. With
the 1990s dot-com boom and bull market in full swing, Microsoft
was famous as a place where employ-ees of no particular
distinction could make $1 million before their thirtieth birthday.
Grad student Gene McKenna signed up for an interview with
Microsoft's recruiter.

Suppose you had eight billiard balls, the recruiter began. One

of them is slightly heavier, but the only way to tell is by put-ting it on
a scale against the others. What's the fewest number of times you'd
have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?

McKenna began reasoning aloud. Everything he said was

sensible, but somehow nothing seemed to impress the recruiter.
With hinting and prodding, McKenna came up with a billiard-
ball-weighing scheme that was marginally acceptable to the
Microsoft guy. The answer was two.

"Now, imagine Microsoft wanted to get into the appliance

business," the recruiter then said. "Suppose we wanted to run a
microwave oven from the computer. What software would you
write to do this?"

"Why would you want to dolhat?" asked McKenna. "I don't

want to go to my refrigerator, get out some food, put it in the
microwave, and then run to my computer to start it!"

"Well, the microwave could still have buttons on it

too."

"So why do I want to run it from my computer?"
"Well maybe you could make it programmable? For example,

you could call your computer from work and have it start
cooking your turkey."

"But wouldn't my turkey," asked McKenna, "or any other

food, go bad sitting in the microwave while I'm at work? I

The Impossible Question 5