How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers
William Poundstone
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 2:00017674
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Microsoft's interview process is a notoriously grueling sequence of brain-busting questions that separate the most creative thinkers from the merely brilliant. So effective is their technique that other leading corporations--from the high-tech industry to consulting and financial services--are modeling their own hiring practices on Bill Gates' unique approach. HOW WOULD YOU MOVE MOUNT FUJI? reveals for the first time more than 35 of Microsoft's puzzles and riddles.
puzzle is that there is no right answer to click into place. Stumble across the right answer to a puzzle, and it's normally obvious that it is the right answer and you can stop looking for a better one. A less-structured question is like a badly designed keyboard. There is no feedback — you never know if you've punched the keys hard enough. Unstructured questions encourage the answerer to explore a number of different paradigms before settling on one. Paradigm Shifts "Paradigm" is a popular word
and arrange them in the many ways possible, you can continue, logically and efficiently, for some time without solving the problem, and without exhausting the possibilities of the paradigm. Because How Innovative Companies Ought to Interview 133 there are so many possibilities to play around with, you do not necessarily find yourself backed into a corner (which might prompt the paradigm shift needed to get the right answer). This is considered an especially successful puzzle because the
produces about 23 percent of the world's pianos and buys 27 percent of the world piano production. Assuming that America's 10,000 or so piano tuners constitute a quarter of the world's total, that would scale up to 40,000 piano technicians in the world. It looks like the 20,000 figure is off by a factor of two (which is pretty good for a Fermi question). The underestimate might be due to the fact that most so-called piano tuners perform repairs, restoration, and other services as well as tuning.
approach is to work from the drainage area. You may know, or can estimate by picturing a map, that the Mississippi and its tributaries drain something like half of the area of the conterminous United States (and a little of Canada). Guesstimate that area, and multiply it by the average annual rainfall for the region. This gives the volume of water that falls as rain each year. Practically all of that ultimately drains into the Mississippi, with one big exception: evaporation. You'd have to make
deposits to form the delta. That probably prevents its channel from being very deep. Besides, the lower Mississippi has meandered over historic times. It could hardly do that if the channel were deep. So okay, it's shallow. How shallow: One foot deep? Ten feet? One hundred feet? One foot deep would be ridiculous. Answers 169 Were it that shallow you could wade across it. You would have heard about the "amazing fact" that the Mighty Mississippi was only a foot deep. Ten feet is still remarkably