How Would You Move Mount Fuji? 1247
How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle | |
author | William Poundstone |
pages | 288 |
publisher | Little Brown & Company |
rating | 9 |
reviewer | Adam Barr |
ISBN | 0316919160 |
summary | The scoop on Microsoft interviews--with answers! |
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.
Given the ease with which the answers to logic puzzles can be spun, it is highly probable that Microsoft interviewers are also making fifteen-second judgements of candidates, without even realizing it.
Three years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about job interviews called The New-Boy Network. Gladwell quotes much of the same research as Poundstone, and relates the story of Nolan Myers, a Harvard senior who is being recruited by Tellme and Microsoft. He has done a one-hour interview with Hadi Partovi of Tellme, and spoken to Gladwell, the author, in a coffee shop for about ninety minutes. His initial interaction with Microsoft was much briefer: he asked Steve Ballmer a question during an on-campus event, which led to an exchange of emails.
As Gladwell writes, "What convinced Ballmer he wanted Myers? A glimpse! He caught a little slice of Nolan Myers in action and--just like that--the C.E.O. of a four-hundred-billion-dollar company was calling a college senior in his dorm room. Ballmer somehow knew he liked Myers, the same way Hadi Partovi knew, and the same way I knew after our little chat at Au Bon Pain."
So Steve Ballmer, who obviously does not feel that he is choosing people based on traditional interviewing techniques, and in fact was one of the originators of the "Microsoft questions," is more prone to making fifteen-second judgements than he would probably admit.
The flaw, if any, may simply be in ascribing too much value to the puzzles themselves. The actual questions may be secondary: the company might do as well asking geek-centric trivia questions, like "What was the name of Lord Byron's niece?" That does not mean Microsoft is hiring the same people that an investment bank is going to hire. The cues they look for may be different: instead of a firm handshake and the right tie, they may be looking for intelligent eyes and fast speech, or whatever non-verbal cues ubergeeks throw off.
A Microsoft interview candidate will typically talk to four or five employees, and in general must get a "hire" recommendation from all of them. Even if the employees are actually basing their recommendations not on puzzle-solving ability but on a subconscious evaluation, it is unlikely that all of them will be subconsciously using the same criteria. Emitting the proper signals to satisfy four different Microsoft employees may be as good a judge of a candidate as any, and Microsoft may be good at interviewing simply because it tends to hire people that are similar in some unknown way to the current group of employees. If another company adopts puzzle interviews, they may discover that they are not hiring the smartest people, just the people most like themselves.
In the end, the best thing that can be said about puzzle interviews is that as a screening technique, they are no worse than traditional interviews. And there are some side effects: some candidates may be more prone to accept a job with Microsoft because of the interview style, and imparted wisdom about the technique may function as a useful pre-screening of prospective applicants. And of course, employees may get a kick out of showing a candidate how smart they are, although this can have a downside: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? has several examples of interviewers who seemed more concerned with proving their intelligence than in gauging that of the candidate. One former Microsoftie admits they asked candidates a question they did not know the answer to, just to see what they would do.
Two chapters of the book, entitled "Embracing Cluelessness" and "How to Outsmart the Puzzle Interview," attempt to help interview candidates who are confronted with such puzzle questions. The official advice is scarce: Microsoft's Interview Tips page advises candidates "Be prepared to think," which isn't much help, since presumably nobody is advising the opposite. Some of the recruiters who go to college campuses have their own little tips; for example, one recruiter named Colleen offers a quote from Yoda: "Do or do not, there is no try." Other recruiter tips include "Stay awake" and "Always leave room for dessert." Luckily, Poundstone gives advice that is a bit more concrete than that.
Microsoft puzzles can be divided into two types: those where the methodology is more important than the answer, and those where only the answer matters.
The "methodology" puzzles break into two classes, "design" puzzles ("How would you design a particular product or service?") and "estimation" puzzles ("How much of a certain object occupies a certain space?"--for example, "How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?")
Design questions exist because at Microsoft, responsibility for product development is split between two groups, the developers and the program managers. Developers write code: program managers design the user interface, trying to balance the needs of users with the technical constraints from developers. As Poundstone points out, while estimation questions and general logic puzzles are universal, the design questions are reserved for program managers.
The reason is that program management does not require the specific skills of development. Designing software is something any reasonably intelligent person can attempt, so the design questions are aimed at finding people who are really good at design. In fact one program manager I worked with told me that the best way to distinguish a potential program manager from a potential developer was to ask them to design a house: a developer would jump right in, while a program manager would step back and ask questions about the constraints on the house.
(Developers, meanwhile, are usually asked to write code on the whiteboard, an experience that program management candidates are spared. Books exist that discuss coding problems in more detail, such as Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job by John Mongan and Noah Suojanen, which covers many standard programming questions and even includes answers to a few of the logic puzzles that Poundstone addresses).
Poundstone does include some of these design questions and provides sample answers. But the "answer" to these questions is really the process involved: ask questions, state assumptions, propose design. That's all you need to know about them. If you are wondering why Microsoft did not use this logical procedure when confronted with the question "Design a response to the open source movement," but instead seems to have spouted off the first five things that popped into its collective head--that's just more proof that performance in interviews is not necessarily a great indicator of future job performance.
Another recruiter, Stacey, gives the following interview tip: "The best interview tips I can give you are to relax and think for yourself. For a Microsoft interview, be prepared to answer both technical and problem solving questions. Ask clarifying questions and remember to think out loud. We are more interested in the way your are thinking through a problem then we are in your final answer!"
That approach works for the "methodology" questions: design and estimation. What about the other kinds--the more traditional brainteasers? For those questions, forget your methodology. What Microsoft interviewers want is the right answer.
James Fixx, writing three years before Microsoft was founded, offers some advice that may hearten potential Microsoft recruits: "One way to improve one's ability to use one's mind is simply to see how very bright people use theirs." With that in mind, we can follow along with Poundstone as he explains the solutions to the puzzles that the very bright people at Microsoft ask during interviews. He certainly delivers the goods: 100 pages of answers. Unfortunately, it's not clear whether seeing those answers help you tune up your brain to answer problems that do not appear in the book.
In his book, Fixx spends some time trying to explain what, as he so delicately puts it, "the superintelligent do that's different from what ordinary people do." For example, trying to describe how a superintelligent person figures out the next letter in the sequence "O T T F F S S", he advises people to think hard: "Persistence alone will now bring its reward, and eventually a thought occurs to him." Talking about how to arrange four pennies so there are two straight lines with three pennies in each line, he writes "The true puzzler...gropes for some loophole, and, with luck, quickly finds it in the third dimension." Further hints abound: "The intelligent person tries... not to impose unnecessary restrictions on his mind. The bright person has succeeded because he does not assume the problem cannot be solved simply because it cannot be solved in one way or even two ways he has tried." This advice sounds great in theory, but how do you apply it in practice? How do you make your mind think that way? As Poundstone quotes Louis Armstrong, "Man, if you have to ask 'What is it?' you ain't never goin' to know."
Poundstone recognizes that the flashes of insight that Fixx describes, and that Microsoft interviewers expect, are more of a hit-or-miss thing than the inevitable result of hard thinking by an intelligent person: "What is particularly troubling is how little 'logic' seems to be involved in some phases of problem solving. Difficult problems are often solved via a sudden, intuitive insight. One moment you're stuck; the next moment this insight has popped into your head, though not by any step-by-step logic that can be recounted."
During interview training I participated in when I worked there, Microsoft would emphasize four attributes that it was looking for when hiring: intelligence, hard work, ability to get things done, and vision. Intelligence was always #1, yet despite this, Poundstone says that the official Microsoft people he talked to would shy away from the word "intelligence", preferring to use terms like "bandwidth" and "inventiveness". Indeed Microsoft's Interview Tips web page says "We look for original, creative thinkers, and our interview process is designed to find those people." No mention of the word intelligence or any notion that interviews are some sort of intelligence test.
In fact, although I think that most Microsoft people would consider the puzzle tests to be mainly a test of intelligence, they may do better at testing some of the other desired attributes. Psychologist and personnel researcher Harry Hepner once said, "Creative thinkers make many false starts, and continually waver between unmanageable fantasies and systematic attack." Poundstone explains that you have to figure out when your fantasies have become too unmanageable: "To deal effectively with puzzles (and with the bigger problems for which they may be a model), you must operate on two or more levels simultaneously. One thread of consciousness tackles the problem while another, higher-level thread monitors the progress. You need to keep asking yourself 'Is this approach working? How much time have I spent on this approach, and how likely is it to produce an answer soon? Is there something else I should be trying?'"
This is great advice, not just for a puzzle, but for a job, and life in general. So watching someone think through a puzzle might be a great way to see how they would tackle a tough problem at work--the "hard work" and "get things done" abilities that Microsoft is also looking for. As James Fixx writes in the sequel More Games for the Superintelligent, "While the less intelligent person, unsure of ever being able to solve a problem at all, is easily discouraged, the intelligent person is fairly sure of succeeding and therefore presses on, discouragements be damned."
Unfortunately, the typical Microsoft interviewer is not looking at the approach to puzzle questions as a test of perseverence. Someone who tries five different attempts might demonstrate more resourcefulness than someone who just "gets it"--but they would get turned down. Interviewers who ask puzzle questions are probing the "intelligence" category, and they want the right answer.
The last chapter of the book is titled "How Innovative Companies Ought to Interview" and deals with a soon-to-be-problem: How will the industry be affected by the publication of this book? Will interviews still work if everyone knows the secrets?
Knowledge of Microsoft-style questions is already out there on the Internet. Since the candidates who participate in the interviews do not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, they are free to tell others the questions they were asked, and from these reports databases of questions have been built up. Poundstone includes the URLs of several sites, including Kiran Bondalapati's "Interview Question Bank", Michael Pryor's "Techinterview", Chris Sells' "Interviewing at Microsoft", and William Wu's "Riddles". These sites generally don't include answers, but certainly knowing the types of questions to expect can be an advantage.
Microsoft employees are aware of such sites. Once, when I sent email describing the questions I had asked a Microsoft candidate, I got a nasty reply from someone else at the company: Didn't I know that the question I had asked was posted on a website of known Microsoft interview questions? On the other hand, with no official internal Microsoft list of questions, some employees are undoubtedly using these sites to come up with material. Even within Microsoft there is debate about which questions are reasonable. In an unscientific survey I took of former Microsoft program managers, opinion was divided on the validity of some of the questions. A question described by one person as a good test of a candidate's ability was dismissed by another as foolish.
Poundstone does point out that some questions are silly and should not be asked ("Define the color green"), but he gives serious answers to others which I don't think are worthwhile either, including "If you could remove any of the fifty U.S. states, which would it be?" and "How do they make M&Ms?" Furthermore, I would argue that if an entire class of questions can be "tainted" by How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, they don't deserve to be asked in the first place. Estimation questions might be invalidated by the revelation that the way to solve them was to multiply together a bunch of wild guesses. The strategy of using a design question to to differentiate program management candidates from developer candidates might also go the way of the dodo. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
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.
You can purchase How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Some of my interview questions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Manhole Covers (Score:2, Interesting)
Rouleaux triangle manhole covers would be more fun.
Re:Manhole Covers (Score:2, Interesting)
One is a near-circle but not quite. It has a lot of edges, maybe 20 or more. Not enough to let slip down the hole, because the lip just below the surface hole is wide enough to compensate for any turning. This behaves differently than a circlular manhole in that it won't turn. Is this an advantage? Probably not, given the question.
Another is a equilateral triangular cover. There is no diagonal like there is in the square; no orientation that exploits a larger width than the triangle's sides.
manhole covers (Score:5, Interesting)
There are other shapes [google.com] that won't fit down the hole they're covering.
And there are pleanty of non-round manholes [google.com], which means that manholes aren't by definition round. So the question is akin to 'why are cars red?'.
--Sean
Kinda like Admiral Rickover (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically the whole point was to see how people would react under stress. Kinda important when dealing with a nuclear reactor 300 meters beneath the sea.
Been there ... done that (Score:4, Interesting)
He first calibrated against all of the regular employees. Then he used that calibration to benchmark prospective candidates.
I was also involved in the interview process, though my questions would be more like, "What is the directive that throttles the number of Apache processes."
The results of his calibration were pretty close to what we all expected. The candidates we interviewed sometimes surprised us, and one of our best hires (a Ph.D. physicist who decided that he wanted to do something other than physics) pegged the scale.
While it was a useful piece of information, however, I tended to find the technical questions, who really separated the interviewees, were more useful and provided a better correlation to job performance. The technical managers who interviewed the candidates (and who all did technical work in addition to their management duties) could tell inside of 5 minutes whether someone knew what they said they know on their resume and whether they had a "knack" for the work or not.
The "IQ test" questions generally did their job and enabled us to tell who was smarter than whom, but there are alot of really bright people out there who are not necessarily the best employees.
The CTO himself couldn't have answered the technical questions though he was extremely bright and could have pegged the IQ test. So I suppose it was the most effective way for him to evaluate folks. However, when interviewing for a technical position, the best way to evaluate any prospective candidate, in my opinion, is to have other technical people talk the candidate up on technical topics.
Then again, he was a CTO and I was not
Re:in 500 words or less (Score:3, Interesting)
Be the first to create new software technologies and algorithms and patent it or buy the patents from the original owners. Vigorously enforce these patents, especially against open source projects, and especially against Linux. Within 10 years, Linux will either be sorely out-of-date because they can't use these new technologies, or it will be driven into the underground. Either way, businesses will stop using it because of legal problems.
I think the more important question is: How do we stop Linux from getting killed this way?
Re:Dumbest question ever (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember, you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you - if they can't even ask intelligent questions based on your resume, once again, its time to head for the door.
Re:Manhole Covers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft not the only one (Score:2, Interesting)
About 20 years ago I tried to get a holiday job as a salesman and was handed a questionaire, many offbeat questions. Upon reflection, they were probably very interested with how quickly I could think on my feet, considering I would be confronted by customers with all questions (often unable to describe in the correct terms, what they needed versus what they thought they wanted, and so on.) A bad salesman makes the business suffer. (I was offered the job, but the cost of clothing would have eaten everything I'd make, so I had to turn it down :-(
One short-lived job involved an interview where the manager looked at my resume' and figured I was qualified and a good fit. He spent the rest of the interview joking about Monty Python. Nothing against MP, I love the stuff, but this should have been a clue that the guy was disorganised and had no idea what he was hiring me to for. It lasted two weeks, two weeks longer than I should have stayed there.
At possibly one of my best jobs, the interview ran through the usual questions, but turned in the last to opinions. What were my opinions on various things. Bit of a shocker there, but apparently I answered satisfactorily. Usually opinions are a no-no for a candidate to express in an interview, particularly strong ones. Best to find what the employer's expectations are and see how they fit his/her opinions.
Re:Other questions (Score:3, Interesting)
Naturally there was no answer that was right - anything would do for me, and some people made something up, but 1 chap (a techie) completely lost it there - he just sat there with an expression of 'does not compute' on his face. He didn't get hired, but mainly because my boss at the time was in the habit of asking us to do completely useless and totally irrelevant tasks. If he didn't have the flexibility to cope with that question, no way would he have coped with my boss.
So, yeah, there are so many questions that are asked in interview where the interviewer doesn't care about a right answer - its *always* how you think, react and interact.
Here's another Microsoft interviewing technique: (Score:3, Interesting)
A few weeks in advance before your interview, you are given some class files and are told to write a solution that fits with the classes/executables you are given. So you download the files and guess what? They don't work. So then you call up and say "hey buddy, the files you gave me don't work."
If you make that call, you're automatically out. Your interview is cancelled. Rather, you're suppossed to work with what you have without prior knowledge that the classes you were given do not work.
Then if you survive that part, you come in for a interview, meet with a person for a hour, and get a 15 minute break. If that interviewer decides you are worth of going to the next interviewer, the first interviewer will forward what s/he considers your weaknesses to the next interviewer. People usually do not make it through lunch, so it gets relaxed at bit if you get to lunch at least ...
Re:Manhole Covers (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Easy answer: Manhole covers are round, because manholes are round.
2) 'put a little thought into it' answer: Manhole covers are round, because they are one of the few shapes that would prevent the manhole cover from falling through the hole. (provided a little lip on the edges).
3) 'extreme thought' answer: Manhole covers are round, because manholes are round. And manholes are round because a circle provides the most resistance against any force pushing on it. It's a structural thing.
Re:manhole covers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Manhole Covers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Having worked in the trades, including doing basic municipal labour, I can state flatly that I have never seen this. When one handles a manhole cover, one simply hooks the lifter into the hole and drags it out of the hole. The thing is rarely moved more than a meter from it's hole. If it needs to be moved further, it is dragged, not rolled. If it needs to be move a great distance for some rare reason, it is dragged or carried by a truck.
These things are massive; nobody wants to roll a 20-40Kg cast-iron disc around on it's edge, over uneven ground.
I have to concur with the top-poster: it's round to keep it from falling in. A square cover could be aligned such that it would fall in. A round one cannot be aligned so.
Re:Manhole Covers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed, the lip is a given, but most shapes would still fall through when oriented correctly unless the lip was excessive, which would then be a waste of space, materials, and weight. I'm pretty sure that out of all the simple symmetrical geometric shapes, only the circle and triangles are gauranteed not to fall in. Anything symmetrical with four or more sides can be oriented just right and dropped in, or at leas tthat's my intuition, I haven't actually tried it really.
Why do people view interviews as adversarial? (Score:4, Interesting)
People need to realize they are unique and that they are selling a product (themsleves) - and the supply is limited. "If you want to buy me, what are yo offering?"
But on the other hand, if you scale your job searches correctly and only apply for gigs you are qualified for, it saves everyone a lot of headache.
Crapshooting a job three clicks above your last, or which clearly requires skills or credentials you aren't close to possesing just wastes everyone's time and turns the interview into a hunting trip.
My personal experience and skiils don't work well agasint resume filters - but then again, I probably don't want to work for a company that would miss out on me because they are so short-sighted as to rely on credentials or diplomas to evaluate me.
I interview well, and am a "real" person. If I get my foot in the door, the job is mine.
Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Manhole Covers (Score:3, Interesting)
Proof:
The diameter of an equilateral triangle is the same as its side, but you can't inscribe it into a circle with that diameter.
The real proof is too hard to explain in words, but by fiddling with pictures you should be able to show that unless your shape has curved sides, you can always find some distance across it that is less than the maximum distance across the corresponding hole.
Re:Manhole Covers... (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, almost anyone who does answer correctly will have pre-read it, because it's an "ah-hah" question. Maybe you've seen it before (and can answer right away), maybe you haven't. If you haven't, it will take almost every developer (including really smart ones) longer than a typical interview question length to come up with the answer unaided.
Re:Microsoft not the only one (Score:3, Interesting)
Built into the kernel? You've got to be kidding me. Not only is that a bad idea, but I seriously doubt that end users really know what they're asking for. Most people don't even know what the kernel is, let alone have the knowledge to know what should go into it.
As for the network transparency - um... most users I've worked with over the last decade or so absolutely love the network transparency of X, and wouldn't live without it. In fact, people ask for the same thing with Windows and Mac OS environments. As for it being slow, you really need to do more research. As another AC pointed out, slowdowns in X are not generally due to network transparency.
Re:The reason Microsoft does this. (Score:1, Interesting)
When intelligence is trumped by competition, when what is more important is not the best ideas but who "wins" people will naturally begin to marshal their talents towards winning, however that is defined in the culture. Thus the violent arguments and fist fights you describe. No doubt a tremendous amount of vicious political fighting goes on behind the scenes as well.
The problem is that the usual conclusion is the breakdown of any ethics, morals and legal or other limits to the competition. Look at the cheating in the Olympics and sports in general that is not only tolerated, but increasingly celebrated. Enron was a notoriously competitive and arrogant culture. Microsoft is well known for bending and breaking rules and laws to "win". Consider Ballmer's embarrassing and arrogant "victory dances". Intelligence seems to have surely lost to "competition" and "winning"
Eventually any such organization will implode from the destructive force of competition run amok. Most religions and philosophies have observed and commented on this throughout history. "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword"
Reminds me of another ridiculousinterview question (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not joking, this was an actual question for a project management position.
I don't know what answer they were expecting, but I answered, "I'd try to figure out who spiked my drink since there's no way that situation could be real."
He didn't seem amused, but personally, I think that was precisely the answer any good project manager should give. If marketing wants something unrealistic in an unrealistic amount of time, you have to stand up and say so. Pretending it's real and pretending to figure out how to do the impossible only hurts the team of suckers who has to work on your schedule and ultimately yourself (unless you can find another sucker to be the scapegoat).
Something similar happened to me (Score:5, Interesting)
I was on my Armoured Recce Troop Leader's Course, and I was being tested on Patrol Commanding in the Advance.
A Patrol consists of two light armoured vehicles. A student is in charge of each vehicle, and one of them is the Patrol Commander who is in charge. The driver and observer in both vehicles are instructors.
In the advance, you're out looking for the bad guys, so you take turns leapfrogging each other. One vehicle watches while the other vehicle moves forward to a new position of observation. If you encounter obstacles, the bad guys, etc there are a series of drills to carry out.
If you fail the course, you lose your job, no possibility for a do-over. The course was broken down into sections, and each section had a practical exam. You could fail it once. Fail your second crack at it, and you were gone.
So anyway, we're on my exam for Patrol Commanding in the Advance, and the guy assigned as my junior is a complete fuckwit. Couldn't find his own ass in the dark with both hands and a flashlight.
He takes the first bound while I observe, encounters a blind corner, and fucks up the drill. The I take the next bound, leapfrogging him, and that goes OK. He leapfrogs me, encouters some other obstacle, and fucks it up again.
In order to pass the exam, you had to do four bounds without error within a time limit, and by this time, we're starting to get close to the limit and there's only one good bound in the bag.
So I'm looking at him floundering around through my binos, and I realize that I've already failed the exam... but By God I'm not going to let this whole experience go to waste. So I hop out of the callsign, storm forward to his position, drag him out of the vehicle, and tear him a new asshole.
Normally, this Just Isn't Done - students don't yell at other students so that they don't look bad in front of the instructors. But as far as I was concerned, the damage was already done, and if I didn't do something about this numbnuts then the next poor bastard who he is assigned to as junior is going to get screwed too, so I have to sort him out right now.
Once I've finished expressing my displeasure and explaining how he SHOULD have been carrying out his job, I tell him we're going to carry on with the exam until time runs out - but with one major difference. Instead of leapfrogging, we're going to catapillar, and I'm going to take the lead.
This means that he drives forward to my position, and I move forward to find the next one. Lather rince repeat.
It's slower than moving leapfrog, and it exposes me to all the risk because I'm always up front, but it also prevents him from screwing anything up because all he has to do is take up position in the spot I just vacated.
We get two more bounds in and then time runs out.
So I'm being debriefed, and the first thing the instructor asks me is how I think I did. The answer is obvious - not enough bounds done correctly, chewed out another student in the middle of the exam... it's pretty clear to me I've failed.
But he passed me.
Up until the point when I went foreward to have words with junior, I had been failing miserably. Chewing junior out (when it was clear he needed it) got his attention, but didn't necessarily _mean_ anything - anybody can get angry.
Nope, what passed me was taking effective steps to solve the problem, by taking the lead and moving to catapillar movement to ensure I kept it. As soon as I did that, he passed me.
I was told that a leader who can carry out a plan effectively is good to have around, but a leader who can take a plan that is all FUBAR and turn it around is something else again.
There is, however, a rather unfortunate epilogue.
The message that junior got out of this was rather different. The way he understood what had happened was "yelling at subordinates will get you passed" so he spent the rest of the course screaming his head off any time he had command of anything. Icing on the top of a perfectly enjoyable experience.
DG
Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji? (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternatively, 'by how much'? If you need to move by only a small amount relative to some other mountain, and movement is judged according to the centre of gravity, then moving one rock from the side of the mountain to the other side would shift the centre of gravity a little and so count as moving.
real life example (Score:3, Interesting)
The proper way to handle this is to step back and look at what the real problem is. The problem is not that the floppy drive won't connect, it's that a 1 MB file needs to be copied onto this Windows PC. It's not that we need to move Mt Fuji, it's that I need to see around it.
Ok, what do I have for copying this file? I have a parallel port, a serial port, an external CDROM drive, and an ethernet connector. The external CDROM needs drivers, which reuqires a floppy drive. The serial/parallel option might work, maybe I could set up SLIP/PLIP on my linux laptop and set up direct connect in Windows. Well, that might need cab files, which are not on this machine. What about the ethernet connector.. it will require a driver, but maybe that driver's loaded. Yes it is, and TCP/IP is also loaded. Problem solved.
Mt. Fuji is in the same spot. The floppy drive still cannot be connected, that hasn't changed. I found an alternative solution that made the location of Mt. Fuji irrelevant to my problem.
Good 'Ole Microsoft -- My Story (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, I am a very experienced developer. I am not a business person; I have made millions and LOST them again over my career.
Now, where is this going? I put my resume in to Microsoft (back in '99), and received a phone interview. In the interview, I was asked two questions -- and one was: "If you take apart a clock to fix it, put it back together, and have some screws left over, what do you do"? I asked -- does the clock work? Answer: yes. I asked -- is it my clock? Answer: yes. My answer: put the extra screws in a bag and tape it to the back of the clock. Put the clock into service.
I was not asked about ANYTHING on my resume, which I found interesting. The other question was "Why do you want to work for Microsoft"? My answer: I want to be with an organization that has potential and is aggressive in producing results.
I was not invited for an interview.
I have wondered, on and off, what was the desired answer to the question?
Ratboy
broken process (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe that most companies would do just as well to do a quick screen of the obviously, grossly unqualified candidates, then do a lottery to select the person (people) for the position(s). I seriously believe that this process would do no worse than what a typical company does today and it would waste a lot less time.
As far as Microsoft goes, I'm completely underwhelmed by their "clever" interview questions. Just because you do something that's different and inscrutable doesn't necessarily make it intelligent, innovative, or even useful. If you doubt that, then just think about some of the Microsoft employees that have been in the news (not in a good way) the last few years. This interview/hiring process apparently passed those jokers with flying colors!
As you can see, job hunting has made be old and bitter before my time! I need more beer to cure the pain.
Re:AI is not "an academic disipline" (Score:3, Interesting)
HOWEVER I stand by my statement that the vast majority of Microsoft people don't deal with AI issues and consider AI to be nothing they have to worry about. They are not writing spam filters or expert systems. They are dealing with pretty basic issues: you have an API you can call, you have an API you have to provide, fill in the gap.
My point was that a) Microsoft people don't spend much time at all trying to justify to themselves that the interview questions are effective, and within that, b) if they do spend any time, they don't use an analogy with AI. I thought the comparison to AI that Poundstone brought up was interesting, but I don't think it is generally correct (one of the reasons I thought it was interesting was because I had never heard it before).
I agree AI suffers from a "I don't know what it is -- but it sure as heck isn't anything that I've seen so far" problem among tech people. I think people have seen problems they thought could only be solved by simulating humans (such as playing chess) instead solved by brute force computation. So the excuse then is, "Yes I said if a computer could do that it would be AI, but now I changed my mind."
- adam
Re:Manhole Covers (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct yet incomplete. You're not hired.
Also:
* Manhole covers are round because manholes are round, and manholes are round because humans are basically round in horizontal cross-section.
* Manhole covers are round to make them easier to put back - no worries about orientation.
* Manhole covers are round to make them easier to transport - by rolling.
* Manhole covers are round so that manholes will have no corners - corners cause points of focus of stress.
I'm sure you can think of some more, if you wouldn't stick with the answer "everybody knows".