How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

adamba writes: "Why are manhole covers round?" "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" "How would you design a remote control for venetian blinds?" "What company is famous for interview questions like those?" You might not know the answer to the first three questions, but you probably know the last one. The notion of asking "Microsoft interview questions," quick logic puzzles and brainteasers, has become accepted wisdom for many technology companies. In comparison, the questions asked during traditional interviews, such as "Describe your typical day" and "What is your greatest weakness?" seem too simplistic, too easy to handle with a prepared answer, too prone to allowing weak candidates to slip through: they simply don't reveal enough about the person. While the Microsoft questions appear to be a better way to evaluate people, the issue has never really been seriously examined. Microsoft's success would seem to make the argument pointless: Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?" Read on for an interesting look at the details and justifications for this kind of interview. 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.

Comments

How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Anonymous Coward]

In true Zen fashion... it is not the mountain that must move, but you.

Or was it one spoonfull at a time?

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[2sleep2type]

I would have a huge marketing push and go for an big event launch. That should shift anything.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Unkle Ka5]

If the spoon isn't really there, how do I put the sugar in my tea?

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[B3ryllium]

I'm lazy. I'd just pick another mountain and swap names. Voila!

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Beige]

Give it a shove, that would move it. Just not very much.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[IvyMike]

I would do it The Edward Teller way. If you're too lazy to click on the link, it may help to know that Edward Teller is known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb".

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[jdray]

Given the amount of actual resources (represented as dollars) that would be required to ACTUALLY move the mountain, I would spend approx. 10% on a marketing campaign designed to convince the world that the mountain had moved and put the remaining 90% of the budget toward the company's bottom line.

I'd get a job in a minute. :^)

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[tompaulco]

I'd say that moving Mt. Fuji is almost certainly the wrong answer to whatever the original problem was. Companies should really involve technical people at an earlier stage than this. But, if I really had to move it, ignoring the fact that environmentalists, local, state, national and international laws don't allow it, and so forth, I guess I'd just move it a truckfull at a time. At a certain point, the mountain would begin to move itself. At that point, I would exit quickly.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[casio282]

"I don't know, but I'm sure there's something in MS Word that will do that..."

Am I hired?

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[joe_bruin]

well, it's pretty straightforward. first i'd have to get the people of japan to agree to me moving their mountains. i doubt they would go along with this, so i would need to mobilize an army to take japan by force. once i have conquered japan, i will put the population to work building giant robots (that transform into motorcycles and hover-bikes) which will be used for making even bigger robots. these bigger robots will form up to create one giant super-robot (which will be stored in a lake). this robot will have a laser-sword, with which it can slice mount fuji off at the base and push it around to anywhere i please.

easy.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Thud457]

If the mountain won't come to Shiro,
Shiro must go to the mountain!

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[T1girl]

I would tell it a very poignant story.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[PD]

Open source: lots and lots of volunteers with shovels.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[cracker8myass]

Very slowly.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[chabotc]

Naaahh, its way simpler then that. As always google is your friend and will find some Mount Fuji that has been moved already, like this one. It will also awnser other important questions such as "Can I phone Mount Fuji ?".

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[$0.02]

Well, In Soviet Russia ... Never, mind.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Ed Avis]

The first question you should ask is 'relative to what?' If asked to move Mount Fuji relative to myself, I could just walk.

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.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[HRbnjR]

Perspectives, renaming.. bah, come on, that's cheating :)

Slurry.

I would build two pipelines from source to destination, one sending, once receiving. I would use an immense amount of water to "slurrify" (like dissolve) the dirt so it could be pumped through the pipe and strained out at the other end, the water being returned through the second pipe for reuse.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[oe1kenobi]

1. Wait for God to ask me to. 2. Say, "Move thou hence." 3. Prophet! -Russ

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Cplus]

Hmmmmmmm, I was just going to suggest "through the power of religious fervour" to make people believe that they are working toward the greater good. Don't take this as a slander of OSS, just an observation.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Ryan Amos]

Yeah.. Until you realize that Mount Fuji is a VOLCANO, having last erupted in 1707. Somehow, I don't think sending a 3 megaton blast to the center of this thing is a good idea.. You may get rid the mountain, but the resulting volcanic explosion would probably dwarf the bomb you just sent in there, wiping out the entire island. All in a day's work.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Stween]

Normal users would get the answer from Clippy.

"Hello. I see you are trying to move Mount Fuji. Would you:
o) Like me create a template for this task for you?
o) Search for more information on the topic?
[ok] [cancel]"

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[LoztInSpace]

Also applicable in Soviet Russia!!!

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Drakonian]

:wq

Not with that sig you aren't!

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[IvyMike]

Picky picky. My other suggestion was going to be "crash a small asteroid into it." :)

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Eideewt]

From what I hear, the Japanese do not have the best English comprehension skills either.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[laard]

You could try faith the size of a mustard seed...

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[lhpineapple]

In Russia, Mt. Fuji moves you!

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[instarx]

That is the POINT! These methods aren't cheating - they are a different way to look at the problem. I'm sorry to tell you this, but the question is designed to filter out the people who don't have enough creativity to find those alternate ways to do it. Slurry line - sheesh.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[kkirk007]

There is no sugar or tea, either :P

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[kkirk007]

Two problems with that answer...

1) How would you remove the water from the destination end? You can't really strain dirt out of mud.

2) I'm guessing that a large portion of the mountain is rock. Unless you plan on using some HIGH water pressure, you can't really dissolve rock.

The closest thing to what you're talking about that would actually work is some kind of conveyor-belt system to move small pieces of the mountain at a time.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Unkle Ka5]

That explains why my cup is empty, maybe i can use it to move the mountain :)

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Alphtoo]

Hell, if I was MS and wanted to move Mt. Fuji, I'd simply buy Japan, tow it over here, and park it off the coast of Washington. Not only do they get Mt. Fuji, but just think of all the smart Japanese folks they can hire!

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Until you realize that Mount Fuji is a VOLCANO

Exactly. If time is no object, the easiest way to move it is just to wait.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji?

[WhiteDragon]

Yes, but people would notice the mysterious third moon. Instead, paint it pink, and setup a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Prpblem field. You can run it on a couple of ordinary flashlight batteries for a hundred years!

Manhole Covers

[DavidpFitz]

Manhole Covers are round so they can't fall down the manhole. Simple.

Standard lateral thinking interview question :)

Re:Manhole covers

[neurostar]

Interestingly enough, any shape with rounded sides would suffice for a manhole cover. For example, if you took a triangular shape and bowed out the sides, it would also work, because it wouldn't be able to fall through. I think it works for most shapes. However the circular shape is the simplest...

neurostar

Re:Manhole Covers

[athakur999]

All this talk of manholes has all the trolls itching to post up goatse.cx links.

Re:Manhole Covers

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I liked Cecil Adams' explanation of the matter.

Rouleaux triangle manhole covers would be more fun.

Re:Manhole Covers

[MagPulse]

This makes sense when comparing a circular cover to, say, a square one. You can lift the square one up, rotate it diagonally, and drop it down. But I have two other shapes that won't fall.

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.

Re:Manhole covers

[stratjakt]

No, not any shape with a rounded sides. Picture an oval, it has a long and short cross section. The short crossection can fit in through longways, obviously.

There is a whole class of shapes by which the distance from one point, perpendicular to the tangent at that point to the other side is the same all around.

I cant remember the name of them, but I first learned all about them on Mr Wizard way back when. They look like bowed out triangles, squares, octagons, etc etc.. They all "roll" like wheels, but have no "center", ie, they cant roll around an axis. All would make fine manhole covers (so far as not slipping through).

Thing is, circles are the easiest to machine and transport, so I doubt they'd ever catch on just because of some neat geometry.

Re:Manhole Covers

[phsolide]

Manhole Covers are round so they can't fall down the manhole.

This particular answer always bothers me. Sure, it's simplistically true, but a whole family of shapes exists that has the same property but does not have the unfortunate property of spinning in place. For example, assume a vehicle stops on a manhole cover with a (powered) tire off-center on the cover. When the driver presses the throttle, the tire exerts a force on the manhole cover that gives it a tendency to rotate. Instant loss of traction.

Also, other shaped covers could posses a flange - the manhole would have a smaller maximum dimension than the flange, preventing the cover from falling down the hole. Squares or triangles would require unreasonably large flanges, but octagons wouldn't.

My guess is that a variety of factors (shape of manholes, ease of manufature, ability to roll the covers) lead to round manhole covers.

Re:Manhole Covers

[arestivo]

In fact:

The Teeming Millions have pointed out at exasperating length that it's not an equilateral triangle that won't fall into the manhole but a Rouleaux triangle--the kind in which each side consists of an arc centered on the opposite vertex (or at least that's one way to do it). A puffy triangle, if you will. An equilateral triangle can be dropped into the manhole by positioning it so that one of the altitudes is parallel and close to one side of the hole (you geometry lovers know what I mean). A Rouleaux triangle, however, is a constant-diameter shape, and can't be. As usual, blame Little Ed. I'm not saying it's his fault, just that you should blame him.

From http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_247a.html

Re:Manhole Covers

[Glonoinha]

Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.

Re:Manhole Covers

[tomhudson]

If you've ever done sewer work, you know the answer:

• Not all manhole covers are round. Duh!

Pundits used to say that it was to make it easier to roll the cover into place, but, since they're not all round, that's obviously baloney. Besides, the proper way to move a manhole cover is to hook your pickaxe into a hole, then drag it into position. Trying to roll or flip it into place risks broken footbones - even with steel toes. Those suckers are HEAVY .

Re:Manhole Covers

[UCRowerG]

My guess is that a variety of factors (shape of manholes, ease of manufature, ability to roll the covers) lead to round manhole covers.

I'd wager on ease of manufacture, ease of drawing (for the drafters). I think another really big reason might be that a circle has the largest area for the smallest outline (circumference) of any other shape.

Re:Manhole covers

[C32]

Very good. Unfortunately you can't spell "hole". Application rejected :)

Re:Manhole covers

[neurostar]

Ah ok. Yeah, I remembered that there was something more specific than I was able to articulate... but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Thanks.

neurostar

Re:Manhole covers

[TheLink]

Any proof of your claim?

It seems to me even if you took a square and bowed out the sides, as long as the width along across the middle of the square (taken parallel to the sides) is less than the width of the hole taken diagonally, it can be inserted through the hole. Assuming the shape is flat enough of course.

That said, the covers here are square or rectangular. They're hinged to the opening port. So they don't fall in.

I doubt I'd pass the Microsoft interview :).

Re:Manhole covers

[superflex]

Sorry, but you are completely wrong. For an polygon to be sufficiently rounded so that it cannot fall through the hole under any circumstances, the distance from the center to any point on an edge must be the same as the maximum distance, which would be from the center to a vertex. Oh, I've just described a circle. Fancy that.

Re:Manhole Covers

[(54)T-Dub]

I'd say that a round manhole cover is easiest to position back over the hole.

Re:Manhole covers

[neurostar]

Here's a better explanation.

Re:Manhole Covers

[ultimabob]

I always thought they were Round to prevent streets from cracking. When they are round, the manholes are round, and there are no corners or structual weak points for cracks to appear.

Re:Manhole Covers

[Eagle7]

And it rolls to the cover. And dragging a circle is easy.

If you have ever had to manipulate a manhole cover (which is damned heavy), being able to slide it over to the hole and having it fit in *any* orientation is an incredible advantage.

Re:Manhole covers

[neurostar]

Read this.

There are shapes that aren't round but won't fall through their own hole. 'cause remember, the hole doesn't have to be round. ;)

Re:Manhole covers

[One Louder]

Bzzzt! You don't get the job.

Look up Rouleaux polygons - the distance from the "center" is unimportant - it's the constant width that matters.

Now we get to see how you react to criticism of a strongly held belief.

Re:Manhole covers

[superflex]

if you can find me a link that describes and/or depicts these shapes, i would recant my earlier comments and immortalize you in my .sig as an intelligent individual. how's that for motivation, eh? come on. having your name in some assholes' sig. you know you want it :P

Re:Manhole Covers

[autophile]

My guess is that a variety of factors (shape of manholes, ease of manufature, ability to roll the covers) lead to round manhole covers.

I guess I'll see you in Redmond.

--Rob

Re:Manhole Covers

[Demonikus]

There are actually a few answers to this one:

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

[stratjakt]

here

Another poster on this thread found the link, I had no idea what to search google for.

Re:Manhole Covers

[akvalentine]

What can you say about chocolate covered manhole covers?

Re:manhole covers

[phasm42]

I assumed they were round so that they didn't have to be aligned when put back on. A round shape allows it to just fall into place without aligning corners.

Re:Manhole Covers

[dlakelan]

Not true about equilateral triangles.

The side is longer than the altitude.

Theorem, every shape other than a circle can be dropped through the corresponding manhole.

Proof:

Take the diameter of the cover (maximal distance across) This minus a small epsilon (lip size) is the maximal distance across the hole.

since you can inscribe this shape inside a circle with the same diameter, but the shape is not a circle, there is some region where the distance across your shape is smaller than the circle diameter.

If this distance is smaller than Diameter - epsilon then the shape can drop through.

Since epsilon can be made arbitrarily small (ie. there is no knowing ahead of time how small the lip is). Only a circle will not fall through.

Of course in the real world, damage to the lip and soforth might make it possible to drop the circle through as well.

Re:manhole covers

[Anonymous Coward]

I can think of other reasons that manholes are round.

1. When you dig, its easier,to make a round hole, rather than one with and edge

2. Structural rigidity.

3. When it costs so much to dig, do you really want to create unneccesary space, and seriously, what woudl they do with the corners?

Ultimately, its about the largest area for the least work. And if you seen the gentlemen that service manholes, (think butt-cleavage) You understand.

Re:Manhole Covers

[dlakelan]

Sorry, this only applies to n gons with straight sides.

If your sides are curved then you can have your cake and eat it too.

Re:Manhole Covers

[UnassumingLocalGuy]

From the above link: "This puzzle was inspired by a misleading statement attribued to Danica McKellar of The Wonder Years:" What's really amusing as that McKellar went on to get a BS in Pure Mathematics at UCLA, and write the foreward to "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus."

Re:Manhole covers

[DrMaurer]

Here's one for a triangle. No need for the sig thing, eh. Just doin' my job as a citizen of the world.

That being said, there are dozens of good reasons why manholes are round. The best one being their resemblance to donuts.

Re:Manhole covers

[rhall]

the round shape prevents them from slipping down the whole if someone sets it down at an incorrect angle.

OK, this has been bugging me for awhile. If falling down the hole is the only concern, then the cover could be any shape, as long as the smallest dimension was still too big to fit through the hole. So it seems that there's an additional unstated assumption: the cover must be as small as possible. Anything else?

Re:Manhole Covers

[foog]

right, and manholes are round because

a) people have to fit in them (so triagular shapes are less desirable because they waste space)
b) it's good if they're easy to manufacture
c) they're made by the same people who make sewer pipes

etc.

I explained this in an interview once, the first time I got that question, and the interviewer was very unhappy with that answer. He got even more unhappy when I pointed out that not all manholes are round. There are rectangular access vias of different sorts, and these usually have rectangular covers (which are often hinged, which is another solution to the falling-in problem).

Although I agree the now-conventional "so they don't fall in and so you can roll them around, and hinges are undesirable on a street" answers are clever in an appealing way, and are true in their way, I still think I'm right. That is, I don't think they describe the real design motives behind the shape of manhole covers.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was disappointing at the time, because I really needed a decent job, but it would have probably been a terrible place to work.

Re:Manhole covers

[tabacco]

My guess would be that the shape makes them easiest to move around. Here's an analogy from my own life, since I rarely move manhole covers :)

Where I work (Disneyland), we use mobile stanchions to support ropes for parades, shows, etc. These things have solid metal and concrete bases, and weigh a ton (that way they're less likely to fall over or be dragged if someone walks into the rope). Yeah, we could make the bases square, but we use round ones. The things are way too heavy for even two people to reasonably lift and carry, but they can be easily tipped to a 45 degreee angle or so and rolled away by even the weakest of people.

I woudl think the same is true of heavy metal manhole covers. Rather than having to lift and drag or carry them off the manhole, they can be tipped up and rolled at an angle out of the way.

I'm sure there are other considerations too, but it seems like this should be a large factor.

Re:Manhole Covers

[Jace of Fuse!]

Actually, they are round for safty.

If they were any other shape, it would likely be possible to turn them some degree so that the cover could fall into the hole.

Have you ever lifted a manhole cover? Can you imagine one of them falling on a worker?

Re:Manhole Covers

[akintayo]

I think the cost of manufacturing cannot be discounted, it is probably easier to machine a circle than the shapes you wish to describe. Also the circle is more tolerant to manufacturing variation

Re:Manhole Covers

[Redwing]

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.

However there is an orientation that is shorter than the triangle's sides. The height of an equilateral triangle is only side*sqrt(3)/2 (about .87 * width). You could slide a triangular manhole cover down the manhole by making one edge vertical and the plane of the cover parallel to and just inside one edge of the hole.

Re:Manhole Covers

[katarac]

I always figured it was because most of the workers that I see go into them are round. *rimshot*

Re:Manhole covers

[ralmeida]

Wrong. Manhole covers are round because the holes are round.

Re:Manhole Covers

[dlakelan]

Actually I'm off base, you can not generally inscribe a shape inside a circle with the same diameter.

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

[ninewands]

The real reason that manhole covers are round is that the circle is the smallest shape that encloses a specified area. A round manhole cover requires the least amount of steel to manufacture of all possible shapes that would provide an opening that size, therefore it is the least expensive to manufacture.

Re:Manhole covers

[superflex]

Cool. Thanks for the link. Very interesting. Kinda neat that it would only work for polygons with an odd number of vertices, since the edges are circumscribed by an arc centered at the opposite vertex. Shapes with an even number of vertices don't have corners opposite their edges.

Re:Manhole Covers

[DeputySpade]

Are you seriously trying to tell me that your car can do a burnout that will rotate a manhole cover?

(potential flamebait removed for clarity) Um... I doubt it. Manhole covers are HEAVY! They have to be in order to avoid changing shape when force is applied to the broad dimension. (so your car don't fall in the hole). They are also slick on top as they are made out of metal (see above WRT your car not falling in.) With five hundred pounds of car sitting on top of one (A fourth of a very light car for being powerful enough to accomplish this feat) there would be a hell of a lot of static friction between the cover and the flange it sists on.

In order to get enough traction and apply enough force to turn one you'd have to have awfully wide tires. With tires that wide you'd overlap the center of the cover or the circumference of it in any but the freakest of circumstances. In order to do this even on purpose you'd have to have big old MT wrinkle-wall slicks and about 700'/lbs of torque on a manhole with a diameter of about five feet or more. Anybody with that kind of meats has some sort of posi/sure-grip/locker, etc... rear end that would launch the car before that one wheel started to spin.

Any car that could do this would sure get my attention because it wouldn't be street legal and would be poorly built as well. This absolutly can not have been a design concern.

Re:Manhole covers

[Big_Breaker]

Um... thanks for coming in. Pls shut the door on your way out.

Re:Manhole covers

[Redwing]

hey look like bowed out triangles, squares, octagons, etc etc..

Triangles, yes. Squares and octagons, no. Shapes with a constant diameter cannot be made from any regular polygon. They must have an odd number of sides so that the points on a side are a constant distance from the point of the opposite corner.

Re:Manhole Covers

[JimBobJoe]

Isn't there something to be said about not having any edges? For instance, if a round manhole cover comes out of the manhole a bit, and a car goes over it, there are no sharp edges that the tire can hit, which could either damage it, or be a point of leverage to cause the cover to flip up in some way. The round cover may lift slightly, and then collapse back down. Eventually if it works its way back to it's happy manhole home, it will just pop itself back in. On the other hand, I believe that the other shapes, like the Rouleaux polygons, would be more likely to snap themselves up when hit by a car (at the cover's edge) increasing the likelyhood of damage.

Re:Manhole Covers

[EnderWiggnz]

manhole covers dont stike me as a machined item, they strike me as a drop forge item - so the mold is what you would be considerring, and i dont think that shape is much of a factor here.

Re:Manhole Covers

[robson]

Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.

Somehow I have a feeling that "Glonoinha" expected a "+5 Funny" rather than "+5 Insightful" :)

Re:Manhole Covers

[Dylan Zimmerman]

You make many good points. The whole "so they don't fall into the hole" is probably just a byproduct of what I think was the original intention: round pipes are better structuraly than anything else.

It's really quite sad that the interviewer was unhappy with the answer, because it is much more complete than the cliche answer. That would be like me leaving the "+C" off of an antiderivative. It simply isn't correct because it isn't complete.

I would love to see someone try to roll a manhole cover around. They weigh well over 40 kg, IIRC. Standing the thing up on edge would be about as hard as standing a dime on edge.

Re:Manhole covers

[Lester67]

They are round because any other shape could fall, or be manipulated through the hole.

Re:manhole covers

[pclminion]

You forgot another important reason, which is that the circle has the most area for a given diameter, and therefore uses the least amount of material (steel, I assume) to cover a hole with a given area. This minimizes both the cost and the weight.

Re:Manhole Covers

[foog]

Pundits used to say that it was to make it easier to roll the cover into place, but, since they're not all round, that's obviously baloney. Besides, the proper way to move a manhole cover is to hook your pickaxe into a hole, then drag it into position. Trying to roll or flip it into place risks broken footbones - even with steel toes. Those suckers are HEAVY .

Yet another reason the average software manager shouldn't even be allowed to hold a screwdriver...

Re:Manhole Covers

[Snork Asaurus]

On the (7 year old) street in front of my house is a manhole/cover. A few weeks ago, I noticed a crack, pretty much centered on the manhole center, that extends approximately 18-20 inches to either side of the cover. I examined the next manhole down the road and found almost exactly the same thing. So much for theory ;-) .

Re:Manhole Covers

[petronivs]

I thought manhole covers are round because manholes are round. I mean, you don't shove a square peg in a round hole, right?

Re:Manhole Covers

[Becquerel]

Don't forget that it is also the most efficient use of the materials in the cover. All points at the same radius from the centre will be equally stressed (assuming a uniform load)

Over millions of load cycles this will reduce the predisposition to cracking along heavly loaded areas, that could occur in an equilateral triangular cover (these would probably be along the 3 shortest lines from the centre to the edge, or possibly on lines between these side centrepoints, at a guess)

Incidently, I'm not sure if there designed like that, but the most efficient use of material would be to have a parabolic cross section rotated about the vertical axis, like an arch bridge spun round its midspan point

<pedants disclaimer>Ye, I know this is probably not strictly true as it applies to a weightless string in 2d but it gives the visual impression to those who don't have degrees in civil engineering </pedants disclaimer>

Re:Manhole Covers

[Slime-dogg]

The explanation that I thought of is that manhole covers are round so that they have an infinite number of ways to be put into place. If you had a square cover, you'd only have 4 options of putting the cover into place, if you had a triangle 3. When it's a circle, it doesn't matter what orientation the cover has in regards to the hole, which makes it an even simpler affair of getting the cover on.

<snide remark>You know construction workers... they need things as simple as possible.</snide remark>

Re:Manhole Covers

[trisight]

Manhole covers are round because it makes them quick and easy for anyone to use.

MS philosophy.. think about it.. their idea was to make software that anyone, no matter how computer illiterate they were, be able to use them.

Re:Manhole covers

[Thud457]

Looking at the number of contentious responses to this here on slashdot, I'm starting to think that this isn't a very good question!

Re:Manhole covers

[Quill_28]

My first thought was it is easier to make a round hole than a square one or any other kind.

Your idea does make good sense though, hope I don't interview against you ;)

Re:Manhole Covers

[Alkaiser]

See, I agree here. Especially, since having looked at the stupid thing when the sanitation guys were running tests you notice there's a little lip on the underside of the cover, so any shape manhole cover would not fall in.

Re:Manhole Covers

[gmack]

Keep in mind that your holding it up so it's not actually ballanced that way. The idea is that you let it fall back down when your done moving it.

It's much easier than actually trying to carry it but probably not as easy as people assume without trying it.

Re:Manhole Covers

[srmalloy]

Manhole Covers are round so they can't fall down the manhole. Simple.

Manhole covers are round in order to minimize the number of decisions that a maintenance worker has to make when putting them back.

Re:Manhole Covers

[Phil Wilkins]

That's either +1 Funny, or portholes.

Re:manhole covers

[BryanL]

Ok, here's a tip. Don't google "manhole." Can you say goatse...?

Re:Manhole Covers

[Yunzil]

Not true. Imagine if the cover was a square 2 feet on a side, and the lip was 1 inch. The diagonal dimension of the hole is therefore 2.6 feet. All you need to do is flip the cover on edge, turn it so it's diagonal to the hole, and drop it in.

Re:Manhole Covers

[russellh]

All right, listen up. Manholes are big pipes. Pipes are round. pipes are easy to manufacture in one piece and very strong. Plus, when transported in quantity on flatbed trucks, they provide the opportunity for an exciting highway experience if the truck gets in an accident (as seen in Toy Story 2).

Re:Manhole covers

[Joey7F]

How about this:

They are round because, they can't fall through, a circle is a common shape, and at circle is the most efficient shape (perimeter/area ratio).

--Joey

Re:manhole covers

[antidigerati]

Saying manhole covers are round because the manhole is round is just plain stupid. That's like saying keys look the way they do because they fit into keyholes. The two were designed in tandem, and the question really comes down to: why are manholes, and their covers, round?

I read down the existing replies and was surprised to not see the two biggest reasons in my mind:

1) Manhole covers are HEAVY... and round covers are easy to move around. Just roll them.

2) A circular cover CANNOT fall into the manhole. This may seem like a small point, but having to lift a non-circular metal cover back up from the bottom of the manhole would just suck. Not to mention if you happened to be in the whole at the time.

Re:manhole covers

[MBoffin]

Manhole covers are round because it's a shape that can't fall into the hole it covers. A square lid would be able to be rotated and fall into the hole it covers.

Re:Manhole covers

[neurostar]

hehehe. well, it appears that others have beaten me to it. :)

Re:manhole covers

[pclminion]

Granted, I haven't heard or read a lot of stupid things today, but your statement is the most remarkably stupid item I've come across in the last 24 hours, and likely the last month or so.

Ok, I admit I phrased that badly. Ok, very badly. Imagine the set of all possible manhole shapes, wherein each such shape has a minimum diameter of D. By minimum diameter I mean, no matter which way you measure across the shape in a line which passes though the center of mass, that distance is always >= D.

Of all the shapes in that set, the circle is the one with the minimum surface area for a given minimum diameter. Why this is true should be obvious on its face.

The way I had it phrased before, I realize, sounded quite stupid. Of course, all shapes with identical thickness and surface area, no matter what their actual shape, will occupy the same volume. I was typing faster that I was thinking, sorry.

Re:Manhole Covers

[crazyphilman]

When my Dad was in the Marine Corps, he and some friends stole a couple of manhole covers and threaded them on a weightlifting bar as a joke. They started working out with them, and my father did a full military press with the bar (that's where you're standing, and push the barbell up over your head, etc). His wrists locked, and he let the barbell fall backwards, behind him, breaking his wrists and burying the manhole covers several inches into the soft asphalt of the parade deck. Boy, did he get yelled at. Casts on his forearms to boot, for weeks until he healed.

He never did THAT again...

Re:Manhole Covers

[blink3478]

Please refrain from using 'goatse.cx' and 'itching' in the same sentence.

Thank you,
Management

Re:Manhole Covers

[localman]

So that's the official answer, but I don't buy it.

That is certainly a side effect of them being round, but I highly doubt that is the reason they are round. My best guess is that they are round because the pipes they first used in underground piping were round, as are nearly all pipes. Why the pipes are round probably has to do with structural integrity or manufacturing ease.

Besides, any shape with a flanged edge would not fall down the hole. And in fact, there were square storm drain covers in the streets where I grew up.

So I've never really thought of this question as more than a joke.

Cheers.

Re:Manhole Covers

[SomeGuyFromCA]

> Manhole Covers are round so they can't fall down the manhole. Simple.

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".

Re:Manhole Covers

[Alkaiser]

The answer given was, "so they won't fall in" and not, "so people don't tip them on their sides and drop the manhole cover".

Re:Manhole Covers

[Phil Wilkins]

Yup. It's portholes that are round, because otherwise they fracture at the corners. There's a hell of a lot of stress in a ships hull. Not so much in the pavement.

Re:Manhole Covers

[artakka]

Have you ever tried to roll a rectangular manhole cover?

Re:Manhole Covers

[n3k5]

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.

You're mixing up two definitions of diameter here. In general English usage, the diameter is measured on a line that goes trough the centre. But in that case, the diameter of an equiliteral triangle would be its altitude, which clearly doesn't have much to do with our manhole problem. What we need here is the generalised diameter, which is the greatest distance between any two points on the border of the shape. So you're imprecise when you say "find some distance across", since that distance wouldn't necessarily be a diameter. What you actually wanted to say is that polygons don't have a constant diameter. Proving this is hard to explain in a few words indeed. However, you didn't want to prove that. You only wanted to prove that the assumption that a shape can be inscribed inside a cirle with the same diameter is wrong. You showed a perfectly good counterexample to that assumption, so you're already done! Only thing you forgot is define diameter first.

Re:Manhole Covers

[Mantorp]

manholes are round because they're holes for round men

Re:Manhole covers

[arrogance]

I looked at a few pages, but this one was the coolest of the bunch: animations and everything.

Re:Manhole Covers

[totallygeek]

Round so the poor guy that has to climb down into them has no protruding edges or points to get cut on while descending or ascending.

Re:Manhole Covers

[kcelery]

Replacing the cover requires alignment for all shapes except the circle which fits for all orientation.

Re:Manhole Covers

[phsolide]

Don't kid yourself. If I'd listed "gratuitious, monomaniacal managment driven incompatibilities with all other manufacturer's manholes", then you might see me in Redmond. In a suit.

Re:Manhole Covers

[phsolide]

Are you seriously trying to tell me that your car can do a burnout that will rotate a manhole cover?

No, I don't habitually drive a cement truck around. But other people do.

The point is, that every design decision involves consideration of a lot of factors, some of which are binary ("The cover shall possess a shape to prevent dropping it down the hole") and some of them involve actual mechanical intuition and caculation. Since a lot of manhole covers do have a circular shape, the loss-of-traction consideration must either work out like you say, or other factors override it.

Re:Manhole Covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Also, even if the cover was shaped as an
> equilateral triangle, it would have to be wider
> at the top than the bottom, which would prevent
> it from falling in.

The same applies for a circular one. There is a presumed small lip the cover rests on, all the way around.

An equilateral triangle would not only fall in, but would possess the disagreeable quality of bonking the head of an opening-nearing climber, not with a heavy round edge, but with a heavy pointy one.

(An equilateral triangle of side length 1 had a height from one point to the middle of the opposing side of 3/4. (1^^2 = (1/2)^^2 + height^^2) Clearly if you shove it through the hole that way, it will fit in without having to ride against an edge.)

Re:Manhole Covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Sorry, this only applies to n gons with straight sides.

Perhaps you mean it only applies to convex n-gons with straight sides (and some, but not all, concave ones.)

Re:Manhole Covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

It's also wrong. Humans are not round pegs going down into the hole. The least amount of metal needed for a cover would be the exact shape of the minimal hole needed for a human + equipment to climb down. A round hole is probably not that shape, and is thus rather wasteful in that respect.

(Sorry for letting my trans-Microsoftic level of creativity and critical thinking out.)

Re:Manhole Covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Also, if it slides in off-center, it's natural tendency would be to tilt flat, whereas other shapes might tend to tilt vertically, giving the worker an even harder task of placing it.

Witness the rectangular cover dragged partly into place, then it tilts up almost vertically:

Frank: "Ok, Joe, now put your foot on the top and tilt it back down and hook it with your crow in the other hand and pull from that side up and back over."

Joe: "Ok, I got 'er now. Ok, here it ooOOOPS AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaa.........."

splash

Frank: "Joe! You ok down there? Wait here a minute while I...WATCH OUT! COVER COMIN' DOWN!"

Yeah, lovely.

Re:Manhole Covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Equilateral triangles...don't fall in.

They do. Hint: Cut out an equilateral triangle. Set it upright on your desk. How high is it?

Re:Manhole Covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Only on the Island of Misfit Manhole Covers.

Re:Manhole covers

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> if you can find me a link that describes and/or
> depicts these (non-circular) shapes (that can't
> fall thru their own hole) (digs his own grave)

Hint: Nobody said they had to be regular polygons, or even concave polygons, or even have any flat sides at all.

NO MICROSOFT JOB FOR YOU!

Re:Manhole Covers

[drinkypoo]

When the driver presses the throttle, the tire exerts a force on the manhole cover that gives it a tendency to rotate. Instant loss of traction.

When one wheel is on tarmac, and the other is on a manhole cover, and the driver presses the throttle which causes a series of events culminating in the rotation of the driveshaft, there are several possible outcomes. If you have an open differential, you will spin the wheel on the manhole cover until it moves off of it and picks up more traction, at which point the other wheel will start moving the car across the tarmac. If you have a locking differential or a limited slip, the wheel with traction should propel you right away.

You will certainly not be rotating most manhole covers. There are some which are textured, but they tend to be bolted down. (They are usually used in "major metropolitan areas".) Also, except in the case of very narrow tires or tires which have excessive camber and are overinflated, a significant cross-section of tire pushes on the manhole cover with more or less the same amount of force at the same time, which will tend to minimize rotation, since areas further toward the circumference of the circle must move faster than those neat the center in order for a circular shape to rotate.

Re:Manhole Covers

[WatertonMan]

I have to ask - what kind of job were you applying for where as part of the interview they asked about why manhole covers were round? Further what kind of job interviewer would be unhappy when you answered that not all manhole covers are round.

Re:Manhole Covers

[foog]

It was a software engineering job; it's a now-cliched question in engineering disciplines other than mechanical engineering, especially computer programming for some reason.

To add to the indignity and bitter irony, the interviewer gave me a little lecture on how they wanted people that "think out of the box" after I didn't give him his pat "correct" answer.

Having something of a materials science and mechanical engineering background myself, although my BS is in physics, I think most smart mechanical and civil engineers would laugh at the software engineering approach to manhole cover design.

Re:Manhole Covers

[dlakelan]

Indeed I forgot that not everyone is familiar with generalized diameters. But I also confused you by referring to 2 different things. My example was to prove the lemma about diameters, but I think the original statement about n gons with straight sides is true as well but I don't have a proof in words, only pictures.

As someone very familiar with mathematics it doesn't bother me to say "the diameter of a triangle is its longest side" because I'm familiar with generalized diameters.

Now although my original proof doesn't work, for a regular n-gon with straight sides, you CAN always find an orientation of the shape that makes it possible to drop the shape through the widest part of its corresponding hole.

But it really requires drawing pictures to show it.

Manhole covers

[Overt Coward]

Manhole covers are round so that they don't fall in -- the round shape prevents them from slipping down the whole if someone sets it down at an incorrect angle.

I wouldn't

[Anonymous Coward]

I would just paint the mountain pink and set up a low power SEP field generator.

Re:I wouldn't

[the_other_one]

Why use paint? You just need an electric monk to believe it is pink

Re:I wouldn't

[celery stalk]

massive Douglas Adams reference. I give thee props.

Probably umount...

[tha_mink]

I suppose something like...

umount /dev/fuji

Re:Probably umount...

[Telastyn]

actually it's more likely mv /mnt/fuji ~

Because I want to live on /mnt/fuji of course...

Re:Probably umount...

[Quixote]

That would be the answer to "how do you flatten Mt Fuji?".

I recommend
mv /mnt/fuji /mnt/barji

Re:Probably umount...

[shades6666]

You forgot that these are Microsoft answers...

copy \mnt\fuji \mnt\barjii
del \mnt\fuji

or better yet

open My Computer
browse to \mnt\fuji
right-click copy
right-click paste
select copy of fuji
right-click rename
type barjii
select fuji
right-click delete
close explorer
select recycle bin
right-click empty recycle bin

Who says Windows isn't simpler?

Re:Probably umount...

[Munk]

Actually, if this was a Microsoft question, you would just drag and drop the file...of course...since this is M$, you would probably get the blue screen of death.

Re:Probably umount...

[confused philosopher]

Unless Mount Fuji is a file.

Then it is CTRL+X
Alt-Tab to new window
CTRL+V

Either that, or reconstruct a new lava duct to move the real mountain.

Re:Probably umount...

[thebatlab]

The person who accidently trashed mt fuji when the didn't mean to thinks it was :) And, as mentioned, it's not like you can't do it in windows with just a couple cli commands. Are the linux guis that much different in how they operate in regards to the sequence you described for windows? Better yet, how about: open My Computer browse to \mnt\fuji right-click cut right-click paste select cut of fuji right-click rename type barjii

Re:Probably umount...

[Mikey-San]

Why have one when you can have two at twice the cost?

sudo cp -p /dev/fuji /dev/fuju.backup :-)

Re:Probably umount...

[Dyolf Knip]

I get the impression that it would be a bad idea to use *nix syntax to answer a question during a Microsoft interview.

Re:Probably umount...

[H310iSe]

You might anticipate anyone who is silly enough to want to move Mt Fuji may be fickle enough to be displeased with the new location as well. Making a procedure would be wise.

@echo off
j:
cd \.
rem make room for the mountain
if exist j:\south goto skipmake
md south
[colon]skipmake
rem note the /q switch is important to
rem avoid environmental activists /y deals with
rem unwilling legislatures and /e is included due
rem to arcane union rules requiring payment for
rem for moving things even if they don't exist
xcopy j:\north\mt\fuji*.* j:\south\mt\fuji*.* /e /q /k /c /i /h /r /y
dir j:\south\mt\ /s >> surveyorecords.txt
del | y j:\north\mt\fuji*.*
I haven't written a batch file in a decade but i think that's what they look like.

Re:Probably umount...

[damien_kane]

But with that syntax, mount Fuji would live on you...

Re:Probably umount...

[edremy]

mv /mnt/fuji /mnt/barji

<obscure reference>
Oooh, bad idea. Do you really want an extraordinarily violent Red warlord pissed that a mountain is sitting on his bar?
</obscure reference>

Re:Probably umount...

[MrResistor]

What is this, Soviet Russia?

Re:Probably umount...

[damien_kane]

No, IN SOVIET RUSSIA... Mt. Fuji doesn't exist...

lol

Manhole Covers...

[mattyohe]

That one is simple.. because any other shape would allow the cover to fall in.. But what about the others??

What kindof answer do you think you would say? What are you supposed to reference for the gas station question?

Does microsoft want me to say that I would assemble my blinds with the latest bluetooth spec and then controll it from my computer?

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Lord_Slepnir]

Actually, it's because when it's round, you can move it easier around construction zones...you can just roll it.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[AssFace]

I know these only vaguely as Microsoft questions (and these questions are retardedly easy compared to the real ones) - but more as Management Consulting questions. When Monitor, Mercer, Parthenon, etc interview - they use these b/c it is the type of reasoning that they use all of the time.

For the gas station one - you need to know the vague population of the US if you want to give them a number answer - but they are really happy if you just explain the correct solution aloud with variables.
You need to be able to give a working estimate of how many people in what sort of area one gas station can service, and then figure out how many people over what area (useable area) of the states is then available - then you can determine the need that is there and then what portion of that is filled.

Management consultants hardly ever have real numbers in front of them when they are working on projects - they have theoretical scenerios and they need to be able to quickly estimate figures to see what paths would lead to higher profit figures... well, usually they are hired for increased profit nominally - but whatever they suggest is ignored and then layoffs happen and are blamed on the management consultants - allowing the higher ups to look as if it weren't their decision, but an outside decision to better the company (although frequently the case IS that layoffs would help the company).

Re:Manhole Covers...

[acm]

That one is simple.. because any other shape would allow the cover to fall in.. But what about the others??

What about an equilateral triangle?

In addition to that answer:

• the worker can roll a round manhole cover down the street (easier than picking it up).
• it doesn't matter which way you position the cover over the hole.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[91degrees]

Surely they're both valid answers. The interviewer just wants a sensible answer backed up by logic.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Hypno]

I thought that it was because manholes are round....

Re:Manhole Covers...

[finkployd]

The first answer sounds like a better reason. Granted yours is valid, but does not strike me as important as the "manhole cover falling into the manhole" problem.

finkployd

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Mr. Sketch]

Does microsoft want me to say that I would assemble my blinds with the latest bluetooth spec and then controll it from my computer?

No, I'm sure they want you to say that you will take the latest bluetooth spec, and extented it to add more innovation to satisfy the needs of a wider audience while making it more userfriendly. The new innovative spec based on bluetooth may not be compatible with the original spec, but oh well, that's the price of innovation.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[SlashdotLemming]

What about an equilateral triangle?

An equilateral triangle can fall through its own hole. Think in 3 dimensions with rotating objects.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[matth]

Not True.. I've seen way too many man holes on streets that have been put down wrong... YIKES! the yellow lines go straight then off the wrong way then striaght again! It does make a differnece :)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[FurryFeet]

You know, I heard a story about a guy being interviewed at MS and asked "Why are manhole covers round?". His answer: "They're not", followed by a gesture out the window. It seem's manholes at Microsoft's campus are square.
Can't for the life of me remember where I read that, but I can testify that Microsoft's manhole covers are square... :)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Mr Guy]

Except that it's wrong.

The shape doesn't keep the manhole cover from falling in, the LIP does.

They are round because they've always been round, at least in this country.

Check out Imponderables and Feldman's printed books for more.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[simong_oz]

I reckon it's more likely to do with "ease of manufacture" and being able to place the cover over the hole without worrying orientation.

Health & safety would probably have a field day with manhole covers being rolled around site!

Re:Manhole Covers...

[DrinkDr.Pepper]

An equilateral triangle can fall through its own hole. Think in 3 dimensions with rotating objects.br no it can't. The widest part of an equilateral triangle is at the edge. If it doesn't fall through when placed correctly there is no orientation where it will fall through, since no other orientation is wider than an edge. A square on the other hand is widest on the diagonal.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[randomencounter]

Are round because pipes are round, and the most common manhole is a pipe run to the surface from the sewer pipe.
Really. Don't overthink these things.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[cygnus]

That one is simple.. because any other shape would allow the cover to fall in..

how about an eqilateral triangle? that wouldn't fall in, given that it has the same lip as a circular one.

or how about a sphere with a larger radius than the hole?

or come to think of it, any shape would, so long as it's shortest profile in one dimension is longer than the hole's.

don't make me do the proof, please. :)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[dAzED1]

For the gas station one - you need to know the vague population of the US if you want to give them a number answer - but they are really happy if you just explain the correct solution aloud with variables.
You need to be able to give a working estimate of how many people in what sort of area one gas station can service, and then figure out how many people over what area (useable area) of the states is then available - then you can determine the need that is there and then what portion of that is filled.

That doesn't work. Reason: you've obviously never been out in a rural area! If you have a town 200 miles from any other place that has only 200 people living in it, guess what...there will be a gas station. In *fact*, if its 200 miles from anywhere else, chances are the gas station will be a large portion of the economy of the town. On the other hand, there are large gas stations in busy areas that I've seen with as many as 20 islands...its no where near as simple as determiniung the # of people, and then trying to extrapolate from that how many stations there are, based on an estimate of how many a single station can service. There's absolultely no way one could come close.

And yes, I realize there was no point to this post. There wasn't one to the article, so...I'm ok ;)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[indianajones428]

I've heard a few answers for this, such as:

--A square one (or any other shape, for that matter) can fall through if placed diagonally in the hole.

--So you can roll it.

--Most people are round, so it's more efficient.


But, like most things, the best answer I've heard so far is the simplist:

--So it will fit on the manhole!



Henry Jones, Jr.

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?' --Don Marquis

Re:Manhole Covers...

[sporty]

Another answer... you get more usable surface area with the least amount of metal too.

The minimum width of the cover is always the radius. If it was an 8 sided shape, you'd get wasted corners that could be used to widen other parts. A square would have a larger minimum. A flat line, of course, is the worst. As angles go up, the larger your minimum width goes.

If everything in the world was box shaped, circles would be stupid for that type of thing.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[darkov]

That one is simple.. because any other shape would allow the cover to fall in..

Where I live man-hole covers are square, and they seem to stay put. I think whether they fall in or not has got to do with the presence of a lip in the frame under the cover or a taper in the third dimension.

Doesn't look like you'd get hired by Microsoft. Count yourself lucky.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

The shape doesn't keep the manhole cover from falling in, the LIP does.

This is true for any shape of manhole cover. If it didn't have a lip, it wouldn't work at all.

A square cover would be able to fall through if rotated correctly and placed on the hole on the diagonal; a round one cannot. This is true regardless of the fact that both designs would have a lip to support it in it's "normal" aspect.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[radish]

We have (some) triangular manhole covers in the UK. For that matter we also have (some) rectangular ones. Maybe we're less geometrically aware over here :)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[dizco]

three dimensions. an equalateral triangle's widest point, as you said, its edge. it has narrower points tho, the narrowest being its height (perpendicular from the center of one edge to the point opposite).

Pass it through sideways, with one point in one corner of the hole, and an edge at a second corner, vertical.

--Sean
(p.s. -- These work tho.)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Mononoke]

The widest part of an equilateral triangle is at the edge. If it doesn't fall through when placed correctly there is no orientation where it will fall through, since no other orientation is wider than an edge.

You're still not thinking in 3 dimensions.

Rotate the cover on either the X or Y axis. For simplicity, do this by picking up one corner and standing the cover on one edge. Now, rotate the cover 60 degrees on an axis perpendicular to the cover's current position. Now you've got it standing on one corner, with one edge perpendicular to the ground. Now you can drop it right down the hole, because the width of the cover from the center of the (now) vertical edge to the opposing point is less than the length of the edge of the hole.

Pythagoras can probably explain this better.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

...it's because when it's round, you can move it easier around construction zones...you can just roll it.

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...

[photon317]

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.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[imcleod]

Actually, yes, it can. Since the altitude of an equilateral triangle is shorter than the edge of the same triangle, a triangular cover could be dropped through the matching triangular hole if:
1) one of the edges of the cover was strictly vertical,
2) the cover itself was vertical, and
3) the cover was dropped near the edge of the hole (the base of the triangle, from whatever orientation).
Now, it's possible to make the lip of the hole wide enough that even this doesn't work. But at that point, you're wasting materials - you've got a cover that's much too big (and therefore unwieldy) for the hole it covers. The circular design allows the cover to be fairly close in size to the hole it covers. It's the most efficient solution.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[ConfusedVorlon]

Rotate your manhole cover so that one edge is perpendicular to the ground. The width is now sqrt(3/2) of the side. It can now slip through the hole by sliding against one edge. (assuming it is a close approximation to a two dimensional object)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[gurps_npc]

All of you are assuming that no one rams into the manhole cover with a car/truck/SUV, denting and distorting the shape enough to go through the hole.

That is not a valid assumption, as anyone that has seen NYC driving.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[M. Silver]

If you take that equilateral triangle, then scribe an arc between each pair of points using the third point as the center, you'll have a non-round shape that won't fall in, though.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[finkployd]

Right, but that only works for a few shapes (the circle being the simplest). A square with a lip could easily fall in if turned to the right angle.

By "not falling in" I don't mean when inserted properly, I mean it is impossible to put the manhole cover through the manhole at all, not matter how you position it. No accidently drops when being worked on in other words.

Finkployd

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Urox]

You're not thinking hard enough.

The widest part of an equilateral triangle is at the edge. And the narrowest part is from one tip to the bisecting point on the opposing side. If that width is narrower than the lip of a side of the triangle, then it can fall through.

This is just like an oval can fall through the wide arc by putting it through on its narrow arc.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[I_redwolf]

This is the correct answer or at least i'd take it as a right answer.. Underground systems are usually tunnels, tunnels happen to be circular, why are tunnels circular? If everything was square, triangle, etc there would be some seriously poor dynamics involvings things like wind, pressure and sound which in turn would cause emergency systems and evacuation plans (flooding, fire, repair) to be more dangerous than they already are and highly problematic. Also structurally they can bear more load, are more cost effective etc etc you could go on and on about the benefits of round tunnels.

You could try building a triangular or square tunnel but I wouldn't drive a heavy truck over that road. The pressure would easily collapse such a structure without the proper support.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[FrostyWheaton]

Yes, it can. In order for such a figure to be unable to fit through itself the minimum cross-section width of the figure must equal it's maximum cross-section width. If there is any difference between these two values simply alight the figure so it's minimum cross-section lines up with the holes maximum-section and it will pass through.

A circle is the only shape that has an equal minimum and maximum cross-section ( 1 to 1 ratio). An equilateral triangle however has a (sqrt(1/4) ~.86 to 1)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[sporty]

Right. duh.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[tabacco]

Or tie a longer piece of string to the pull-cord :)

Re:Manhole Covers...

[haystor]

The other answer is "because manholes are round".

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Nintendork]

A round manhole cover would fall right through without the lip to hold it. I was surprised to see that nobody else mentioned this point.

But think about if you were to actually try and get the cover through the hole and lip. A round or triangle manhole cover wouldn't be able to get through regardless of the angle. Take a square one though and you can drop it in vertically with it rotated to run along the hypotenuse (Imagine the square split into two right triangles to see the hypotenuse). The hypotenuse is longer than the sides.

-Lucas

Re:Manhole Covers...

[DeputySpade]

Your sig just cracked me up. :D

Re:Manhole Covers...

[SlashdotLemming]

Or maybe you just have smarter construction workers ;)
I'm thinking that there isn't some deep mathematical reason to why manhole covers are round. Probably whoever made the '1st' one made it round cause, maybe, pipes are round too.

It like analysis of art. People find all these deep hidden meanings in stuff when the original artist just made something on a whim.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[taniwha]

A circle is the only shape that has an equal minimum and maximum cross-section ( 1 to 1 ratio).

Note true .... draw an equilateral triangle, now take your compas, put the pointy bit on any corner and the pencil bit on any other, draw a curve from that corner to the free corner. Repeat with the pointy bit on the other two corners. Now erase the straign lines - voila!

This of course is the answer the M$ person wanted - and you're unlikely to know the answer unless you've been exposed to the problem before, and found it interesting enough to remember. Which is not a test of problem solving and more of a test of what you find interesting in the world - maybe not a bad thing to test for - but it's pretty hit and miss whether you happened to have been exposed to it - and as such its a bad test.

I've always liked three sorts of interview questions - one tries to get the interviewee to tell 'war stories' about previous projects trying to get an idea as to what they find challenging and what they are proud of acomplishing, the second are about very basic, but hard fundementals of the subject (back when I was a chip designer I would always ask a question about metastability ...), finally I've tried giving people really hard problems to solve on the board - not really requiring them to finish them, but wanting to see how they approached them.

I've kind of gone off this last one mainly because I think it's too intimidating in an already difficult process - especially if you are giving the first interview of the day - who wants to walk around doing all the other interviews thinking you've failed already ....

Re:Manhole Covers...

[damien_kane]

That is not a valid assumption, as anyone that has seen NYC driving.

Those aren't manholes, they're potholes...

Re:Manhole Covers...

[demonlapin]

You know, the easiest way to do the gas station one is "Call all fifty states' Departments of Commerce and ask them how many gas stations there are." They'll be the ones who put up those little stickers that say "Yes, this pump is accurate." Oh, and do it for DC and any possessions you want to include.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[default luser]

Right. The key to understanding the economics of gasoline is not depending on population density alone.

Traffic Density should be considered, with two aspects:

1. How many cars go by a location each day?

2. How many cars consider this a starting point / destination?

People are more likely to fuel up on the way, and are even more likely to fuel up closer to the start or end of their trip rather than the middle.

The problem with questions like this is, in order to answer them with anything but boring math, they require a decent amount of insight into culture and common practices. What exactly does this have to do with your job, unless you are selling something?

Re:Manhole Covers...

[91degrees]

Thanks. Far too many people seem to completely fail to spot it, and still bite.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[AssFace]

That reminds me of my freshman year Chem final. I don't recall the exact wording of the question, but it was something like "Describe three ways to get a 3 molar solution of something something something." And I think I recall the amount that they wanted was relatively large.
One of my ways was "Call Fisher Scientific and give them your credit card number. Barring any major postal carrier or trucking strikes, you should have your solution within 3 business days - faster if you used an express method."
From what I have heard of others that have had that class since, I'm now used as an example of what not to do. To think that my real life has become much like a despair poster makes me uncertain to feel bad, or laugh and pump my fist triumphantly.
Either way, my dad found it funny (he was an analytical chemistry prof at the time).

There is also the story (likely an urban legend) (which perhaps influenced my choice of answers on that test) of the student that had a physics test and on it was a question that said "Using only a barometer, how could you measure the height of ."
The student then answers using various methods beyond any "normal" use of a barometer.
One was using the sun and measuring the length of its shadow and the shadow of the building and then the math of similar triangles.
Another was to get its weight and drop it off of the top of the building, counting how long it took before it crashed on the ground.
Another was to find the building custodian and bribe him by offering him the barometer in exchange for the information about the building.
There were likely more, but those are all of the answers I can recall that didn't use it for measuring pressure changes.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[pjp6259]

A circle is the only shape that has an equal minimum and maximum cross-section ( 1 to 1 ratio).

Note true .... draw an equilateral triangle, now take your compas, put the pointy bit on any corner and the pencil bit on any other, draw a curve from that corner to the free corner. Repeat with the pointy bit on the other two corners. Now erase the straign lines - voila!

Voila? Didn't you just create a circle by doing that?

Re:Manhole Covers...

[mst76]

Note true .... draw an equilateral triangle, now take your compas, put the pointy bit on any corner and the pencil bit on any other, draw a curve from that corner to the free corner. Repeat with the pointy bit on the other two corners. Now erase the straign lines - voila!

Voila? Didn't you just create a circle by doing that?

look for "reuleaux triangle" on google

Re:Manhole Covers...

[uberdave]

The cover would have to be a third of it's side thick in order to not fall through. Do the math.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[twitter]

The minimum width of the cover is always the radius.

That's half right, but you get full credit.

Next!

Re:Manhole Covers...

[zilly]

It's still possible for triangles, equilateral ones included, to fall in if the lip isn't wide enough. Harder than a square, sure, but why risk it?

Aside from that, I would think round manhole covers are easier to fabricate than triangular ones. I mean, you might as well ask why Snapple bottles aren't triangular, or why bricks come in rectangles.

yours

Re:Manhole Covers...

[green1]

>> All of you are assuming that no one rams into the manhole cover with a car/truck/SUV, denting and distorting the shape enough to go through the hole

not likely a problem, I have never seen a bent manhole cover, (and you probably haven't either) they are VERRY strong/heavy things, I also think they would break before bending, but even that would take a LOT of effort, the car/truck/SUV on the other hand would be quite "bent" if it managed to "ram" a manhole cover.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[2short]

The answer to the gas station question is 59,542, of course. But if you're not in the midst of building site selection software for a major gas station chain...

You're correct that the point of the gas station question is to see if you can come up with some way to break the question down into numbers you can make reasonable guesses at. Which will allow you to come up with a number that's at least in the ballpark. Which is a very useful skill for sanity checking numbers, deciding whether a data structure can be kept in memory, etc. The only wrong answer is "I have no idea." I had the question as "how many hairdressers are there in the Us" The interviewer later confided that he got a little sick pleasure from the ones who said "I have no idea": "So it could be 10 times the total population then?" "Uh, no" "So you do have some idea. Can you come up with a better idea?"

Re:Manhole Covers...

[mindstrm]

All you are saying is that an equilateral triangle can be isncribed inside a circle. That has nothing to do with the problem.

The maximum cross-section on an equilateral triangle is viewing any edge straight on (the length of an edge)

The minimum cross section is viewing with one face parallel to the angle of viewing (the height of the triangle, if one point is facing upwards)

They are not the same.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[jolyonr]

Ah yes, but in Microsoft Manhole Cover Service Pack 3 they have solved the 'falling down hole' problem by filling up the hole with dirt before putting cover back on.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[AssFace]

My friends always joked around about wanting to give very concrete answers.

Like when asked how many tractors there are in the US, answer "7". If the person asks how you got it, just be very confident that you are right and you shouldn't be questioned.

On a side note - when interviewing, don't correct the person interviewing you. Even if they say something a little off, don't correct them. It is feasible that the person is a manager and is just filling in for a programmer that couldn't make that time slot to interview you and is reading a script of questions. Or it is always even possible the person is just screwing around with you.
I was interviewing a girl and was looking down at her resume mainly thinking how no matter what opinion I gave of her, it wouldn't matter - the CEO was going to make his own decision in his own magical way - which was largely based on how the people did at dinner when drunk (we were consultants, so that is part of the lifestyle... if you are young).
I see on her resume that she has "SQL" in there, but she hasn't mentioned ever working with it. I ask her what projects she has done with "sequel" and continued to read over her resume, not all that interested in what the hell she had to say - I was just passing time and trying not to look down her wide open blouse.
She proceeded to push her hand out over her resume to catch my attention and as if to say "stop" and she says "oh, I think you mean ESS-QUE-EL" - I smiled and nodded and said, of course. In my head I was thinking "oops, someone's not getting hired"

I told that story to my coworkers and for about a week after that, no matter what anyone was saying, we'd just stick our hands in their face and say "oh, I think you mean ESS-QUE-EL"

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Eideewt]

Since Venetian blinds are operated by pulling the string to the side, a longer string would only serve to make them inoperable.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[tabacco]

Only when you want to lower them.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Anonymous Cow herd]

or how about a sphere with a larger radius than the hole?

What a genius idea! Spherical manhole covers! At least then those Hummer owners can *use* all that ground clearance...

Re:Manhole Covers...

[appleLaserWriter]

You read this in a usenet thread in the summer of 1994. Almost the exact same thread. Some things never change...

Manhole covers at the main Redmond/Bellevue campus are round. However there are square service covers scattered around the campus that could easily be mistaken for manhole covers. These service covers appear to be made of corrugated sheet metal with hinges in the middle.

A good question for the Microsoft interviewer is along the lines of "what do you do when your computer locks up?"

The vast majority of MSFT employees will say "reboot."

Admins and other less technical people might suggest calling the ITG helpdesk.

If the interviewer expresses interest in debugging the issue, ask them for more details.

Another good brain-teaser for the microsoft intervieweris "what is uptime, and how does it relate to software reliability?"

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Actually, I worked for a year and a half on an "ESS QUE ELL" project before I found out it was also referred to as "Sequel". By that time I was schooling the dorks who I was working with and who had worked on it longer than I.

Be careful who you do and don't hire. Not everyone knows it's not pronounced "lihnux", either.

If you're a programmer on an interview, though, please learn that object oriented programming is not the same thing as and has nothing to do with object oriented design of a software (or other) project.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Just make up a number like 25,563,813 (what?
> You don't beleive that number is correct, prove
> me wrong).

Actually, the number is 25, 563, 812. Don't believe it? Do so at your own risk.

Re:Manhole Covers...

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> You're still not thinking in 3 dimensions

"He shows intelligence, but is thinking in two dimensions."

Hint: upright the triangle on the ground. You've probably set it along an edge and not on a point. How high is it?

Re:Manhole Covers...

[DJ_Goldfingerz]

Actually just to add to what you said and correct you, only shades with more then 4 sides and an even number of sides can be placed to fall in. Imagine a pentagon and you could position it to make it fall, not possible.

But you're right about the waste of space...

Re:Manhole Covers...

[photon317]

Agreed. All the mahole covers I remember seeing seemed to be solid cast iron around 1 inch thick. Compare that to the wimpy aluminum sheets on your car. Hell even older cars with real sheet steel bodies would crumble in the face of an inch of solid cast iron. And in any case, how do you "hit" a flat object on the ground with your car? Do you launch your car into the air and then dive back down at the hole? As mentioned before, workers don't leave the covers leaning up against things or roll them on their sides - they use little tools to hook into them and drag them away from the hole flatly and set them flatly on the ground nearby. They are always flat to the ground during the whole process.

Dumbest question ever

[Ars-Fartsica]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

My answer - I have no tolerance for idiotic canned interview questions and the morons who use them.

Really, this has got to be the worst, most moronic question that can be asked. It really is a red flag that the interviewer doesn't have anything intelligent to discuss - you should head for the door. What's even worse are the moronic answers people give in a hackneyed attempt to make a weakness look like a strength - "I'm a perfectionist!!" or "I work TOO hard!!".

Then again, ask a moronic question and expect a moronic answer.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[brakk]

After I got dropped kicked from my last big corporate job, they sent us to interview training as part of the severance package and they told us to answer it by stating a genuine weakness, but also add what you've done to fix it.

IE: I'm always late to work, so I bought 75 alarm clocks and hid them in various places around my house.

Or: I have trouble keeping track of all my tasks, so I started tattooing them on my skin so I see them in the mirror when I get up.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[ergo98]

I wouldn't call it a "moronic question" whatsoever: Certainly no worse than pulling a "brainteaser for dummies" out of the net archives, which is what the majority of "clever" Microsoft-like questions are. It's like being the Jeopardy host and smirking in self-satisfaction because you know all the answers...because you have them in front of you.

Questions like "What is your greatest weakness" can show a tremendous amount about the applicant, and is more of a discussion starter than a literal questions. As far as how the applicant answers, I can see definite downsides to "I'm a perfectionist" (meaning: I never finish projects because I'm always working on "just one last issue") or "I work too hard" (meaning: I'm a martyr and will likely have a serious case of burn-out several months down the road, not to mention upsetting the work apple-cart).

Any question at an interview, asked and interpreted by someone with intelligence, is a powerful question. Do you eat lunch? What are your career goals? What is an optimal work day? All of these questions can give great insight into the honesty and character of the interviewee. Personally I think the "Microsoft questions" are grossly overstated, and asking brainteasers most certainly didn't make Microsoft the success that it is (especially true to those that believe that Microsoft is more of a marketing success than a technical success. Personally I believe that they're a great technical success as well, but just pointing out the paradox).

Re:Dumbest question ever

[Ars-Fartsica]

No No No. If the interviewer can't ask me about my experience or even offer an intelligent technical question, they go in the moron file. Questions pulled out of "What Color Is Your Parachute" means the interviewer is either so stupid as to think this question is useful, or hasn't even bothered to read over my resume or think about meaningful questions.

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:Dumbest question ever

[Troed]

It's an excellent question. Anyone who cannot answer it is clearly in need of psychiatric help.

Yes I'm serious.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[secolactico]

Really, this has got to be the worst, most moronic question that can be asked.

I take it you didn't know the answer.

(kidding, dude, no need to take it personally).

What's even worse are the moronic answers people give in a hackneyed attempt to make a weakness look like a strength - "I'm a perfectionist!!" or "I work TOO hard!!".

Too true. When I hear people say that, I assume that they are either liars or lack imagination.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[DEBEDb]

I wonder if a good answer is: "We both
know that there is copious advice
from various sources on how to handle
these kinds of questions, so are you
checking if I've read up on it? Here,
let me read a stock answer."

Re:Dumbest question ever

[napir]

The correct answer to this question is "An intolerance for stupid questions."

Re:Dumbest question ever

[u-235-sentinel]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

Yeah. Pretty silly question IMHO. I prefer to ask the job seeker what self improvement would they like to work on or something to that effect.

Greatest weakness. lol.. I work to damn hard and need to spend more time with my family ;-)

Re:Dumbest question ever

[Wintermancer]

Sigh. I know this all too well. I had an interview yesterday and surely enough, you get the canned HR interview questions.

"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
"I'm a fscking chain saw!"

I guess it comes down to the "hire the person" vs. "hire the skill" mentality....

Re:Dumbest question ever

[Kneht]

The answer's easy:

"Sometimes I work so fast that I become invisible."

Follow this up with, "Do I look blurry to you?"

thanks to Scott Adams :)

Re:Dumbest question ever

[Sloppy]

Anyone who cannot answer it is clearly in need of psychiatric help.

Cannot, schmannot. Anyone who does give the answer to a stranger, is really stupid. Dress it up and pretend all you want, but when you get down to it, interviews are just part of a marketplace negotiation. It's no different than asking a salesman, "What sucks the most about your product?"

If someone asks that question directly instead of trying to infer the answer from other the answers to other questions, then they're either doing a quick stupidity check to see if someone is dumb enough to answer, or they're doing something totally alien and strange that has nothing to do with finding the best employee. The answer they get is almost guaranteed to not be useful for the purposes of their selection. It's noise and you're wasting interview time.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[bpfinn]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

My answer would be "Kryptonite", but that probably wouldn't get me the job.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[Mr. No Skills]

These are the kinds of questions you ask entry level people. If you're hiring experienced people you can ask them about their experience.

I suppose this whole exercise appeals to the puzzle crowd (as discussed in the original post), so you have a company of people who take Mensa tests looking to hire others. But, if you narrowly hire through a profile like this it seems to create a very narrow profile of kind of employee. That lack of diversity probably is some insight into the problems of trying to work with Microsoft as a partner or trying to buy their products as an employee.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[josephgrossberg]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

<SELF-DEPRECATION>
Krispy Kremes. Then again, they really don't need to ask, unless it's a phone interview.
</SELF-DEPRECATION>

Re:Dumbest question ever

[kakos]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

I wonder how they would react if you said something like, "A small spot on my heel which is the only place on my body that is vulnerable to damage."

Re:Dumbest question ever

[Troed]

I've answered that question a few times (I'm a consultant - I've answered both when asked by a customer and when changing employer)

I assure you, I've answered it honestly, and I've so far never failed an intervju.

A person who tries to hide his/her negative sides probably hides other things too. People like working with honest persons.

(My most negative side, btw, is that I like to debate and sometimes fail to see and accept that others are right too. See - I can even write it on Slashdot .. )

Re:Dumbest question ever

[J. J. Ramsey]

It's no different than asking a salesman, "What sucks the most about your product?"

If you phrase the question that way, the salesman might give you a dirty look. However, if you ask politely about the product's possible weaknesses, the answers that the salesman give you may be enlightening. If the salesman tap dances around the question, that tells you something, and if the salesman produces a list of potential problems, that may tell you something as well.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[J. J. Ramsey]

My answer would be "Kryptonite", but that probably wouldn't get me the job.

Actually, if you delivered it as a throwaway joke and then gave your real answer, it might work out.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[akuma(x86)]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

My favorite answer to this question is "kryptonite"

Re:Dumbest question ever

[SlashDotForever]

"As far as how the applicant answers, I can see definite downsides to "I'm a perfectionist" (meaning: I never finish projects because I'm always working on "just one last issue") or "I work too hard" (meaning: I'm a martyr and will likely have a serious case of burn-out several months down the road, not to mention upsetting the work apple-cart)." Geez...and what if the 'perfectionist' also knows how to stick to the specs, 'I work too hard', is actually factoring in his family life as well, or maybe he really knows when it's crunch time? 'Do you eat lunch?' Give me a break...What are you going to if the guy answers 'No, I use that time to watch pretty women go by on the patio'. How about I judge you right now for posting what you did? I think you are a prime candidate for a Jeopardy host yourself. I keep wondering when people will stop debating the merit of the interview questions and start looking at why none of the techniques work any better than picking candidates from a line up...

Re:Dumbest question ever

[marhar]

Most of the non-technical kinds of interview questions are intended to explore your personality. Are you the person I want to be spending hours a day with? etc. Occasionally this question reveals a real treasure, though. If somebody answers "I have a hard time finishing projects" but he has other attributes you desire (clever, able to start projects well) you can put that person in as part of a team which compensates for his weakness, and have some confidence that the person will have some degree of honesty about project status, etc.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[ergo98]

Remember that these were supposed answers to "what are your greatest weaknesses", so obviously if someone answers "perfectionist" or "work too hard" then clearly, if they are answering the question and not just lying through their teeth, they are weaknesses in the way that I said. If someone is so arrogant and personally blind that they truly don't think they have any weaknesses, or that it's none of the interviewer's businesses, then they could answer as such, but if they profess them as weaknesses then there definitely are negative connotations to them.

How about I judge you right now for posting what you did?

Be my guest! I'm hardly looking for you to hire me, and given that this is the best we have to evaluate and understand each other, of course you judge me based upon what I post. The same should be expected in an interview: Perhaps you are the smartest person who has ever existed, and is God's gift to mankind, but if you don't answer the questions that the interviewer asks to their satisfaction, then so be it. It's probably for the best if the interviewee thinks the questions are moronic that they don't get the job, as clearly they won't fit into the corporate or social culture of the job anyways.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[enomar]

My answer...

I sniff glue...and tell jokes at inappropriate times.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[(H)elix1]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

Concise answers. (silence)

To think they made me a job offer after clowning around on the interview...

Re:Dumbest question ever

[pi_rules]

"What is your greatest weakness?"

My last answer: Interviews.

After I explained that I tend to rate my skills lower than peers do because I compare myself against people with far more experience than I*: my interviews are usually unimpressive. I'd been told that by the HR directory of my previous job too -- I interview poorly.

* For instance, Bjarn Stroustroup , the creator of C++ mentions he's not an expert in the language anymore in his 3rd edition of The C++ Programming Language. Knowing things like that I can't rate myself as anything more than a 6/10 as a C++ coder. I've never had a living person next to me who could do significantly better, but I know they're out there.

Oh, and yes I got the job.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[The_dev0]

What is your greatest weakness?

I recently got asked this at a job interview. My answer was "Well, it takes me a long time to learn anything, I'm kind of a goof-off...... little stuff starts disappearing from the workplace..." The interviewer then asked me the following hypothetical: "There's a problem with the reactor. What do you do?" I don't think my reply was the one he wanted,"There's a problem with the reactor!? We're all going to die! Aaaaaaaugh!".

In the end the nerd gave the job to two of his old frat buddies from Alpha Tau. I guess it IS who you know...

Re:Dumbest question ever

[milou]

"What is my greatest weakness?"

CHOCOLATES!

Re:Dumbest question ever

[error0x100]

I'm a perfectionist!

Judging by the quality of their products, I doubt that saying this ever gets anyone a job at Microsoft anyway.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[SlashDotForever]

Let me restate my actual point. There is no chance of anyone (short of people that don't need the money) trying to honestly answer those questions. Most people will either have canned answers for those questions, or will give you what they think you want to hear. Not mention that most people don't even talk to their loved ones about their 'weaknesses', work related or otherwise. You can't expect people to walk into an interview and treat it like confession. I can't even count how many people, and this includes HR staff, and training that I have received that flat out have told me how to deal with those questions. The advice in a nutshell? 'Never say anything bad about yourself. People will be people.' This would seem to be backed up by the article. Now lets say that you are interviewing. The 'perfectionist' tells you the truth. Then the next guy answers with a weakness you prefer. You hire him. What if he is the 'forked tongue devil'? Great, you've hired a liar. This situation happens all the time. What are you going to do? Tell him he was naughty for misleading you? As for fitting in with corporate culture...sigh. Have you liked everyone that you have worked with? The team that needs the help should ALWAYS be part of the hiring process, but rarely ever is. Why is there friction between technical staff and management? Different philosophy that's why. HR has the same problem. The expression 'Like to like' applies well here. They hire people THEY like, not necessarily because of any fit. You've heard of the 'friends and family program haven't you? This means that you could lose the best candidate just because HR screens him based on a meaningless question or by the colour of his teeth. If it's made by man it can be conquered by man. HR has been invalidated by its own existance. Their is an entire industry out there setup to defeat every aspect of these questions, with one objective; to get you a job. If that article points out one thing it is that the whole HR industry has no idea what they need to do in order to identify good candidates. So why keep them, or their philosophy? I have worked for many companies that didn't have HR (they were small to medium sized) and they ran great. Nice people, good environments. The bigger companies have HR departments and I found that they were no better or worse than the small/medium companies I have worked for. One of the best places I worked (medium sized) didn't bother with any of those questions or techniques. They narrowed the field to those with a good combination of skill, experience, and then took them to lunch. Yes, lunch or bought them a coffee, candidates choice. The manager looking for help, and one tech guy, would simply see what this person was all about. If they got a good vibe and the person seemed to be genuine; they were hired. This, in a way, is quite subjective, but everywhere I have been that uses a method like that, has been a great place to work. HR just hasn't delivered on what is been promising for years. It is time to accept the fact that their is no cookie cutter way to hire people. You need to feel them out yourself and take a chance.

Re:Dumbest question ever

[SlashDotForever]

Right on dude. I agree. But...I think that is only represents the people that are interviewing you, not necessarily the people that you might work for. Also, spot on with you interviewing them

Re:Dumbest question ever

[SlashDotForever]

Um, how come everybody that seems to support HR on this thread is posting as 'Anonymous Coward'?

typical question

[tjw]

Which of the following would you most prefer?
A: a puppy,
B: a pretty flower from your sweety, or
C: a large properly formatted data file?

Re:typical question

[brakk]

C is correct....

We would have also accepted "a puppy"

Re:typical question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it a mechanical puppy?

Re:typical question

[Havokmon]

C: a large properly formatted data file?

Did anyone else just automatically put 'disk' at the end of 'large properly formatted data'?

I was wondering why anyone would still want an 8" disk..

Re:typical question

[fliplap]

Correct Answer:

I would take the puppy from the search window and use him to find my large, properly formated data file which was likely hidden by my usually flower giving sweety after I spent too much time at work.

Re:typical question

[Fascist Christ]

Not A, because a puppy requires too much maintenance.

Not B, a flower won't last more than a few days.

Not C, it could contain copyrighted material.

Although, when you use words like "pretty" and "sweety," you could convince me to buy a flower today, and replace it every time it dies.

Re:typical question

[Dynastar454]

This isn't a good question. I don't care for flowers, and I'm algeric to dogs. Even though I actually do like large, properly formatted data files, I'd have to take it even if I didn't give a rat's about them.

Re:typical question

[ediron2]

Does anyone know when Aibo will come out with Sony Memory Stick interfaces? Then I can have a puppy capable of carrying a flower and a well formatted data file, all in one. And it doesn't need to be let out at 3am.

Ooh, speaking of which, I've gotta go let the dog in!

My Interview

[UCRowerG]

Yes, at graduation time I was interviewed by a Microsoft guy, from their gaming department.

In one of his interview questions he asked me how many "weighings" I would need on a scale to find the one marble that was differently weighed from the other ones. I think the idea was for me to come up with some log-base-2 of n weighings. Since he didn't specify that the unique marble was specifically heavier (or lighter), he couldn't figure out why I needed an extra weighing for my result, until I explained my methodology to him.

Then he realized that he had presented the problem somewhat incorrectly and grudgingly said, "Well I guess you get that right, since I didn't explain the problem completely."

...Needless to say I was not called back for a second interview.

Re:My Interview

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Nah...it was probably your Linux t-shirt...

Re:My Interview

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but I am an MS employee and I have interviewed 4 candidates to date. In the training session they give us, they tell us to simply say "I probably explained the problem incorrectly" when an applicant is becoming particularly defensive about his (probably wrong) answer. Judging from your "log base 2" answer to the weighted ball problem, I'd say you got the canned response. Incidentally, the answer is 3 when 12 balls are being used.

Re:My Interview

[sholden]

log-base-2 of n is not optimal for that problem, so it's not surporising you missed stage 2... And you aren't supposed to be told whether the odd marble is heavier or lighter, working that out is part of the problem.

It's doable in O(log-base-3 of n), well log3(2n+3) to be precise...

That's using a balance which compares the weight of two sets of marbles.

Re:My Interview

[Some Dumbass...]

Then he realized that he had presented the problem somewhat incorrectly and grudgingly said, "Well I guess you get that right, since I didn't explain the problem completely." ...Needless to say I was not called back for a second interview.

I don't doubt it. I have heard of a similar MS question involving sinners with marks on their foreheads (or some variation on this).

The correct answer is supposed to be three. I remember reading an interview in which an interviewee got this question correct. Note however that there is no reason to start counting at 1. Why didn't people start noticing the marks on the day when they were put there? The real answer should be two.

Needless to say, I suspect that this is how MS hires C programmers...

Re:My Interview

[Some Dumbass...]

The real answer should be two.

By which, of course, I mean "four" (or three sinners would take in "two" days, depending on how the question is asked). Needless to say, I'm a lousy C programmer. :)

Re:My Interview

[sholden]

Nope. You can do it in three always.

HINT TO FOLLOW - READING FURTHER MAY REDUCE FUN

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The key is to split it into three sets instead of two sets at the start...

Re:My Interview

[docbrown42]

Yes, at graduation time I was interviewed by a Microsoft guy, from their gaming department.

Sorry to hear that. Were you're grades that low?

I hope you sanitised yourself afterwards.

Re:My Interview

[equivocal]

The key is to split it into three sets instead of two sets at the start... PayPal had this problem posted on their website a few years ago. I got as far as dividing into three groups. But 3 weighings was only possible when things went well. If the first 4 vs. 4 weighing is balanced then the errant marble is in the unweighed 4 and which one can be determined in 2 more weighings. But if the first weighing is unblanced then finding which of the 8 was errant took more than 3 weighings.

Re:My Interview

[Keighvin]

So, in the first 2 weighings you can determine whether the ball is lighter or heavier, and isolate the set of 4 in which it occurs (having split it into 3 equal sets). Fair enough, you now have the 4 balls in which the odd one occurs.

Please tell me how in 1 weighing using the balance you can determine which of these are the target. Anyone? Near as I can figure you need an additional weighing once narrowing this down to 2 (using a "balanced" break-down from the 4). Likewise, I cannot find an alternate method by substituting some known standard balls from the already eliminated sets which will allow you to reduce this to a single specimen.

So I'm with the originator: you'd need 4 steps to know exacly which one it is. If anyone has a different answer, please enlighten me I'd honestly love to know how my approach can be optimised.

Re:My Interview

[sholden]

You can isolate it to three balls not four, by mixing your sets when weighing...

You should prbably stop reading if you don't want to see a solution. Maybe this sentence will get me past the compression filter? Hooray it did!

Anyway here's some code that solves the problem in 3 weighings, being perl it should be sufficiently unreadable to allow those who want to work it out themselves to look away before it gives away the trick. The choice of marbles for the second weighing guarantees we have only three contenders for the odd marble for the final weighing...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# change one of these to a 9 or 11 :)
our @m = (10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10);
our $weighings = 0;

sub weigh {
my $left = shift;
my $right = shift;
my $scale = 0;
$weighings++;
$scale+=$_ for @$right;
$scale-=$_ for @$left;
$scale;
}

my $w1 = weigh([@m[0,1,2,3]], [@m[4,5,6,7]]);
my $w2 = weigh([@m[4,5,6,3]], [@m[8,9,10,7]]);

#If $w1 is 0, we could weigh 0,1,2 against 8,9,10 which would take
#us to the else part with @down_to_three=(8,9,10) is the result wasn't 0
#if it was 0 then 11 is the odd marble, so we can just weigh it against
#any other marble to get the answer - but adding the extra known normal
#ball to each side doesn't hurt, and lets is use the more general check...

if ($w1==$w2) {
my $w3 = weigh([$m[7]], [$m[11]]);
if ($w3==0) {
if ($w1>0) {
print "Marble 3 is lighter\n";
} elsif ($w1<0) {
print "Marble 3 is heavier\n";
} else {
print "All marbles are the same\n";
}
} elsif ($w3>0) {
if ($w1>0) {
print "Can't happen\n";
} elsif ($w1<0) {
print "Marble 7 is lighter\n";
} else {
print "Marble 11 is heavier\n";
}
} else {
if ($w1>0) {
print "Marble 7 is heavier\n";
} elsif ($w1<0) {
print "Can't happen\n";
} else {
print "Marble 11 is lighter\n";
}
}
} else {
my @down_to_three;
my $type;
if ($w1==0) {
@down_to_three = (8,9,10);
if ($w2>0) {
$type = 'heavier';
} else {
$type = 'lighter';
}
} elsif ($w2==0) {
@down_to_three = (0,1,2);
if ($w1>0) {
$type = 'lighter';
} else {
$type = 'heavier';
}
} else {
@down_to_three = (4,5,6);
if ($w1>0) {
$type = 'heavier';
} else {
$type = 'lighter';
}
}
my $w3 = weigh([$m[$down_to_three[0]]],[$m[$down_to_three[1 ]]]);
if ($w3==0) {
print "Marble $down_to_three[2] is $type\n";
} elsif ($w3>0) {
if ($type eq 'heavier') {
print "Marble $down_to_three[1] is heavier\n";
} else {
print "Marble $down_to_three[0] is lighter\n";
}
} else {
if ($type eq 'heavier') {
print "Marble $down_to_three[0] is heavier\n";
} else {
print "Marble $down_to_three[1] is lighter\n";
}
}
}

print "Used $weighings weighings\n";

Re:My Interview

[ggwood]

I was asked the 12 coins: one either heavy or light find which one and whether it is heavy or light - question when a graduate student in physics, along with my 11 classmates. None of us came up with the answer for one week - and then we only proved the answer was 3. Anyone who would want to try to solve this problem in, say, 10 minuets is just going to find people who have already seen the problem (in my opinion).

Now, I'm not saying *no one* could figure it out in 10 minuets, (although you might start seeing lots of autistic people working for you...) but if 11 people studying for Ph.D's in physics can't do it in under an hour it seems a poor question.

By the way, there is a similar test we take in physics called either the qualifier or the comprehensive exam. Professors just ask the questions they did not get as grad students. However, we study for months ahead of time (conventional wisdom is about six weeks will do it) and most do rather well.

It is common in physics to say the last time I knew how to do that was when I took the comp's.

My reaction to Microsoft(M$) asking questions like this is that they will begin to get a bunch of cheaters (people who just looked up some questions ahead of time and memorized a bunch of answers - then just got lucky.)

These people may fit perfectly into the M$ culture.

I would imagine it would make a rather Machiavellian culture. At the end of the day you can't pay me enough to work with jerks. Unless it was enough to retire on within a few years, which I suppose at M$ it used to be.

Re:My Interview

[Mr Fodder]

> The key is to split it into three sets instead of two sets at the start...

How about splitting it into 12 sets?

Re:My Interview

[Locutus]

it really doesn't matter who microsoft hires these days anyway. Unless they are being hired for the PR positions. $50 billion buys alot of PHB's attention and buys them into many many 'partnerships'.

BTW, they are still trying to figure out how to move their Mt Fuji( Windows ). GNU/Linux is the newly forming mountain that's getting too much attention these days for them to just sit on their mountain.

IMHO.

LoB

Re:My Interview

[solarlux]

Actually, it does matter whether or not the odd-ball is heavier or lighter, even if you use a log base 3 solution.

Let's say you first measure 4 vs 4 first (planning to use the remaining 4 if the scales are even). If one of the sides tips, which ones do you throw out? You have to know you are looking for a heavier ball.

Re:My Interview

[Servants]

A very tough problem, involving considerable trial and error and pretty much insolvable in interview-time; I'm guessing the reports that this particular problem was used are probably apocryphal.

The statement of the problem: Given 12 objects, exactly one of which is a different weight than the others, determine a) which object is different and b) whether it's lighter or heavier than the rest. Use only 3 weighings on a balance scale.

It can be solved, but the solution boils down to a bunch of if-then directives.

------------

Weigh 4 balls vs 4 balls.

Equal:
One of the remaining 4 is heavier or ligher.
Weigh 3 "good" balls against 3 of those 4 balls.
Equal:
Weigh the remaining ball against a "good" ball
to see if it's heavier or lighter. []
Different:
Observe whether the three balls were heavier or lighter
than the good balls. If heavier, weigh 1 of the 3
against another of the 3. If these are the same, the
last ball is different and heavier. If they're
different, the heavier ball is the odd one out.
Similarly if the three balls are lighter than the
good ones. []

Unequal:
Take (A) 3 balls from the heavy side and 1 from the light side, and weigh against (B) 3 "good" balls and 1 from the heavy side.

If they're equal, we know one of 3 balls from the light side is lighter than the others. Weigh 2 against each other. []

If side A is heavier, we know one of the heavy-side balls on side A is heavier than the others. Weigh 2 against each other. []

If side B is heavier, we can limit our search to the light-side ball on side A and the heavy-side ball on side B. Weigh one of these against a "good" ball. []

I think there might also be one variation on part of this solution (maybe on the second weighing, if the first turs out unequal).

Re:My Interview

[solarlux]

Whether or not the oddball is heavier or lighter does matter.

If you weigh 4 vs 4 in round 1, which ones are you going to set aside if the scales tip? Let's say you go with the heavier group. The 2 vs 2 weighing here may be even since the oddball was lighter and was in the group you set aside. By that point, you have to find the oddball in the set-aside group of four with only one remaining weighing.

Re:My Interview

[Servants]

Check out my post elsewhere in the thread for a solution in English.

Re:My Interview

[H*(BZ_2)-Module]

The problem is given the set of marbles to determine which one marble among them is heavier or lighter than the rest using a balance scale. You also must determine whether the bad marble is heavier or lighter. I had this question as a homework problem for a discrete mathematics class a while back. The general case is more interesting: Prove that you can find the bad marble among (3^n - 1)/2 - 1 marbles using n weighings. Note that the "interview case" is when n = 3.

Re:My Interview

[Caoch93]

I think it has to do with observing your thinking processes, really. I interviewed with MS. For the record, I was asked the "weighted ball" question and did get it right, but I don't think they're looking for you to sit in silence and spit out the correct answer. I was encouraged to verbally noodle everything out because they told me they wanted to "hear how I think."

Honestly, if I as an undergrad with little formal physics training can answer what is really a "how do you find the non-obvious odd-man-out of a group given the ability to only equate groups" puzzle noodling it out verbally, then I don't see where the big deal is. Really, the test is in the non-lateral thinking that, for your second weighing, you can remove half of the quantity from each end of the balence.

For the record, I blew another puzzle involving figuring out which switch lights which lightbulb in a panel of three consecutive lightbulbs when I cannot see the lightbulbs without shutting off the lights first. It might have had some effects on my not getting the job, though I think what most likely did it was my discovery that I was interviewing for what was essentially telephone tech support (albeit to the big customers of MS) and, in anger, being honest with them about my opinion of Microsoft products.

Re:My Interview

[sholden]

True enough...

I added the big-O notation where I shouldn't have since in this problem the answer of 3 is *so* much better than 4 :)

The post I replied to didn't use big-O and I suspect the author's solution was the standard first attempt (which ignores the usefulness of the tri-value output of the scales)...

Re:My Interview

[deranged unix nut]

By specifying the design of the scale, I could find a single marble (heavier or lighter) out of any sized set of otherwise equally weighted marbles in exactly two weighings.

Think outside the box, or in this case, outside of the scale and outside of a single dimension. :)

Re:My Interview

[esampson]

I've heard this question before. You don't need to know which is lighter and which is heavier. That actually is part of the problem.

You do, however, need to state how many marbles there are. I think in the usually phrased question its 12 and you can accomplish it in 3 weighings.

Its a fairly stupid thing for a test though. Either the person answers quickly because in the past they've read how to do that problem or they once spent a few hours solving it before, they don't answer because its honestly a pretty difficult problem to work out, or they take at least 15 minutes to half an hour in rare cases and solve it.

So 95% of the time you get someone who can regurgitate something they read or who doesn't know a solution to an obscure problem. I guess its good for locating that elusive 5%.

Then again, perhaps some of the questions are designed to check the character of an applicant. How many gas stations in the US? Does the person make a guess or just admit that they don't know?

Re:My Interview

[janeil]

The 12 coins is a great problem, and a joy to solve by oneself, you should skip the solutions here and try it if you've never had the pleasure.

I had a 7th grade student solve it a long time ago, though it took him overnight and I don't know if he had help. Also, we had already looked at the 9 coins, one heavy, two weighings problem so I'm sure that helped him.

I'd think that in an interview, just coming up with the first crucial step, then some idea of the rest of the solution in ten minutes would be pretty good, IF one had never heard of the problem. This is an ancient math question though, seems like everyone in CS or Math or Physics would have heard of this one by college.

Re:My Interview

[Zirnike]

8 marbles... put 1, 2 on one scale and 3, 4 on the other. If one side tips, it's trivial to get which is off in 2 weighings. (weigh 1,2, they're the same, weigh 1 vs 3 (you can't do 3v4, as you don't know which is heavier)) Remember, you don't need to figure out if it's heavier or lighter.

If it's not in 1-4, then put 1, 2 on one side and 5, 6 on the other. see above parenthetical (but 1v5) if they aren't equal. Otherwise, weigh 1v7.

2 weighings gets you which group of 2 it's in. Third one tells you which it is. The important part is to remember that the first 1/2 you weigh tells you either that your target is in that half (so you didn't 'waste' a step) or gives you 4 marbles you know are identical.

Re:My Interview

[solarlux]

A nice solution... for 8 marbles. However, I was referring to the 12 marble puzzle. I said start with 8 because if the scales is even (four vs four), you know the 4 not being weighed contains the odd stone.

Re:My Interview

[deranged unix nut]

Freaks like you piss me off.

Thanks! I must be doing something right if I am pissing someone off.
FYI, I spent six months the first time someone gave me that problem before I came up with a workable solution, and then I came up with four variants on the solution in the next week.

Re:My Interview

[antiher0]

this is correct even when you don't know whether the marble is lighter or heavier.

let's take a look, shall we?

We number the balls and seperate them into three differen groups, as below:

(1 2 3 4) we'll call G1
(5 6 7 8) we'll call G2
(9 10 11 12) we'll call G3

The ball we seek shall be dubbed B.

So in move one, we weigh G1 and G2. There are two possible outcomes:

If G1 == G2, then they all weigh the same, and B is in G3. Now we weigh 9 and 10 against 11 and 8. If they balance, then B is 12, and we can find out if it's heavier or lighter by comparing it to any other ball. If they do not balance, then we know that either 9 or 10 is light, or 11 is heavy. If this is the case, we weigh 9 against 10. If they balance, B is 11. If they don't balance, the lighter one is B.

If G1 != G2, then G3 doesn't contain B. Either the heavier group contains a heavy ball, or the lighter group contains a light ball. Now we can weigh 1 2 and 5 against 3 6 and 9. If they balance, we know that either 7 or 8 is heavy, or 4 is light. So we weigh 7 and 8. If they balance, then B is 4. If 1 2 and 5 are lighter. Then either 1 or 2 is light, or 6 is heavy. We can weigh 1 against 2 to find out which is true. If 1 2 and 5 are heavier, then either 3 is light, or 5 is heavy. We can weigh 3 against any ball other than 5 to find out which is true. A similar argument can be made for the other situations.

From this we see that you can determine the answer in only 3 weighings.

Re:My Interview

[dwsauder]

Oh, yeah. That question!

One of the professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland put that question on an exam in a graduate course in information theory.

When I was at UM, the EE department had some of the most arrogant professors you can imagine. On many tests the high score was about 70, with the median score being in the 40s. (I attended the graduate school at UM.)

In case you were wondering, this is not a simple problem. The solution most definitely does not involve base 2 logarithms (even though superficial considerations from information theory might have you think that). And, yes, you are not told whether the different marble is heavier or lighter than the others. You have to figure that out by using the balance scale.

Re:My Interview

[Zirnike]

"If you weigh 4 vs 4 in round 1, which ones are you going to set aside if the scales tip? Let's say you go with the heavier group"

No offence, but the way that's phrased screams '8 marbles!' Add in talking about weighing a total of 4, and then the 'set aside' group of 4...

I'll have to think about doing 12 optimally.

More reads

[Anonymous Coward]

some more questions.

Jesus.

[Wakko Warner]

Longest. Slashdot article. Evar.

Anyway, since Microsoft was basically handed the PC operating systems market and has been running with it ever since, I think it's silly to say that $250B in market capitalization can't be wrong any more often than any other company can. They're atypical of the software industry and business in general.

- A.P.

Re:Jesus.

[ewithrow]

It's not like anyone reads the articles anyway ;)

Re:Jesus.

[Skyhoper]

400 Billion Amphibians Can't Be Wrong!

Intuition vs. Logic

[KiahZero]

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."

That's the problem with these sort of questions used exclusively. Logic is important in CS. Sure, being able to think logically 'outside the box' is good, but you also need skilled implementers; people who can take an idea for a program and program it well.

Then again, maybe I just missed the point.

Not all manhole covers are round

[Viol8]

Here in the UK you can find oblong ones all over the place though generally they're for utilities
not entry to the sewage system.

Guess I won't get a job at MS for being a smartass. Oh well. Guess it'll be using slackware for
a while longer...

Microsoft's Hiring Myth

[f1f2f3]

Microsoft only hires the best & brightest engineers, putting canidates through rigiourous testing and many rounds of interviews before hiring them.

Micorsoft releases horribly bloated software riddled with bugs and security problems.

Discuss.

Re:Microsoft's Hiring Myth

[Anonymous Coward]

So does the unwashed programming masses that produce Open Source.

In the words of so many that have come before, the answer is:

"Software is hard"

It actually may be the most difficult engineering task there is and it is definanately the most lightly taken engineering task there is. What is the enevitable result?

Re:Microsoft's Hiring Myth

[BJZQ8]

I went to school with a person that was considered a super-intellect type, even though I regularly out-scored him on standard tests. He later went on to such-and-such academy and such-and-such school. He ended up at Microsoft, and is listed in some archaic credits of Internet Explorer 4.0 as a member of "Core." Well, I have searched the internet from one end to the other, and he has never posted anything, anywhere, at least using his real name. I can find his supposed house and address on Mapquest (outside Redmond of course.) Remember he was working for them in 1994-1995 or so, when the Internet was "hot."...and he's never been sighted anywhere on the thing he supposedly helped create. So I almost believe the oil-rig piling story...

Re:Microsoft's Hiring Myth

[J. J. Ramsey]

It occurs to me that both can be true at the same time. If you put programmers through a "death march" schedule, or let marketing decide too many of the product specs, or have an incentive structure that discourages proper dealing with security issues, then even if your programmers are bright, they can still produce junk.

Some of my interview questions

[ColonelPanic]

I occasionally get a crack at candidates for experienced systems programming positions, and I like to see whether they know what they don't know. So I like to ask simple programming questions like:

• How does struct member layout differ between little-endian and big-endian architectures?
  
• Can integer division ever overflow?
  
• The Cray X1 has an instruction that atomically ANDs a word in memory with one register value and then XQRs the result with another. How would you use this to implement an atomic "set bit" or "clear bit" primitive?
  
• Tell me about a compiler bug that's bitten you and how you worked around it (or better, fixed it)
  

Re:Some of my interview questions

[Emil Brink]

I'm stumped by a one of those, so I guess you wouldn't hire me. But that's OK since I already am employed. Two observations, though:

• Did you mean that that Cray instruction did an XOR? Is it a typo, or are Crays so exotic and cool they actually have a boolean operation unknown to, well, me?
• There are no compiler bugs in reality. It's always my fault. :) Just this morning, I was staring at a piece of code, convinced I was seeing a compiler bug where it optimized away my if logic. I even showed it to a coworker, and he agreed. Then, later on, I spotted the spurious semicolon...

Re:Some of my interview questions

[LordNimon]

Ok, I'll bite:

• They don't. Endianness applies only to multi-byte integers. If a structure member is a multi-byte integer, then the layout of its bytes is endian-dependent, but that has nothing to do with the fact that it's part of a structure.
• Yes, if the destination (quotient) register is smaller than the dividend register. For example, if the divisor is 1, then the quotient is the same as the dividend, so it needs a register at least as large.
• Assume the instruction ANDs with register A and XORs with register B, and assume A and B are 8-bit registers (to keep it simple). To set bit 0, A=0xFE and B=1. To clear, A=0xFE and B=0.
• Questions that ask you to remember some obscure incident a long time ago are unfair. I've been programming for 25 years, and I guess that I've come across a compiler bug or two, but I can't remember that any more. If I thought that I really needed to give an answer, I'd lie to you. Do you really want to ask questions like that?

Re:Some of my interview questions

[b1t r0t]

* There are no compiler bugs in reality. It's always my fault. :) Just this morning, I was staring at a piece of code, convinced I was seeing a compiler bug where it optimized away my if logic. I even showed it to a coworker, and he agreed. Then, later on, I spotted the spurious semicolon...

--
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}

I just spent two minutes looking at your sig trying to figure out why the semicolon was spurious before I realized it was just your sig!

Re:Some of my interview questions

[machine of god]

So what you're saying is that I still have a bit of schooling to go then huh.

Re:Some of my interview questions

[Emil Brink]

Heh. Sorry about that, I guess there's a point in having a standardized separator between message body and sig, like on Usenet... Anyway, I try to keep the code I write at work slightly more legible and straight-forward. Really! :)

Re:Some of my interview questions

[Dr. Manhattan]

Tell me about a compiler bug that's bitten you and how you worked around it (or better, fixed it)

The Diab M68K C compiler, 'affectionately' called "C--" where I used to work. If you had a pointer to a struct, you could dereference any field in any other struct through it.

That is to say, you could do "coordPtr->degrees", even if the definition of "struct coord" didn't have a member called "degrees". So long as any other structure in the program had a field called "degrees", it would just blindly use that offset. Much memory corruption ensued.

I personally got around it by knowing what the hell I was doing, plus ctags and such. We weren't allowed to fix it, but eventually there was a minor rebellion and we started using GCC with Cygnus support.

Re:Some of my interview questions

[ceswiedler]

I believe that K+R C allows this, at least unofficially. I seem to recall something like this from the UNIX 6th ed. sources (in the famous Lions book). They declare a struct type, then later take a scalar variable (not sure if it was even a pointer) and dereference it as that struct without so much as a cast.

struct { int width } foo;
int rod;
bar = rod.width;

Re:Some of my interview questions

[Dr. Zowie]

Integer divide can overflow even if the operands have the same size as the destination. Consider

-32768 / -1 = 32768

That would overflow a signed short.

Re:Some of my interview questions

[jandrese]

WTF does the XQR operator do?

That fourth question seems to involve a bit of luck. People who religiously stick to stable compilers and try to avoid doing exceptionally bizarre things are unlikely to ever trigger bugs. I know the only time I've ever seen compiler "bugs" (when the compiler actually crashes or produces something you didn't want) was when I had a bug in my code that confused the compiler slightly. The only true bugs I've found have been in "toy" compilers, and I doubt you want to hear about bugs in Scheme.

Re:Some of my interview questions

[LordNimon]

I don't think that's a better answer, since your example is highly unlikely to occur in practice, whereas mine is much more likely.

Re:Some of my interview questions

[wildsurf]

Can integer division ever overflow?

Signed 16-bit integers: -32768 / -1. (Or anything divided by zero, I suppose.)

Re:Some of my interview questions

[Viadd]

How does struct member layout differ between little-endian and big-endian architectures?

The C++ spec states that the layout of bitfield elements is unspecified. (As is whether unmarked bitfield elements are signed or unsigned.)

In practice there is a strong correlation in endianness and bitfield order (e.g. gcc for PPC and Intel). But anyone who asserts that all little-endian compilers are one way and all big-endian compilers are the other way should be corrected, then shipped off to your competitor.

Was that a Book Review?....

[whazzy]

....Or the author's own thought process chugging up ssooo much space? Anywayz,here'z my take on the issue. 1.I don't subscribe to the 'ask puzzles-judge programming skills-will hire' approach.Sure,it might have worked for microsoft,but microsoft is anywayz hiring from the top schools(If Ballmer is interested in a kid from Ivy league schools,he need'nt think for 15 seconds before hiring him!The fact that he is in the Ivy school is proof enough that he must have 'somthing'in that brain of his!.True..not ALL Ivy leaguers are brainy,but the reputation is good enuff) 2.What might work for Microsoft may not at all work for any other company/profession. 3.Has anyone correlated how other big tech companies base their hiring process?Now,that would be an interesting read and would give a lot more information. 4.I will skip reading this book precisely for the above reasons

Re:Was that a Book Review?....

[esampson]

The fact that he is in the Ivy school is proof enough that he must have 'somthing'in that brain of his!

George W. Bush is an Ivy League graduate.

How to move Mount Fuji

[r4lv3k]

Detonate a large explosive on the sea floor offshore from Mount Fuji. When Godzilla wakes up, deploy large inflatable monster of choice in front of Mount Fuji. Fuji moved (though not intact).

manhole covers

[dizco]

manhole covers, when they are round, are round because the manhole is round. manholes are often round because its an easy shape to make, is structurally sound, and is a nice shape for a person to crawl down.

There are other shapes that won't fit down the hole they're covering.

And there are pleanty of non-round manholes, which means that manholes aren't by definition round. So the question is akin to 'why are cars red?'. ... They're not red. Some of them are red, and the reason those ones are red is because they're red. Round manholes are round because they are round.

--Sean

Quite the contrary

[jkabbe]

Microsoft seems to be the case-study in showing that actual employee skill is almost irrelevant to success. Sure, they've got some bright people, but what have they done with it?

Re:Quite the contrary

[jkabbe]

No, the marketers, managers, and business planners did that. What did the coders/testers/designers do?

Who cares

[eadint]

Q: Mount fujii
a) directed nuclear explosion?
q) manhole covers.
a) best mass to shape for strenght ration
q) venitian blinds.
a) stepping motor, radio plc and controller stupid.

i guess i wouldnt get a job at microsoft.

The answers are:

[burgburgburg]

False
True

What's to discuss?

You are so wrong

[been42]

Manhole covers are round to fit the holes.

Re:You are so wrong

[JDevers]

That's my first thought too. Obviously round holes need round plugs ;)

Re:You are so wrong

[pyrrho]

but why are the holes round... oh forget it... good answer, you're hired!

Re:You are so wrong

[ArsonSmith]

what came first, the man hole or the cover?

Re:You are so wrong

[Lovepump]

The man who dug the hole, I'd assume.

Mount Fuji

[gbrandt]

The first thing to realize...is that there is no Mount Fuji

Gregor

Why....

[Russ Nelson]

Why, I would move it with a teaspoon, naturally. How much more Zen can you get than that?
-russ

Re:Why....

[Tenebrious1]

Why, I would move it with a teaspoon, naturally. How much more Zen can you get than that?

Well, a zen master would use chopsticks...

Moving Mt. Fuji?

[grub]

Pffff... I'll sit back on a lawn chair with some beer and let plate tectonics do all the work.

Re:Moving Mt. Fuji?

[UWC]

There's also the Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) field option, if you just don't feel like moving it.

Re:Moving Mt. Fuji?

[Fesh]

Skip that. I already am moving it while sitting here. Unless you're a Flat-Earther, it's pretty plain that Mt. Fuji is in fact moving in 3-space relative to any arbitrarily point outside the Earth's surface.

Therefore, by bringing this point up, I've effectively moved the mountain.

Yes, I am the center of the Universe. Move along... *grin*

Re:Moving Mt. Fuji?

[Black Rabbit]

I can't believe that only one other Hitchhiker's Guide fan on /. had this exact thought triggered upon reading that header. Is the Guide really that old? Can't be! I still remember the bit in the story! Mod that one up!

Moving Mt. Fuji

[teslatug]

Make everyone that sees it sign an EUSA (End User Seeing Agreement) that prevents anyone from disclosing the current location of Mt. Fuji. Put out statement with new location.

How would you reprogram Windows so it won't crash?

[MrGibbage]

Download a copy of Linux and rename it Windows?

For those who care

[SplendidIsolatn]

GAMES magazine detailed this book and had 10 sample problems in their last issue. Very interesting read.

Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[bravehamster]

Admiral Rickover, who was placed in charge of creating the Navy's nuclear program was pretty much given a free hand in picking who he wanted to have working for him. His job interview tended to be a bit extreme, like hiding in the closet and jumping out at candidates to see how they would react, throwing things, insulting them. The one I remember hearing about the most was of a young midshipman who was about to graduate from the Academy and wanted to go into the nuclear submarine program. After sitting down for the interview, Adm. Rickover looked him straight in the eye, and said "Son, you have 30 seconds to piss me off." The midshipman sat there for a little bit, then noticed a glass model of the U.S.S. Nautilus sitting on the Admirals desk. He picked it up and smashed it to the floor. The Admiral stood up and yelled out "Dammit, that *pissed* me off! You've got the job."

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.

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[SuiteSisterMary]

Would there happen to be a book about this? Sounds like it would be an interesting read.

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[1984]

This is documented a little differently in Blind Man's Bluff a book all about US submarine programs in the cold war. The situation is basically the same, but the applicant sweeps everything off the Admiral's desk onto the floor (IIRC). There isn't a specific mention of smashing a glass model of the U.S.S. Nautilus.

Incidentally, that book is an excellent read.

(Of course if I'm not remembering it right, strike me down for being arrogant.)

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[CvD]

This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch: Silly Job Interview / Careers Advisory Board (Google cache). The interviewer basically confuses the hell out of the interviewee. Hilarious.

Sorry the original page this was on died. Sorry can't post it here cause the lameness filter is too lame.

Cheers,

Costyn.

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[jjohnson]

I read that anecdote in "Blind Man's Bluff", by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, except that in the book, the midshipman sweeps his arm across Rickover's desk, pushing everything onto the floor.

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[SuiteSisterMary]

<Mr. Burns Voice >Excellent.</Mr. Burns Voice >

Thanks for the reference; it's been added to my 'hooge unwieldy list of books to get.'

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[Nick of NSTime]

Thanks for the reference; it's been added to my 'hooge unwieldy list of books to get.'

Perhaps you should consider adding a dictionary to that list.

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[SuiteSisterMary]

What, because I used 'oo' instead of 'u?' The list is HOOOOOOOOGE!

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[torpor]

Freakin' hell you two, get a room ...

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[Starcub]

I thought the Admiral was trying to warn the recruit the only way he could: "You don't want a crappy job like that, and I'm not going to give it to you unless you demonstrate extreme stupidity." After all, who is going to be affected by a nuclear accident that happens in a thick metal tube 300 meters beneath the sea?

Re:Kinda like Admiral Rickover

[WasterDave]

"Son, you have 30 seconds to piss me off."

"No"

Dave

If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following...

[JaredOfEuropa]

Interview Question:

1. Collect underpants.
2. ???
3. Profit!


What is step 2?

Microsoft products

[John Bayko]

That's the problem with Microsoft product design to begin with. Their products are too clever, and not smart enough.

They give the illusion of being powerful, but the clever parts don't work together well, or require more effort or detailed knowledge than they have to (anything that needs a "Wizard" software assistant to do something is waaaay overcomplicated to begin with).

The trick to being hired by MS...

[FyRE666]

After parking, make sure you "forget" to lock your car doors in full view of the CCTV cameras, with all your personal documents strewn over the seats where anyone can get at them.

Been there ... done that

[Starky]

I worked for a company in which the CTO, who would interview all prospective tech candidates, would ask a variety of questions such as, "Name as many ways you can think of to find a needle in a haystack."

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:Been there ... done that

[juuri]

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."

For the record this is a horrible interview question, especially of a sys-admin. I know because I used to interview this way, instead you should ask more about process and finding out information than asking basic "memorization" questions.

Instead try "If you wanted to limit the number of Apache processes what would you do?"

Re:Been there ... done that

[ivan256]

"What is the directive that throttles the number of Apache processes."

The answer is, of course, the directive listed as having that function in the documentation.

The ability to solve problems that you don't know the solution to is a more useful ability than knowledge of any particular tidbit in almost every case. Your question may be able to tell you if somebody lied on their resume, but that's about it.

Re:Been there ... done that

[bmajik]

Your apache question is useless in the following sense

1) tomorrow a new webserver that _smokes_ apache comes out. oops.

2) it is asking someone to recall something memorized

tne reason some MS interview questions are so non-specific is because someone MS hires today is statistically likely to be working on a different team and different technology within 2 years. Specific knowledge like asking how to configure apache is almost useless in an environment where you have no idea what you'll be working on now or in n timeperiods from now.

some people do get very specific quesitons like that - typically, contractors are brought into to do technology-specific projects. there is no time to train them so they have to know the technologies they'll be working with on day 1. the interviews are entirely different for them because there is no built-in assumption that they have to be incredibly smart and adaptable.

If MS were going to ask a question about apache, it'd be more like this

"You have a webserver that doesn't throttle connections. Explain how you would change it so that it would. Now tell me how the adminstrator would tune or configure the throttling algorithm you've come up with"

Followup: how would it be different for an ftp server ?

Your question is mor elike the (much maligned) MCSE test. "please repeat domain-specific knowledge verbatim from some source"

The directive for controlling this is obvious to anyone that is editing the apache.conf file. The question might as well be "where is the apache conf file" because its self describingly obvious, IMO.

Re:Been there ... done that

[Stalemate]

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."

I've never understood these type of questions. Do you really want the person to be able to tell you that answer? Is "I don't know, but it would take me a couple of minutes looking through the config file or the help file to find out" an acceptable answer? Is it really that important to you for your employees to have memorized these things?

I'm just curious and maybe that's not how you intended the question. But, I will say that I'm a programmer and most of my co-workers think I have a great memory, but I would make no attempt to remember something like that when I can have the answer in about 2 minutes if I need it. Now, if I happen to remember it just because it sticks with me, that's another thing. But it isn't something I would try to remember.

Re:Been there ... done that

[zenyu]

Instead try "If you wanted to X what would you do?"

Ans 1: I'd type man "X"
Ans 2: I'd grep -R X /usr/src/linux/Documentation/
And 3: I'd google "X"

Am I hired?

Seriously, I use the interview to evaluate if I want to work there. If I do they'll find me pleasant and smart, if not I'll be pleasant and appreciative of the free meal. Well if they didn't take me out to lunch they're already on thin ice, eh? (Disclaimer: I did accept an internship once over the phone, but only because my advisor recommended them and one of the interviewers was someone knew and respected.)

Re:Been there ... done that

[haystor]

Its only a bad question if you're giving them a fill-in-the-blank test.

Good answers include things like:

"Its in httpd.conf. There is a comment line next to it describing it. I don't remember the exact directive because I haven't changed it in 2 years."

"Its on the apache.org site."

What the interviewer is looking for is how comfortable you are in that environment. You may or may not know something but as long as you know you don't need to know it, you're ok.

One of my favorite questions while interviewing some people that would be programming on Unix boxes was "Which editor do you use?" or "which shell?" I'd tell them there was no right answer and they were free to use whatever they wanted here. My reasoning was simple, a Unix programmer has an opinion on those two things usually and if not, they have to at least know what those things are off the top of their head. If they have to answer something like "I double-click the file, whatever editor that is" they can work somewhere else.

Keep in mind that the answer isn't always what's being asked for. What they are interviewing for is expertise in the field and there are many ways to demonstrate that.

Re:Been there ... done that

[esme]

2) it is asking someone to recall something memorized

Not necessarily. I'd consider an answer like "I'd check the mod_throttle directives documentation" to be pretty good. For anything that's not totally basic, I think demonstrating that you know how to find out the answer to be at least as valid as knowing the answer itself.

-Esme

Re:Been there ... done that

[sludg-o]

The directive for controlling this is obvious to anyone that is
editing the apache.conf file. The question might as well be "where is
the apache conf file" because its self describingly obvious, IMO.

The apache.conf file is really called httpd.conf. Nice trick question! Will somebody hire me now? Oh, thanks anyways...

Re:Been there ... done that

[bill_mcgonigle]

I think the right answer is:

grep -i Max /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[(54)T-Dub]

RTFA
Microsoft was not the first company to ask such questions, but it certainly popularized it.

The Answer is ofcourse Eight....

[whazzy]

..would it make me super intelligent?I would be flattered,but I ain't taking the byte: I wonder how many ways you could arrive at the solution to the problem posed here:

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."

1.The immediate thought that occured to me was it was either 'days of the week'/months of the year. Within 30 seconds,I could figure out that it must stand for the numbers...One,Two,Three,Four....Eight would continue the sequence... 2.What would really make me super intelligent is to find an alternative fittable pattern that satisfies the criteria.This would not only take the interviewer by surprize but also conclusively prove that I have too much time on my hands..

Ask Slashdot

[GuyMannDude]

When I first saw the heading "How Would You Move Mount Fuji?" I assumed this was an Ask Slashdot question. Finally, I said to myself, an Ask Slashdot question that can't be answered by a google search. Then I realized it was a book review. (sigh) Oh well, one can dream, can't one?

GMD

Re:Ask Slashdot

[HenryFlower]

Google gives two good answers:
This
and
this

I like the first one better.

More crap from HR-droids.

[The Fanta Menace]

I'm amazed with the crap that human resources droids dream up with to justify their jobs. When I interview people, I get to the point quickly: determine their Unix knowledge. If they don't demonstrate cluefulness about that, they don't get the job.

I do not need to unduly stress them out with bullshit questions regarding manhole covers to determine if they're going to work in my organisation.

Not good journalism, that's for sure.

[pmz]

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

I wonder if the author is biased? Naw, he's just an impartial observer. Yea, that's it.

It is highly debatable whether Microsoft is the smartest. It is easily argued that they are the most cunning, however. Cunning like the devil, that is.

It is also highly debatable that Microsoft hires the "most creative thinkers." They are certainly good at aquiring creativity--I guess that is an indirect form of hiring.

One thing I find frustrating is that many people equate Microsofts market share and asset portfolio with "they must be the best". This is a fallacy, of course, but it appears that Microsoft's marketing dapartment can work around any logical inconsistency. The fact that Microsoft keeps most of the public in the dark about their lack of ethics doesn't hurt, either.

I wouldn't be suprised at all if Mr. Poundstone is, directly or indirectly, on Microsoft's payroll.

Re:Not good journalism, that's for sure.

[thebatlab]

To be extremely cunning requires some pretty good smarts about you :)

You got questions...

[FroMan]

I've got answers...

Title) Its already moving, like hurtling through space at 66000 miles per hour.

1) There is o way for a round cover to fall into the hole. A square one could potentially be lifted then turned 45 degrees and all in there.

2) An awful lot. But my theory is there is an even number. Sort of like Burger Kings and McDonalds, where there is one, there is always another.

3) I'd trick all the gondola drivers into taking eye exams and poke them in the eyes with sharp sticks or make the eye exam thing poke them in the eyes.

4) Gonna have to go with Microsoft on question number four.

Re:You got questions...

[FroMan]

Damn, my life long dream of working at Microsoft for a dickhead like you is shattered forever. Guess I'll have to get on with my life.

Note to mods: not implying all folks at Microsoft are dickheads, only implying the parent poster is.

Moving the Mountain

[teamhasnoi]

Easy. Just say "Mt. Fuji is in Wisconsin," until people start believing it.

It's how WMDs got in Iraq, the Patriot Act was written for 'patriots', the RIAA lost billions of dollars to piracy, and how Microsoft became the most secure OS ever.

Re:Moving the Mountain

[Malcontent]

Yes it's funny but it's also true.

Re:Moving the Mountain

[Jack9]

I was gonna start with talking with prominent map-makers but, essentially that was the same answer I would give. This crap about Mount Fuji == /mnt/fuji is funny, but wholly inappropriate when the problem was not addressed...it's Mount Fuji not mount fuji.

Moving mt fuji?

[sporty]

I rather use the zen-ish answer.

One rock at a time.

There's a lot you don't know about the problem, so engineering such a simple question is virtually impossible.

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[Bazman]

Chop it horizontally into a load of slices, drill a big hole in the middle, build three poles big enough to stand it on, then execute the recursive Tower-Of-Hanoi algorithm, thus reducing the problem to one with a known solution.

Baz

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[sporty]

rotflmao, I hate you. You can't answer a riddle with another riddle :D

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[pben]

If you are interviewing with Microsoft:

Why would you want to get in a low margin business like earth moving?

If you are interviewing with Bechtel:

Call the Secretary of Defense and ask who we have to bribe in Japan.

You just got to know the business you are in.

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[Thuktun]

There's a lot you don't know about the problem, so engineering such a simple question is virtually impossible.

In all honesty, moving Mt. Fuji sounds like a metaphor for large, ill-considered projects that many companies like to undertake to the detriment of their investors.

I would seriously hope that a response in the form of a question, "Why do we want to move Mt. Fuji?", would be accepted as wise, in favor of some blind estimate of how much work it would require.

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[dmd]

Brilliant!

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[sporty]

I would seriously hope that a response in the form of a question, "Why do we want to move Mt. Fuji?", would be accepted as wise, in favor of some blind estimate of how much work it would require.

Simple... because you were asked to. Remember, this is a test question, not a business/strategy type thing you can simply dodge or change. If you did ask why, i'm sure you'd get a "because we need to".

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[jokercito]

But then the question becomes... Is that really Mt. Fuji?

Arg!

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[Billly Gates]

That one question in my cs101 course almost made me quit computing and change my major. I then cheated and went on the internet and relized you can do all sorts of weird shit by having a function call itself and swaping the arguments. That seems ugly. The negative is you need a pattern to do this otherwise the algorithm will go to hell. No one told me there was a particular pattern so I solved it iterally with a shit load of if/else statements.

Please tell me computer science is not just siting around and looking at patterns of thousands of strange recursion algorithm's and nothing practical?

Re:Moving mt fuji?

[dead sun]

Strange recursion algorithms? There's nothing strange about recursion, and further, some recursion is downright beautiful in nature. A lot of the time recursion strikes beginning programmers as odd but it really is a simple way to solve things.

Consider the programming languages LISP and Scheme. The primary method of writing functions is recursion, and quite often you can write large, powerful programs without once having to set a variable to a value. Instead you'll start with some list of constants and then the program will just pass values around. And with the initial values, well maybe you'll set those initial values to a variable name, since they take a few function calls to build up, but that doesn't really count towards using variables in computation. It is just convenience. While there are structures to do loops in these languages, frankly I'm not sure why they're it is necessary to include them. Anything you can do in a loop you can do with a recursive call.

Sure, there are plenty of instances where outright computation will be faster as well as more efficent than recursion. For instance, any number in the Fibonacci sequence can be computed explicitly, or you can go about from the start of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5... and work your way there. In this instance the explicit formula clearly wins out, unless you want to know the whole series up to that point.

If you're still curious, define what you think a practical application of Computer Science is. If you feel that the most practical solution to any CS question, or in general any question, is to define it via your own if/else logic and neglect any patterns or other algorithms that you might exploit then you're going to be in your own personal hell in CS. There are patterns, often times recursive in nature, that occur in coding and if you're unwilling to look for them you will be lost. Personally I can't think of any interesting problems where no pattern is better than using one.

If your idea of practical is to write applications that do something very specific with very flat, conditional sorts of options, well, where's the challenge in that? Sure, everybody needs a little calculator program for their desktop. But that's the sort of code that practically anybody with knowledge of simple math and a coding reference book can do. That's not Computer Science but a simple exercise.

For the Tower of Hanoi problem you probably weren't given too many rings to move. Think how much more work you'd have to do with if/else statements if there was just one more ring. Therein lies recursion's beauty.

Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[bhurt]

Assume you have four euclidean points, A, B, C, and D. A, B, and C are colinear, and B, C, and D are colinear.

Assume D is *not* on the line A-B-C. Therefor, the set of points A, B, and D define a plane- if there is a solution, it is on a single plane. Going into n dimensions doesn't help- if there is a solution, it's planar.

But two points define a line. So the A-B-C line can be defined by two points, B and C say. But so can the B-C-D line, indeed by the same two points! The two lines have to share at least two points, therefor D has to be on the A-B-C line.

The trick is the question talked about *pennies*, not euclidean points. This gives us some fudge room, and the solution *must* take advantage of this fudge room. The only other alternative is to leave euclidean geometery. Anyone got a black hole handy?

Brian

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[Overt Coward]

It's real easy if we allow that points B and C are the same, then there is no segment BC on either line (it requires two distinct points to make a segment), and therefore there is no overlapping segments on lines AB(C) and B(C)D.

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[SecGreen]

Trick or no trick, the journey is what matters...

As for the penny puzzle, here's my take. My first inclination was that the solution must be three dimensional (probably because of the hint in the text). I started to think of ways to arrange the pennies on a sphere. While I was thinking about this it occured to me that just placing the 4 pennies in a straight line does produce 2 line segments containing three pennies each (and "line segments" is what most people mean when they say "lines"). This is a solution that should be acceptable... But the three dimensional "hint" made me curious about the "other" solution. So I went back to the sphere and attacked it more methodically. Since 2 pennies must be included in each of the two lines, I put them on the north and south polls of the sphere. Place the other two pennies _anywhere_ on the sphere and there will be two "lines" of three pennies along the spherical surface. Of course for a Microsoft interview I'd make the sphere the earth, and I'd put one movable penny in Redmond, and another in DC... Just for kicks... Also, if you throw out the laws of physics you can just co-locate the pennies at a single point in space and meet the requirement... Or you fuzzify the requirements.. Do the lines have to go through the _center_ of the pennies? So many solutions to such a simple problem.

If you've gotten this far, I'm not just rambling for the sake of it... A lot can be said about a problem solver by how they attack a relatively _simple_ puzzle. If you ask this question in an inteview and ask the interviewee to explain thier thought process, you can see how they attack problems (methodical, imaginitive, systematic, out-of-the-box, etc.) and you can also guage their communication skills as related to problem solving. Many people can snap to the answer, but if they can't explain how they got there, they probably wouldn't be able to work in a team solving complex problems. The puzzles aren't always the answer, but they can be a valuable tool when used by a skilled interviewer...

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[Mac Degger]

I'd say that only works if you can subsitute 'line' for 'vector'...then you just place all 4 pennies in a line and claim that those are two vectors in oposite directions (vector abc and dcb).

Problem is you can't do it with lines, as a line cannot occupy the same space as another line (except at intersection...and all that in euclidian space, at that :) ).

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[Mac Degger]

Have a look at my answer to the poster above you...the line thing won't work.

Personally, I suspect it can't be done: a line is defined by two points. Seeing as lines cannot occupy the same space, you're left with an intersection or no intersection. The latter isn't an option as you have to few pennies for that, so there must be an intersection...but that means you have at least three pennies already tied up, defining your two lines (the intersection counts as a line point definition for both lines), leaving you one penny.

And that one penny has to be placed on one of those lines (and the intersection point is already taken!) for the "three pennies on a line" criterium, leaving one line with only two pennies.

Now those three pennies (defining two lines) also define a plane, so taking it to three dimensions gets you nowhere.

Therefore, I'm saying it can't be done, QED...at least for euclidean space.

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[SecGreen]

At what point did the puzzle state that you must use euclidean geometry? It didn't... The question was stated in standard (accepted) english, so it would be a reasonable assumption that it should be addressed under those terms. If asked the question "What is the shortest distance between two points?" most people will say "A straight line". Not "A straight line segment defined by points A & B". (People look at you funny if you talk like that in public!) I would also argue that the projection of a line onto the curved surface of a sphere is commonly accepted as being a line. For prior art, look at our long history of flat-map projections used for navigation. No offense, but strict euclidean interpretation of the english language is usually restricted to academia and math-club-geeks...

To get back on topic, the point is that they want a solution to the problem. Within the definition of the puzzle there is room for assumptions. The skill that the interviewer is testing is the ability to make these assumptions and find _any_ solution.

If a customer comes to me and says "I want you to build x, but I've only got a budget of y", and I know he can't build x for y, I'm not going to tell him to pound sand. I'll propose a solution that gives him as much of x as I can for y, and let him know how much more it would cost to get the rest. It's called being flexible...

If this had been talking about interviewing for a position as a math professor at a university, your answer would be best, but we're talking about a company who tries to write software to help people run businesses (and homes, and the world, etc.)... They're looking for creative, out-of-the-box, non-rigid thinkers who can come up with solutions for problems. I work in various areas of IT & Computing and one of our biggest problems if having developers and administrators who like to find a reason why something _can't_ be done because of some constraint, real or unreal. Our top performers are the folks who find ways that things _can_ be done regardless of the constraints.

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[Mac Degger]

You have a good point, but in my post above I said why the question as stated wouldn't work. I also supplied an 'answer space' where the solution is to be found.
But that solution wouldn't work for the question as stated because of points you've mentioned; for one, a line is a line is not a line segment. Anyone who's had his/her highschoool math (and didn't take the easy way by dropping it) knows that. Not only that, but working in euclidean space is much more of a basic assumption than saying "hey, I'll confuse a line with a line segment!"

The thing is that when someone asks me to make something, I will always back up my alternative with the neccessary info to point out why the asked for isn't possible.
I know a couple of people who'll say "yeah sure, we'll do x which does this, this and this" and then make y instead which does as many things as x as possible. And that to me is dishonest.
It might be good business, but I wouldn't want to work like that.

Re:Many puzzles are about knowing the "trick"

[merigold77]

"Assume you have four euclidean points, A, B, C, and D. A, B, and C are colinear, and B, C, and D are colinear. Assume D is *not* on the line A-B-C."

No, this is solvable with points, too. Notice that you did not say four DISTINCT points. All you have to do is make B and C identical. (With pennies, you put one on top of the other). Now, a line is not defined by two points, it is defined by two distinct points. So, B = C is the answer.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[tomhudson]

Yet virtually every Microsoft employee accepts the "obvious" rationale, that only people who do well in logic puzzles will do well at Microsoft.

Just like they accept the "rationale" that a 2-month refresher course in secure coding makes up for 2 decades of stupidity.

The correct answer for "How would you move mount Fuju?" is "I wouldn't - it's fine right where it is." This is meant to be more than a facetious remark. Too often, we tend to add a feature because we can/think it will be nifty/were asked to, without reflecting first about whether we should. This is the number 1 cause of bloatware - coders not putting our feet down and saying - No, you don't need that! It's stupid, badly thought out, and won't work anyway!

As a Mensa Member...

[ChuckDivine]

No, I don't usually bring that up. But, given the topic, I think it is relevant.

Yes, I do well on various kinds of IQ tests. I also have some real world accomplishments to my credit. To get a flavor of some of my abilities, check out my personal web site. Some of it is serious, some not. The software side isn't fancy -- the point of the site is the content (words, pictures) not software. I have also done reasonably well in life. I make enough money to live indoors, sometimes do interesting work and have lots of friends. OK, I go in for understatement and I can be weird.

These sorts of tests can screen out the obviously unqualified. They also can offend those of us who are good enough for the job. I've deliberately blown such tests a few times in my life. Once I walked out without even taking the test -- the company made that bad an impression on me. The recruiter who set up the experience was surprised.

Hiring people is still a black art. Once you've eliminated the obviously unqualified, you might as well use some random criteria. Is there any alternative? Yes -- hire people who are already somewhat known to you. That way you get a fuller idea of what the person is actually like. It's easy (well, it is for me) to maintain an act for a few interviews.

These puzzle tests do test intelligence to some extent. They also help make sure that the person being hired is at least somewhat like the people doing the hiring. And are willing to put up with something the corporation thinks important.

Do such measures make me think well of a company? Not really. There are many things that can limit what you can do. Yes, a lower intelligence can be a handicap. So, unfortunately, can a dysfunctional corporate culture.

I don't think I would like working at Microsoft. Gates seems too much of an autocrat. Yes, it's nice to work with intelligent people. But it's also nice to work in an enviroment where you're reasonably free. I don't know how Microsoft stacks up in that regard. Their lack of innovation doesn't speak too highly for them.

Re:As a Mensa Member...

[Pejorian]

I think you hit it on the head with your comment, "Hiring people is still a black art. Once you've eliminated the obviously unqualified, you might as well use some random criteria. Is there any alternative? Yes -- hire people who are already somewhat known to you."

I can't believe that it isn't being discussed more in this forum! Everyone is answering the brain teasers without commenting on the fact that EVERY interview technique has been shown to be fairly meaningless, since the interviewer makes up her mind in the first 15 seconds .

The other relevant statistic is that less than 15% of jobs are gotten from cold-call, off-the-street resume drops. You have to know someone in the company. A local company here in Vancouver, Crystal Decisions, admits that openly. You don't stand a chance if you don't have an internal reference.

You also mentioned another thing in the article. "They also help make sure that the person being hired is at least somewhat like the people doing the hiring." This spooks me. I was in a seminar that showed how this "hire-people-like-me" mentality (which is what people decide in that fifteen seconds) tends to skew a company badly, so that when they go wrong, they can REALLY go wrong, because there's no one left who disagrees with the general consensus. Yes, even intelligent people can be wrong, and they can all be wrong at the same time. Microsoft has made a couple of stupid decisions, right?

One more thing -- if you are mainly hiring for experience, then you are hiring someone to do what they've already done. It seems to me that technology is about doing new things. You should be looking for clear, intelligent thinkers and people who are willing to learn all the time.

You won't really get these intelligent people by asking the kind of questions for which the interviewee either has heard the answer ("cheaters" and "memorizers") or will need (realistically) several days to hammer out an answer.

I tend to score highly on IQ tests, but I'm not convinced that these scores are relevant for hiring.... And these questions only capture a corner of a person's intellect - or maybe it is more their intuition?

Re:As a Mensa Member...

[mcjulio]

You are as free as the schedule at Microsoft. Big thinkers who can execute on their ideas get big rewards, but it's the execution timeframe and the idea's direct marketability that are the deciding factors. Also, MS maintains a pretty sizeable research department where people mostly get to sit and come up with cool stuff all day.

Why are Manhole Covers Round? An answer.

[hndrcks]

In the UK, at least, they aren't.

Re:Why are Manhole Covers Round? An answer.

[Pyrion]

Given the question, I wonder how the genius that used BLINK tags on that site answered...

Re:Why are Manhole Covers Round? An answer.

[dfay]

How about in Soviet Russia? Anyone know the answer?

Other questions

[Mr_Silver]

Here are some used in Management Consultancy interviews:

• How many phone books are there in London?
• How many steel pylons are there on the Eiffel Tower?
• What would be the implications of the invention of a machine that could get you from A to B in a fraction of a second?

and many others. They weren't designed to have a right or wrong answer - just to see if you could take something completely silly and logically break it down into sub-points with a bit od creative thinking thrown in for good measure.

Often people got hung up on the impossibility of it, refused to make some guesses or failed to ask good enough questions to get a better understanding of the question.

Re:Other questions

[gbjbaanb]

I asked 'Whos Best?' as a interview question - I was looking to see how the candidate would react to quite a nonsensical question (though if you've seen Dougal and the Blue Cat, you'll know the answer).

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.

Re:Other questions

[Drakonian]

Heheh. I like asking this question to friends but if I'm in a position to ever interview, maybe I'll ask it too. The question is "So, what do you think?". It must be delivered out of the blue. The only wrong answer is "about what?" Any thought about anything else satisfies me.

Re:Other questions

[Suppafly]

What would be the implications of the invention of a machine that could get you from A to B in a fraction of a second?


a lot of machines can do that where the distance from a to b is a small number.

Re:Other questions

[gbjbaanb]

go for it - but get Dougal and the Blue Cat video first.

I think a 'about what?' answer is fine - after all, he's really saying 'you're talking shite, be more specific and stop mucking me about', which is, after all, what we'd be doing to him and that is a perfectly reasonable and intelligent response. The trick is to ask a question that is just as meaningless but that doesn't have the benefit of such a 'pre-packaged' glib answer.

You go for it in interview, but remember it's not a trick to catch him out, you're not asking it to be cruel.

Wrong!

[tanveer1979]

The question is
How do you move mount fuji

mv /mnt/fuji /mnt/whatever
In case this is not allowed then do this
ln -s /mnt/fuji /mnt/whatever

But the Perfect Solution is this:
#cd /mnt
#mkdir /wherever
#cp /mnt/fuji/* /wherever
#umount /mnt/fuji

Make sure you use xemacs coz vim may not work

For and interview at microsoft? Nope!

[mattACK]

More like this:

mountvol \\?\Volume{67c584db-28cc-11d7-8ea9-806d6172696f}\ /d

To see a simpler example of this, simply open a cmd prompt and enter this at the command line:

echo y | mountvol c: /d

Please share with us your experience after entering this. [/winkwinknudgenudge]

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft WMD!

[DoctorMabuse]

One 50 megaton hydrogen bomb ground-burst in the center of the crater. After some unfortunate local effects, the remaining Mt. Fuji material should be carried into the upper atmosphere where it would encircle the planet (much like the Krakatoa explosion).

The question being, does Microsoft have weapons of mass destruction?

My response...

[mark-t]

Why would a blind venetian want to watch television in the first place?

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[sandbagger]

Sell it on line to oversexed Japanese salarymen.

tests: the problem of validity; 50 states puzzle?

[rjnagle]

I used to work in the career testing biz, and can say that the problem boils down to validity. Anecdotally, interviewers might think off-the-wall questions are meaningful, but without any sort of research (which admittedly is an unrealistic requirement) to establish validity, such tests/questions really don't establish any sort of competence. The original New Yorker article (linked in the slashdot posting above) mentioned that situational interviews were proven to be quite effective. I'm guessing that these kinds of interviews succeed because they give an advantage to people with the most relevant experience. On the other hand, the ability to answer such a question to the interviewer's satisfaction does indicate some compatibility with the corporate culture. If Microsoft likes candidates who like to solve puzzles, then your ability to solve puzzles means that you are just one of the gang. On a somewhat related note, the 50 states puzzle was rumored to have been started by Microsoft. Does anyone know if it's been solved?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[tomhudson]

Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?

... reminds me of the poster ... Eat shit - can 10 trillion flies be wrong?

Actually, the whole article sounds like a cross between "Management Interviewing Techniques for Dummies" and "Trolling for I.D.-10-T's" (I.D.- 10 - T error == idiot user, for the clueless)

Re:YOU FAIL IT

[Anonymous Coward]

I would use photoshop to move mt. fuji. put it right in my back yard.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[ackthpt]

Lots of companies do this. I think Microsoft, again, gets too much credit here.

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:Microsoft not the only one

[Mr_Silver]

Microsoft was not the first company to ask such questions, but it certainly popularized it.

I'd personally say that Banks, Management Consultancies, Lawyers and other blue chip institutions popularised it significantly more than Microsoft ever did.

They may be a big company, but the combination of people like Arthur Anderson, Accenture, PwC, Credit Suisse First Boston, DKW Bank and others dwarf Microsoft quite substantially.

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[Hard_Code]

"Post on Slashdot"

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[SWroclawski]

Um, no he didn't. He's just using the old Yakov Smirnoff joke from the 80s'.

The poster may give you a chuckle, but it's certainly not a "new form of humor".

Bah...

[darkov]

A Microsoft interview candidate will typically talk to four or five employees, and in general must get a "hire" recommendation from all of them.

This is lowest common denominator stuff. Your chances that at least one of them has a personality clash with you, finds you a bit threatening or other totally irrelevant judgements skyrockets.

Basically they're going to get the same guff that produce the same mediocre output that Microsoft does now.

How to move Mount Fuji

[Hard_Code]

1. Claim that the Japanese are hiding weapons of mass destruction in Mount Fuji

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[eXtro]

Simple, set up a vending machine in Japan and sell them.

Abstract and concrete questions

[Mundocani]

As a former Microsoft employee of five years, I was never much into asking brain teasers and always asked more straightforward algorithmic questions when interviewing candidates. Regardless of the type of question however, the questions really serve one main purpose -- to see how the candidate thinks under pressure.

I favored algorithmic questions because, like brain teasers, you got to test the candidates ability to reason but you also got some information about their ability to write algorithms and/or actual code. You'd be suprised how many candidates professed knowledge of an alphabet soup of industry technologies and languages, but had a difficult time correctly forming a "for" statement in C. Programming questions were also nice because once they were answered they lent themselves to further exploration such as optimizations.

I was never particularly concerned about anybody getting the answer "right" or "wrong". Interviews are tremendously stressful for most people and it's often difficult to think very clearly under such stress. What was much more valuable was observing how they handled that stress and the thought process that they used in trying to solve the problem -- what questions did they ask? What mistakes were made and were they found? Did the candidate declare the solution to be complete even when it was terribly flawed?

I think the most valuable person is one who isn't afraid to admit that he/she isn't sure and is willing to ask for clarifications. The scariest candidates were the ones who just plowed right in when they didn't really understand the question. I always assumed that I hadn't formed the question clearly (I wasn't deliberately vague, though that could be interesting too), but I expected the candidate to recognize that the problem was unclear and seek to understand it better.

Following up with questions about optimization was really nice since it really lent some insight into whether they really knew how computers and compilers make use of their code. Of course, being able to optimize wasn't critical to getting an approval from me, but you can bet that somebody who demonstrated knowledge of how to write tighter code got a stronger recommendation than somebody who didn't.

Re:Abstract and concrete questions

[lobsterGun]

You'd be suprised how many candidates professed knowledge of an alphabet soup of industry technologies and languages, but had a difficult time correctly forming a "for" statement in C.

TESTIFY Brothter!

One of my old supervisors told me this story. He had one guy's resume that claimed he was a expert CTT programmer. CTT? what the hell was that? He showed the resume to some other people and they eventually figured out the guy meant C++. He said that had hoped that it was a typo that his spell checker had created, but in the interview the guy actually called it CTT out loud. When he asked the guy to describe how CTT was different than C he was given the book jacket description of C++. The interview ended at that point.

Re:Abstract and concrete questions

[dgenr8]

Did the candidate declare the solution to be complete even when it was terribly flawed?

After much cajoling by a friend who works there, I once interviewed at Microsoft. I actually did poorly because I would NOT declare my solution correct without testing it. The interviewer, zeroing in on this flaw in my character, informed me that yes, in fact, my solution was correct, and I should have been more confident.

Just then, I noticed a glaring flaw in the code and pointed it out. I don't think this garnered me many interview "points".

The rest of the people who were scheduled to interview me found out about these events in near-real time via email, and the exact same scenario replayed itself later in the day. Solution designed, my refusal to declare this non-trivial problem completely solved without testing, chastisement, and my discovery of a problem on further inspection of the code!

I didn't want their lousy job anyway, but it still hurt not to be offered it.

Re:Abstract and concrete questions

[Alpha_Nerd]

Of course, being able to optimize wasn't critical to getting an approval from me

We've used MS software... You did not need to tell us that.

Re:Abstract and concrete questions

[hondo77]

You'd be suprised how many candidates professed knowledge of an alphabet soup of industry technologies and languages, but had a difficult time correctly forming a "for" statement in C.

During my pass through the dot-coms (actually, it still might be true), the one technical question that would weed people out the fastest was, "Sort a list of strings." That's it. They could do it in C or Perl or pseudo-code orwhatever they wanted to. People who claimed to have 5 years of C experience would get that deer-in-the-headlights look. There would be other questions if they could answer that but 90% of candidates couldn't. Amazing.

equilateral triangle is no good

[pussyco]

The height is only root three over two of the side length. It would take a 16% lip to make it impossible for the cover to fall down the whole,

Re:equilateral triangle is no good

[cygnus]

so maybe the answer should be "a circle is the least wasteful shape that won't fall in in terms of materials."

i'd like to see a man-shaped manhole cover that was mostly lip, but with a circle area to cover a round hole.

Re:equilateral triangle is no good

[drinkypoo]

I Was going to make a joke about this but everything came out wrong.

Let me just point to the name of a song by N.W.H., "Put Your Mouth Where My Manhole Is".

Worst Interview Question Ever

[one9nine]

CapitalOne: If you were a color, what color would you be?

Me: (pauses for a few seconds...) Blue

CapitalOne: Why?

Me: I don't know.

Then they asked me what was in my wallet. Needless to say, I didn't get the job (or even a phone call or letter to tell me that I didn't).

How to move Mt. Fuji

[MoreDruid]

Didn't the US try that already in 1945? They just missed it completely because it was in another location already.

Here's another Microsoft interviewing technique:

[0x00000dcc]

Alright this is not a first person account, but it's from a reliable source at any rate ...

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 ...

Integer division overflow

[niom]

I had never thought of it, but now that you mention it can. The absolute value of the minimum integer is greater than the maximum integer, so dividing the minimum integer by -1 will overflow. I just tested it with gcc 3.2 and the result is the minimum integer again.

Best question, really

[Continental Drift]

When I interview a programmer, I always ask "Why are you a programmer?"

There is only one acceptable answer: "because I enjoy programming." Answers such as "because that's where the money is" or "I wanted stable employment" or "because nobody will pay me to surf the web" are indications that they will be bad or mediocre programmers. People who like what they do will usually do it well.

Re:Best question, really

[Ozan]

This applies to every profession, not only programmers.

Someone who does something because of a reason other than the joy of it is simply a bad employee. (And that's probably why so many lawyers work independently)

Re:Best question, really

[haystor]

How about:

I like to solve problems and computers leverage my skills to that end.

Ask Slashdot?

[Idou]

Do they give you enough time to post an "Ask Slashdot."

Re:Ask Slashdot?

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Interviewer: How would you move mount fuji?
Interviewee: One sec ... time passes...
Interviewer: Well?
Interviewee: *BSD is dead.
Interviewer: You're hired!

Metareview

[Webmoth]

That was a long review. I felt as if I had read the book. Or was that the book?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Ageless]

And does their track record of being hugely successful and selling the most popular software in the world mean anything? I think something is pretty clearly working.

Move a mountain?

[Flarg!]

I'm not allowed to. My worker's comp insurance won't cover me for injuries sustained while moving anything weighing more than 30 pounds.

Fermi Questions.

[syrah]

"How many gas stations are there in the US?" is actually a Fermi Question, not a Microsoft question.

Enrico Fermi was a physicist at U. Chicago and participated in the bomb making at Los Alamos. I believe U. Chicagos supercollider is named after him. Fermi definitely predates Microsoft.

My high school math teacher introduced our class to Fermi questions. I'm not sure how good they are at interviews - you have a big advantage answering them if you know what they are, if you've answered one in the past and if you know what is expected of you.

More info about Fermi Questions can be found at:
http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/interdisc/she ila1.html

Great Questions!

[jsegall]

I think these questions are great! You can really learn a lot about a candidate by how they roll their eyes at you.

I'm surprised I haven't seen this yet.

[CrazyDuke]

Come on, you all are supposed to be nerds! You don't have to do anything to move Mt. Fugi. Just wait. The Earth,and therefore, everything on it, are hardly at rest. The earth spins and revolves around the sun, which revolves around the galactic center, which is speeding away from the center of the universe. And, that ignoring things such as vibrations like earthquakes (standing motion), erosion, plate techtonics, etc. I mean come on!

Re:Pennies?

[OldAndSlow]

Try arranging them on the surface of a sphere.

Can't code for a lick

[irritating environme]

I've heard about MS questions for almost 10 years now. In that time, I cannot recall them releasing a new, innovative product. 99% of their products were already built by another company they bought out (SQL Server, IE, Windows, DOS, the office programs...). Even if the programs were buggy when purchased, how does it reflect on MS employees with their limitless backing that these things haven't ever been worked out? How is it that Apple, with less than 1/10 the resources, releases far bigger in scope OS changes, AND does Hardware design to boot?

These questions are good consulting questions, but obviously haven't produced a worker culture of efficiency, innovation, thoroughness, insight, or talent.

The reason Microsoft does this.

[LibertineR]

Manhole covers and Gas stations in not the point.

When these questions and other, better ones are asked, the first point of evaluation is the reaction of the candidate. Some will freeze, some will quess, some will actually become upset about the question. What is being gauged first is whether the challenge is responded to emotionally or logically. Whether the candidate knows the answer or not hardly matters.

Second; how and how QUICKLY does the candidate begin to work the problem towards a solution. If the candidate just quesses, he will be challenged about the answer to determine how he came to it. It is best if the candidate explains the process for breaking the question down into solvable chunks, or agreeable perameter assumptions.

At Microsoft, it is assumed that if you got through the phone screening and invited out for an interview, that you are smart. Brains are not in question at this point. What is in question, is how easy or hard it will be to get those brains working the way Microsoft prefers.

How agressive is the candidate towards solving the problem? How afraid was the candidate in getting the wrong answer? How did the candidate respond after answering rightly or wrongly? Was he sheepish or reserved, afraid to say anything else?

When I was asked these questions, I asked to use the white board in my future supervisor's office, and drew diagrams while explaining the answers I came up with. Major plus points. Microsoft is competitive in the extreme. They want to know if you can back up your ideas with force, and not be talked down because someone challenged you. What good are you to them if you are brilliant, but afraid to speak up?

This is why Microsoft gets a reputation for arrogance. Most everyone here is ready to defend their point of view to the death, until proven wrong. The challenge is leaving those battles on campus, and not bringing them home with you, which is all but impossible. Many great ideas get left on the table and forgotten, because someone lost an argument with a better debator. When that happens, you almost want to kill someone. I witness many occasions where discussions almost came to blows, and heard of a few that actually did.

Those interview questions are designed to find out how wimpy you are, how committed you will be to getting something right, and defending your point of view. Naturally, you cant determine 100% accuracy through the interview process, but it is a start.

Re:The reason Microsoft does this.

[UncleDavid]

Me too. Back when I interviewed testers I had a favorite problem-solving question (my own invention) that I used to assess the ability of the candidate to get practical and realistic about the problem, not reply in abstractions. I deliberately stated the question (on the whiteboard) in a concrete way but was amazed at the abstracted waffling I got. Also at the inability to think beyond a box I (intentionally) created. There were about 4 different directions you could take; only one person ever found the truly lateral-thinking one. He got hired.

But I never let the problem take more than 20% of the interview time. Don't be misled by this book or some of the replies: watching the candidate think and talk about the problem is enormously valuable, but I also asked the most-proud and handle-conflict and 5-year questions. For candidates who need to code (devs and some testers) I asked them to write atoi() on the whiteboard; the results were usually embarrassing. For coders who claim to know C++, ask for an explanation of overrides/virtual/pure - again I was amazed at the ignorance out there.

BTW, I was hired as a tester and my very first interview started with being handed the pen and told to code atoi(). I first asked if I should account for leading whitespace and sign, was told no, and did them anyway. The interviewer then asked if I wanted a developer position instead (I said no).

Re:The reason Microsoft does this.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly why this type of questioning, the way it is handled, and the attitude behind it is so wrong.

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"

Re:The reason Microsoft does this.

[argoff]

What good are you to them if you are brilliant, but afraid to speak up?

If you are brilliant, and speak up at Microsoft - then you won't get hired because anybody who thinks is going to realise that the glorious "intellectual property" they tout over - is CRAP, and is a strategy that basicly relies upon restricting information just as our society enters the information age - not a good place to be in. Anyone who thinks is going to figure out that Linux is a more competitive paradigm, and will kick Microsoft's but in the long run. And they may also realise that Microsoft is an entrenched corporate bureauocracy where talent and achievement have little to do with success, where backstabbing and being in with the top will get you a lot further.

If I was a Microsoft investor, I would be damanding massive dividend payments about now - so I can get my money out and start investing in every viable Linux company I could find.

Re:Pennies?

[nucal]

Make a triangle with a stack of two on one of the vertices.

fermi

[mz001b]

Enrico Fermi was asking questions like this to physics grad students taking their candidacy exam at UC in the 1950s. Microsoft didn't start this. Fermi liked the questions because it showed how you would go about solving the problem, making estimates, using logic, ... all the things a physicist should do.

Market Cap

[truthsearch]

Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?

Yes.

Their questions probably keep out those who are bad at business. So far they've been successful in business and marketing. But their software quality is still low, so they may not be keeping out bad developers.

The guys thought I was cheating!!!

[exa]

They asked me a stupid puzzle about stacks of coins which was easily translatable to a simple summation. The kind of question they used to ask us at elementary school. I answered it in a flash and the guys thought I already knew the answer. I said no, and then told them there are questions on the net but i didn't know this question. I think they didn't believe me because they thought it was impossible to answer that quickly!!! I was very pissed off. Those questions are clearly prepared for morons. Maybe it's also because I told them "IBM got the memory manager right, but you are still using linked lists" when confronted with their usual "linked list" questions. And then I told them the "Hungarian notation" was for incompetent programmers so I didn't use it. I dunno :P

And yeaaaa, linked list is a really top notch data structure, the only data structure MS uses! Hahah! Just look at the awesome speeeed of MS apps!!

I wonder if they have any groups on data mining. Maybe some people who do have a clue about programming could interview me!!

Hmm, I just had a look at google. Charles Simonyi invented Hungarian notation. So this guy is responsible for all the mess. It's a pity that they employ such people.

Re:The guys thought I was cheating!!!

[LibertineR]

Oh yeah, and you are a better programmer than Charlie Simonyi.

Right.

The puzzles are getting the comments

[Infonaut]

This is interesting. In spite of the length of the article and its emphasis on how Poundstone disproved the notion that puzzle-lovers are inherently more intelligent, the highest modded comments on this page are discussions about the puzzles mentioned in the article.

Perhaps what that says is that it's not so much about intelligence as it is about commonality of interest. If you like puzzles, and you like them enough to be good at them, you'll fit in with the culture at Microsoft (or any other company that attempts to approach creativity in a one question equals one answer format).

Maybe Microsoft HR should be putting up banner ads on Slashdot. ;-)

Paint it pink

[Tenebrious1]

And set up a cheap SEP field... oh wait, that's how you'd make it invisible...

Re:Paint it pink

[Phroggy]

rofl.. wish I had mod points to mod you up.

Know where I can buy a cheap SEP field generator?

Re:Pennies?

[Kredal]

My guess follows:

Put one penny on the table. Place half of two other pennies on top of it with their edges touching, then stack another penny on top of those. From the side, it will look something like this:

-----
----- -----
-----

Now draw two lines through the top penny, perpendicular to the table, each one through one of the middle pennies. Each line will go through 3 pennies, but *not* dead center through any of them, but that's ok, since it wasn't a requirement.

Why do people view interviews as adversarial?

[Wirenut]

I see interviews as much a way for me to evaluate the company, as for the company to evaluate me.

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:Microsoft not the only one

[b0r1s]

Given Microsoft's track record with security problems, buggy code--such as infinite registration, and the famous blue screen of death, it's probbably not a good idea to ask Microsoft type questions with Software Engineering candidates because something isn't working.

Because remote root holes in sendmail, OpenSSH, apache, and samba, and linux kernel panics, are so much better than Microsoft's flaws? Sure, Linux never has a problem with infinite registration, but then again, they don't have any problems with registration, nor any of those ugly cash flow problems that registration would bring.

Why are Manhole covers round?

[Laurion]

Easy. They 'cut corners' to save manufacturing costs.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[NerveGas]

A triangular manhole cover (well, an equilateral triangle anyway) is also immune to being dropped in the hole.

However, a ROUND hole is much, much more amenable to having an overweight public works employee climb through it than is a triangular hole.

steve

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

As has been stated time and time again in this thread, equilateral triangle covers can be dropped through their holes. Here's how:

1. Lift the cover up by one of the corners, pivoting at the base until the cover is standing perpendicular to the hole, at the edge of the hole.
2. Now lift one of the remaining corners, pivoting the cover on the remaining corner, until the oposite edge is vertical.
3. Push the remaining corner off of the lip.
4. Lid falls in.

If you're having trouble imagining that one, try this:

1. Push one corner down, and lift one corner up, so that the lid pivots down it's center line, and is sitting vertically in the hole, supported by one corner, and the middle of the opposite side.
2. Rotate the lid horizontally around the remaining corner towards one of the adjacent sides. The lid will no longer reach to the opposite side, because the centerline of the lid is shorter than the edge of the lid.
3. Lid falls in.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

This only works if the lid is exactly the same dimensions as the hole. Actual manhole covers have a lip extending out from the upper edge, so that the cover is always bigger than the hole, no matter which way you turn it. A circular lid only needs a lip of half an inch or so (since it's fairly rigid metal and cannot usually deform), but a triangular lid would need more of a lip.

To exaggerate, imagine an equilateral triangle two feet (24 inches) on a side. Now imagine another triangle 12 inches on a side, centered within the larger one. The hole in the ground is 12 inches across. The shortest line that can cross the larger triangle is 20.78 inches (imagine a line from any point of the largest triangle, that heads straight across to the midpoint of the other side, bisecting the triangle). Since 20.78 is more than 12, there's no way the cover can fall into the hole. (Imagine that each part of the cover is half an inch thick. The "hole" in the ground has two parts: a half-inch deep triangular depression in the asphalt that lets the larger triangle lie flush with the asphalt, and the actual hole itself, also triangular (at least at first, it can widen out to a circle or whatever after another inch or two), centered within the depression.

In reality, a triangular manhole cover's upper triangle would only need sides 20% longer than the lower triangle, rather than the 100% I gave here. So for a 24-inch upper triangle, you could safely have a 19-inch lower triangle. That might not be enough room, but you can make the upper triangle as big as is necessary.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

Well *OBVIOUSLY* if you make the lip big enough, the lid will not go through. You could do that for a square cover as well. That's not the point. The parent post of this thread put forth the notion that an equilateral triangle has the same "not-able-to-go-through-a-hole-of-the-same-size (with a trivial lip)" property that a circle does. It does not. I presented two ways of visualizing how to pass it through.

Now that I think of it, you are helping my case, because you are saying you need a non-trivial lip in order to prevent the lid from falling through.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

But a circle can go through a hole the same size as it, if there's no lip -- it'll just fall straight through. So why did you go to the lengths of pointing it out about triangles, but not circles? Just wondering.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

Well, basically because triangles are the topic of conversation. Specifically, the point of the discussion is whether a manhole cover shaped like an equilateral triangle can pass through its own hole. Obviously, any shape will pass through it's own hole if there is no lip to the hole. Equally obviously, any shape can be blocked if you make the lip big enough. But what if there is a trivial lip, say one cm wide lip on a metre sized hole. A circular lid cannot fall into such a hole, but can an equilateral triangle shaped manhole cover fall into its hole in that case?

In the great^n-grandpappy post, NerveGas said that equilateral triangle manhole covers cannot fall through their own holes.
I gave him a counterexample: If one of the edges of the lid is normal to the plane of the hole, and the lid is parallel to and just inside one of the edges of the hole, it can fall in.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

Specifically, the point of the discussion is whether a manhole cover shaped like an equilateral triangle can pass through its own hole.

Only if the lip is small enough. Since you claim this is "obvious," then NerveGas must have known it as well, so why did you need to point it out to him?

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

The only things I said were obvious were that if there was no lip any shape would fall through , and that the lip can be made large enough that no lid can fall through. One reason manhole covers are round is that circles have the property that if there is any lip whatsoever, it cannot pass through it's hole.

NerveGas claimed that equilateral triangles also have this property, that if there is any lip whatsoever, it cannot pass through its hole. This is false. I explained how to do it.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

NerveGas claimed that equilateral triangles also have this property, that if there is any lip whatsoever, it cannot pass through its hole.

No, he didn't. Here's the entirety of his post:

A triangular manhole cover (well, an equilateral triangle anyway) is also immune to being dropped in the hole.

However, a ROUND hole is much, much more amenable to having an overweight public works employee climb through it than is a triangular hole.

He didn't say anything about a lip, and neither did the parent to his post. Certainly his omission didn't help, but you're ascribing things to him that he didn't say. Also, earlier in this thread, you said:

The parent post of this thread put forth the notion that an equilateral triangle has the same "not-able-to-go-through-a-hole-of-the-same-size (with a trivial lip)"

The parent post said nothing about "(with a trivial lip)", but I didn't catch it at the time. Nobody mentioned a lip in this thread until you did, in this post.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

Let go of the lip issue. It is irrelevant. The relevant question is "Is an equilateral triangular shaped manhole cover immune from being dropped into its hole?"

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

If we ignore the possibility of a lip, then the answer is no. Of course, then the answer is no for any shape without a lip, even a circle... so I'm not sure why we need to drop the lip issue.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

Fine, we agree. Now if there is a small lip, a trivial lip, say one or two cms on a meter sized hole. Is an equilateral triangle immune from falling through such a hole?

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

Is an equilateral triangle immune from falling through such a hole?

With a trivial lip? No, it's not. But who claimed otherwise?

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

NerveGas did.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

He did? Here's the entirety of his post:

A triangular manhole cover (well, an equilateral triangle anyway) is also immune to being dropped in the hole.

However, a ROUND hole is much, much more amenable to having an overweight public works employee climb through it than is a triangular hole.

steve

I don't see anything there about him lipless covers... so I guess I'm still confused.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[Dirtside]

That is, about him *mentioning* lipless covers.

Re:Why are manhole covers round?

[uberdave]

No, he (or she) never mentioned anything about the lip. It was mutually assumed that there would be a lip, because without one, the cover would always fall through the hole - regardless of its shape.

The reason I mentioned a lip originally was that if you were to follow the directions in my first counter-example, you would wind up with the manhole cover standing on one vertex on the lip of the hole. That vertex would need to be pushed off of the lip in order to fall.

That casual mentioning has lead us through the whole size-of-the-lip debate, and taken us away from the shapes-that-can-fall-through-their-holes debate, which was the point of my original post.

However, that casual mentioning has also led to the longest Slashdot thread/conversation I have ever been a part of. It's been great!

"I'm not impatient, I just hate waiting!" - My Dad

Depends on what you're hiring for.

[TheLink]

For example, an intelligent and knowledgeable perfectionist might be good for a project role, but unsuitable for scenarios which require suboptimal improvisations.

The perfectionist might be able to get the job done, but will be unsatisfied. Continued dissatisfaction = bad. Of course good HR/management might be able to mitigate that.

Whereas you could get people who don't mind regularly being thrown in at the deep end and doing passably well (and from time to time failing).

So sometimes you might pick a mainly 'B's candidate over a straight 'A' scholar.

Real scenario: two sales engineers in my ex-company were told to provide training on a new product to employees of a big customer. Product was new, so the engineers wanted the product and docs in so they could learn about it before providing training on it. Reasonable right?

Unfortunately to cut costs, the equipment was directly shipped from the principal to the site, and the engineers flown in to the training site, all arriving on the day itself! Woohoo.

Guess what, with lots of on the spot improvisation and nerve (plus background experience), they managed to pull it off! Apparently the trainees actually gave glowing reviews too ;).

Some might say that's bad management. But, money is saved, customer is happy, so _if_ the employee is ok with it, it's a win-win all around.

Why do people view interviews as adversarial?

[Wirenut]

I see interviews as much a way for me to evaluate the company, as for the company to evaluate me.

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 you 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 skills 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.

In case you like these kinds of questions...

[Jon Abbott]

Here are some other books for you...

"How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?"

[shades6666]

Is that an NHL sized rink or an Olympic sized rink?

Go Sens Go

Re:"How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?"

[mike_mgo]

I was thinking the same thing.

And the Devs will take Ottowa out in 6 games in the Conference Finals :-)

Cult of the Puzzle

[Embedded Geek]

"Cult" is the operative word here. I've never had the opportunity (honor? misfortune?) to interview with Microsoft proper, but I've dealt with a handful of companies that used these techniques and almost all of them did it poorly. There was always a conceit of "Golly, I'm so clever - show me that you are." This, despite the fact that the lame puzzle was recognizably pulled from a brainteaser book instead of being homegrown.

Ask me about structure layout, how to optimize a function, when and where I've used OO inhereitance to enhance a design and when it's a horrible idea to use OO at all. Ask me how I'd deal with an abusive coworker or a boss with a substance abuse problem. Don't waste my time asking about manhole covers and pretending your company is like Microsoft. You're not. Get over it.

It's reminicent of what I call the Hemmingway Effect. Ask anyone who absolutely loathes Hemmingway's writing and they'll immediately rant about the imitators who ape the original but do a poor job of it. Remember a few years ago when every half assed film student thought he was the next Tarrentino? Even if the original is any good (and I'll leave that an open question with regards to the folks in Redmond), the imitators are enough to turn mild dislike into full fledged hatred.

Microsoft didn't get where it is by trying to be the next IBM. Only a fool buys into the notion of being the next Microsoft. The puzzle cult is yet another example of this.

Re:Cult of the Puzzle

[superflippy]

Microsoft didn't get where it is by trying to be the next IBM. Only a fool buys into the notion of being the next Microsoft.

Marvelous quote. It should be printed on a t-shirt and passed out to every software company with a napoleon complex bigger than their potential customer base.

Re:Cult of the Puzzle

[praedor]

So...when IS it a bad idea to use OO?

Really, I'm curious.

Re:Cult of the Puzzle

[Embedded Geek]

Marvelous quote. It should be printed on a t-shirt and passed out to every software company...

Well, now that you've mentioned it, I have set up a little online store for those shirts and copyrighted the phrase. My VC's and I are still looking for a logo, though. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Before that, though, you'll need to answer a little question: How would you move a manhole cover to Mount Fuji?

</tongue in cheek>

Re:Cult of the Puzzle

[Embedded Geek]

Three quickies. The first two are a little specialized, but the third is pretty stand alone:

1. The kneejerk answer is the same one that was kicking around when I was in college in the 80's: efficiency. Obviously, anything you would even contemplate coding in assembly due to speed concerns should not use any unnecesary overhead. In fact, in highly optimized code even procedural programming is a mistake (although those situations are even rarer). As to how one would code OO in assembly, see below...
2. Inavailabity of tools: I have seen many embedded projects that use legacy compilers that do not support OO or have very poor OO support (i.e. pre ANSI C++). Often the tools can't be upgraded because they are no longer supported or it's just not in the budget. Under those circustances, some developers are tempted to kludge an OO looking design on top of a procedural structure - lots of function pointers hanging everywhere to simulate class methods, fields in structures identifying types to support run time polymorphism - all the things the compiler is supposed to do for you. You wind up with a design that's more complex, not less, because you have to implement the OO underpinnings as well as what you're trying to do in the first place.

   There are, naturally, exceptions. UNIX pioneered drivers in C with general purpose routines referenced via pointers - basically a base class (stream or block driver) with subclasses having device specific code embedded in class methods. Taking it much further than that would be a horrible mess, though.

3. Finally, the biggest mistake in implementing an OO solution (IMHO) is when there is little reuse of components (aka: forcing an OO solution on a non-OO problem). I worked with an OO advocate who pushed a scheme of representing our entire system as objects: a status light would invoke a message method in a dumb router box which would invoke a method in our method in our platform to build the core message, wrap onion-esqe headers around a message structure and then shove the structure down into a driver. While it was really cool to be able to put "box1.router2.statuslight[22].blink();" in your code, the fact was that none of the boxes had anything in common. Every one had a different structure for messages and different timeout issues. As a result, nothing inherited from anything and none of the code ever got reused within the platform. Worse, there were no upgrade efforts on other platforms, so the stuff wouldn't get reused there either. Basically, the whole thing was just a bunch of procedures hanging off an object framework - we never got any advantages of OO but we still got all the headaches of implementing an OO design (i.e. objects all over the place, many of which were just shells to allow others to be invoked in certain ways and didn't contribute to functionality).

   Jack Ganssle had a great metric in one of his seminars: Reuse of code is not cost effective until it has been used five times. You often see developers trying to do the right thing and make reusable libraries, etc. only to see the effort abandoned around the third iteration. That's because coding for the general case is often tough and requires a lot of testing that you'd never do if you were just coding up for a single project (ask anyone who's coded a driver or library that stays in house for use on a few projects and one that actually goes out to customers as a COTS solution). I believe OO is a lot like that: If it's a design you're going to conceievably be reusing five times, code that puppy as objects to give you a nice, clean interface. Otherwise, don't try it unless your design lends itself strongly to objects that can be reused within the scope of your current project.

   In the words of Dennis Miller, though, I could be wrong...

Re:Cult of the Puzzle

[jcr]

I have seen many embedded projects that use legacy compilers that do not support OO or have very poor OO support (i.e. pre ANSI C++).

Or any other flavor of C++...

-jcr

Now I understand

[csguy314]

how they hire people for their security group.

Interviewer: How would you make a critical, large, distributed application more secure?

Interviewee: Round!

Interviewer: Congratulations. Welcome to Microsoft.

Roman Manhole Covers

[N8F8]

This site goves a good overview of the history of sewer systems. I toured a Roman city in Jordan back in 1995 and was suprised by the round stone manhole covers every 40 feet along the road. I was also amazed by the acoustics in the amphithearte.

One of my favorite questions

[dsplat]

How would you measure the height of a building using a barometer? I have never been asked this one in an interview. It was used in a discussion in my high school physics class.

There are a couple of things to note. The question specifies that you must use a barometer. It does not say how it is to be used, or prohibit the use of other tools.

I will wish good karma on anyone who can come up with an answer that I haven't heard since I since encountered this question.

Re:One of my favorite questions

[AdamBa]

This is actually mentioned in chapter 1 of Games for the Superintelligent , not as a puzzle for the reader, but as an alleged example of a student getting in trouble for thinking outside the box. The three answers he mentions, which I will obfuscate to keep them secret a bit longer, are the "standard" one, the "drop" one, and the "owner" one.

- adam

Re:One of my favorite questions

[dsplat]

It's been ages since I read that book. I have it sitting on the shelf at home. I know a bunch of others, some of which I came up with independently. My classmates came up with the "shadows" solution and the "string" solution. There is also the "sell it and use the money to pay the fee to get a copy of the county records on the building which will contain the information" solution. I won't claim that the number of solutions is infinite, because at some point additional solutions start either involving trivial inclusion of the required barometer or are trivial variations on other solutions. The reason I like this problem is that it can be used as an exercise in brainstorming.

Re:One of my favorite questions

[nsayer]

Take the barometer into the building and find the receptionist, tourguide, building manager or some other person in charge. Tell them, "I'll give you this shiny new barometer if you tell me the height of this building."

No good? How about this one:

Take the barometer to the top of the building, drop it over the side and time how long it takes to hit the ground. Using 9.8 m/s^2 as its rate of acceleration and 0 as its starting velocity (leave out the computation of the barometer's terminal velocity. It's unlikely to affect the outcome), you should be able to find the distance it fell.

Re:One of my favorite questions

[dsplat]

1. Tie a long string to the barometer. Lower it from the top of the building. When it touches the ground, pull it back up and measure the string.
2. Put the barometer next to the building. Measure the barometer, the shadow of the barometer and the shadom of the building. Do the math.
3. Eject the barometer horizontally from the top of the building at a known velocity. Measure the horizontal distance it travelled from the building to calculate the duration of its flight. Use the duration and g to calculate the distance it fell.
4. Using the same string from before, make a pendulum. Swing it slightly. Time the period and use that to calculate the length of the string.
5. Melt the barometer down. Make a large strand of very fine wire. Lower it until it touches the ground. Measure the wire.

The list goes on and on.

Re:One of my favorite questions

[WasterDave]

Similar: You have one minute to tell me as many ways as possible of killing someone with a doorknob.

No answer -> No hire.
A couple of answers -> Maybe, depends.
Someone who keeps going for the full minute -> Have security escourt them from the building.

Dave

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Peterus7]

But Microsoft is the only one who asks these questions:

Were you are have you ever been involved with Apple?

Do you know anyone who is or has been involved with Apple?

Oval

[phorm]

Agreed.I think an ovaline manhole cover would be a better choice. You get the same benefit as a rounded cover, but making it slightly ovaline (not too much, or you can tip it up using pressure on one end) would stop the problem of rotation.

Perhaps there's a ratio between the size of a construction worker and the roundness of a manhole cover?

Re:Oval

[jafiwam]

Oval would prevent spinning, but any shape designed not to rotate can probably be made to jam. Especially once considering the force applied during a drop of an inch or two given the weight. The same applies to triangles or rectangle or square, get one jammed in there and you are using a winch and spending lots of time to get the damn thing out. (Or CUTTING it out...)

I'd also consider it likely that any tire on the cover would spin against the metal before even the round cover would spin, the normal static friction of a tire on metal has got to be way lower than the rough metal on rough metal of the cover and frame. Plus, any jerk off stupid enough to punch the petal that hard deserves to be made look like a fool by a man-hole cover.

LSD in the water

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

I'd put LSD in the water. Why actually do the grunt work when it's easier to just get everybody to believe you did?

Is the puppy mechanical in any way?

[Sabu mark]

Futurama = more gooder

Re:Is the puppy mechanical in any way?

[BHearsum]

Do you happen to know the episode name or number of that paticular episode?

Re:Is the puppy mechanical in any way?

[athmanb]

Fear of a Bot Planet

Re:Is the puppy mechanical in any way?

[esanbock]

Season 1, Episode 5 - Fear of a Bot Planet

Re:Is the puppy mechanical in any way?

[Sabu mark]

You have no idea.

I lost a lot of weight last year by listening to Opie and Anthony while jogging. I would not have been able to keep at it without something that entertaining.

Re:Is the puppy mechanical in any way?

[spencerogden]

I can't believe those guys are gone for good. They were syndicated in ustin for a while, I new them from New York. They got kicked out of Austin a few months before the big blow up.You'd think after all of the crap they pulled previously that WNEW wouldn't be too shocked by the, um, 'act' in St. Pat's.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Jaysyn]

It means that thier marketing department is full of Rainmanesque idiot savants... /hoffman

Marketing, yeah marketing...

Jaysyn

In my 50+ interviews..

[gosand]

I have probably interviewed 50+ people over my 10 years in the industry. I have known people who have asked questions like these, dumb questions (what part of a Big Mac would you be, and why?), boring questions (where do you see yourself in 5 years), or even had them write code to solve a problem.

They all suck. For me, when I interview someone I talk to them, I don't grill them. I find out what they know and what they don't know. If you have Unix on your resume, I ask what shell you use. If you don't know, then you shouldn't have Unix on your resume and be interviewing for a position where it is the OS that our product runs on. At least you shouldn't say "I know Unix". (true story)

One place I interviewed at, wasn't sure about me. They didn't feel that I was enthusiastic enough about their company. They wanted me to come back for a second interview to see if I could be a little more excited. I declined. If 4 hours of talking to 5 different people didn't let them make their decision, then in my opinion I wasn't a good fit for them.

I don't care how intelligent someone is, if they can't work with people then they are useless to me. Rarely are there jobs in the software industry where you don't interact with other people. I once worked with a guy who was a contractor at NASA for years. He told us some pretty cool stories, and he had some high clearance there. But he was a crappy worker. It took him forever to get the simplest things. He kept color-coded notecards with him at all times, and he would write down things you told him. If you asked him a question, he had to take out his notecards and look it up.

I always ask myself "would I want to work with this person?". Chances are if they are interviewing, they have some technical skills. Can they learn new ones? One guy, when asked if he knew Unix, said no, but if you gave him a manual he could learn it. He had a PhD. I was against it, but he was hired. Contrary to what he said, he couldn't learn Unix. After almost a year, I still had to explain over and over how to list the contents of a directory. Kind of hard to test a Unix server like that.

I am of the firm opinion that you have to be able to work with people. Get a feel for the person when you are interviewing them. But that is just me, I am not a huge faceless corporation. I suppose if I went to work for Microsoft I'd have to change my ideas.

P.S. Did anyone else notice how many times the word Microsoft was repeated in that article? Creepy.

Remote control of Venetian blinds?

[Dr. Mu]

The blind people of Venice are human beings just like the rest of us. I find the notion of controlling them remotely not only morally repugnant, but a blatant misuse of technology. That Microsoft might have come up with this one is disappointing but -- sigh -- not such a great surprise.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. Programmers should have little say in what goes into a program otherwise you wind up with stupid and confusing interfaces (look at GNOME and KDE). The users should be consulted primarily since they tend to have good ideas. A look over the X project proves this. How many times have people cried uot for a decent GUI to bebuilt into the kernel? Thousands! And that's because it's a good idea. But programmers are stupid and think that people want the network transparency which makes X slow. Or take a look at some of the mail clients in Linux like Evolution. They try to be like Outlook but they can't beat it because Outlook has more features and will always be ahead of Evolution. Why? Because Microsoft listens to what the users want and they give it to them. That' why Windows and all Microsoft products are so featureful. Windows has a GUI in the kernel. They have a mail client/PIM tha has nearly everything but the kitchen sink. This is waht everyone wants. Only programmers would have the idea that NOT adding features is a good thing. The only problem with adding features is that you have to remember to take away the ones that aren't needed anymore. That's why Windows XP boots up faster than any other OS now. They took out all the features that they forgot about that no one uses anymore and made the kernel really small but still put a GUI in it. The only time that listening to the users is a bad idea is when they want to take features away. Things like "Clippy" for instance. While it may be annoying to an advanced user (who is probably just a programmer and has no sense of whimsical), it was very helpful to people like me to become experts at computers. Now I know how to use wizards in Office better than anyone where I work. I can make really good looking documents and I don't have to type too much information to make my point. This is all very helpful. So forget about what the programmers want. Pay attention to what the users want. Coders don't have any idea what the avearge users want because they forgot what it's like to be a human being instead of a machine. Stupid programmers. Microsoft is going to be lightyears ahead of everyone because they are asking questions like this. It will help them get the best programmers who are really just users that learned by using Office and "Clippy".

How many hairs does a horse have?

[PhilHibbs]

An Austrian school inspector was impressed by the children that he had observed, but wanted to ask one more question before departing. "How many hairs does a horse have?" he asked. Much to the amazement of both the inspector and the teacher, a nine year old boy answered "3,571,962." "How do you know that your answer is correct?" asked the inspector. "If you do not believe me," answered the boy, "count them yourself." The inspector broke into laughter and vowed to tell the story to his colleagues when he returned to Vienna. When the inspector returned the following year for his annual visit, the teacher asked him how his colleagues responded to the story. Disappointedly he replied, "I wanted very much to tell the story but I couldn't. For the life of me, I couldn't remember how many hairs the boy had said the horse had."

Another question...

[mattyohe]

Suppose you had 8 billiard balls, and one of them was slightly heavier, but the only way to tell was by putting it on a scale against another. What's the fewest number of times you'd have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?

Re:Another question...

[SecGreen]

This one has been around a while, so I wouldn't "trust" it as an interview question.. Here's the answer:

2

(or did you want to know how?)

Re:Another question...

[SecGreen]

I forgot to mention, but the answer is the same for 9 billiard balls. Unfortunatly, more people figure it out when you say nine (that's a hint!)

LOL.

[Unknown Poltroon]

I get this sort of thing all the time with my friends, and random people on the metro. "WHo you rooting for in the game tonight. Well, i kind like both teams, bu i wonder which is gonna win. I mean, one of ems been having that trouble, and the other ones got the new guy. WHat do you think?" I have no idea what the mans talking about.

Anyone who cant bs his way through an on the spot question like that worries me.

$250B Market Cap can't be wrong?

[$beirdo]

$250B Market Cap can't be wrong; this is a ridiculous statement.

Microsoft was in the right place at the right time to take monopoly control of one of the greatest industries of the modern world - their outrageous success is due to the immensity of the information revolution and not to the quality of their interview questions.

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[rkischuk]

1. Collect underpants.
2. ???
3. Profit!

I think Anthony Scholfield is in the midst of exploring step 2.

Re:How-to find an answer in a haystack.

[Sabu mark]

So reduce the surface tension by adding detergent until the needle won't float.

Or churn the water as you're dumping the stuff in (if the act of dumping doesn't churn it enough already) so the needle doesn't stay on the surface.

Chumpnuts.

Re:Pennies?

[kakos]

Just line them up in a single line. There will be on line of 4 pennies, but 2 lines of 3 pennies. Ahah!

Re:How-to find an answer in a haystack.

[Anonymous Coward]

Surface tension occurs ... wait for it ... at the surface. You submerge the whole stack and stir gently - the needle will drop and the hay will suspend. I assume.

Re:Manhole Covers... (now: Gas Stations)

[corporate zombie]

It's definitely about cars and not area.

I didn't have an envelope but with `bc' I get:

us pop = 300M
avg us family = 3.6 people
# us families = 833,333
avg cars / family = 1.4
# cars in us 1,166M
avg cars / gas station = 250

# gas stations = 6533

So my interviewee can do unit conversions. Doesn't tell me if he or she is gonna crack when they've got an angry engineer on the phone wondering why /usr/local is locked down because of course the engineer would NEVER fumble finger a command and break 4000 other people's environment.

-CZ

SEP Field

[mckwant]

Paint it orange, SEP field.

Re:SEP Field

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Paint it orange, SEP field.

Well, I prefer pink. Of course, my solution is just to lie about it until people believe me.

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[josephgrossberg]

I remembered "Vat a Country!" but not that line. Thx for the correction.

O T T F F S S. Easy.

[Pyrion]

Next letter is obviously E, though it doesn't stand for "easy". :)

"how would you move mount fuji?"

[_ph1ux_]

Photoshop!

Move Mt. Fuji? -Simple-

[dbretton]

Detonate a briefcase nuke in Beijing.

Leave a note reading,
"Dear assholes. I have just saved
your country millions of dollars in
electricity costs. Beijing no longer
requires lighting at night, as it glows
in the dark now.
Ha ha ha!

Signed,
Japanese dude sitting on top of
My Fuji, laughing his ass off.

Job interview questions

[Richard W.M. Jones]

At the last company I worked for I was mostly in charge of hiring developers. I used Joel's interview technique very effectively to locate smart people who Get Things Done. This has several sections, one of which is a wild question like "How many trucks does it take to move Mt Fuji".

Unfortunately it was disappointing how few people did well in the interview. I forget the exact numbers of course, but I must have looked at 500 CVs in my time there, interviewed perhaps 30 people, and hired 2.

Another great technique we found was to install a computer with Linux on it in the interview room, and prepare a bunch of tests. Example: create a directory full of filenames in UPPERCASE and ask the candidate to use "any tools available" to convert the names to lowercase. We had the screen projected up on the wall of the interview room so everyone could see, and we gave the candidates no help.

The first thing you notice is: this guy doesn't know Linux. At least 50% of the candidates didn't know about "ls" and "cd"! (These are people who claim Linux on their CVs, interviewing for a job which requires Linux on their desktop).

The second thing you notice is the difference between the top 1% whom we hired and the bottom 75% is something like 20 to 1 differential in their knowledge.

It was an eye-opener. I now no longer trust pimps^Wrecruitment consultants as far as I can throw them.

Rich.

some more

[Unknown Poltroon]

Feed hat to a cow. When cow starts bellowing, x-ray cow and remove needle. Cruel though.

X ray haystack

leaf blower.

sort through thm one by one.

tremites

go to store, buy needle. magically find neede after 2 minutes of searching.

Metal detector

Pay a consultant to do it.

Drop moutn Fuji ont to it, pulverixing the hay, so its less to look through

beam microwaves at it untill the needle heats up and sparks.

sit in haystack. Guarenteed to get stuck with it.

Re:some more

[ChaoticLimbs]

Burn Haystack. Everything left is needle.

Use an electromagnet on the haystack. Everything sticking on the electromagnet = needle.

submerge and ferment the haystack in water until the haystack is gone. The red stain at the bottom of the tank is (was) the needle.

Allow nine small children to choose to play with the haystack that has a needle in it or a pile of toys worth seven hundred dollars. Leave one electrical outlet in the room uncovered. Leave the room unsupervised for thirty seconds. The needle will be in the hot terminal of the electrical outlet when you return and there will be eight small children covered in poop and hay. And one corpse.

Proudly and publicly announce that all dangerous needles have been removed from the haystack. Announce that you are running for Senate. As a Republican. The needle will turn up shortly after the primary election.

Drop the hay from 30,000 feet of altitude in a 5 mph wind. The thing that hits the ground first and nearest to the drop point is the needle.

How would you Move Mt. Fuji?

[dbretton]

370,000 metric tons of Metamucil?

Sideways

[Col. Panic]

Well you wouldn't want to do it any *other* way would you?

Re:Sideways

[sporty]

I asked someone else this question, who in turn, asked it back.

I was told, all I have is a shovel. So I said, i'd use a shovel, and from top down, move it.

Then they said, move it to America... said I can't. I don't have enough money.

-s

Lord Byron's niece....

[elf]

Ada Lovelace

By some accounts his neice, by others his daughter, the latter of which seem more accurate.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-bio.h tm l

quote:
After she wrote the description of Babbage's Analytical Engine her life was plagued with illnesses, and her social life, in addition to Charles Babbage, included Sir David Brewster (the originator of the kaleidoscope), Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. Her interests ranged from music to horses to calculating machines. She has been used as a character in Gibson and Sterling's the Difference Engine, shown writing letters to Babbage in the series " The Machine that Changed the World" and I have gathered her letters and writings in "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer Though her life was short (like her father, she died at 36), Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing.

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html

http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.comp ut ers/19980911_Who_invented_the_computer

quote:

Since we've strayed onto this topic, I'll throw in a story I've heard in a number of contexts. I have no historical support for any of this - it's just a story I've encountered. Ada Lovelace was a student (the first female mathematics student at Oxford, I believe, and a true genius at it to boot) of Babbage. Babbage was a commoner, and Lovelace was the niece of Lord Byron (an elevated commoner, and poet laureate). Byron was determined that his niece would marry well, and when Ada and Babbage met at Oxford and fell in love, Byron nixed the relationship, because Babbage was a lowly commoner, not well paid as an Oxford don, and had no real future.

-elf

Apache directives

[apankrat]

"What is the directive that throttles the number of Apache processes."

Oh, this is classics. The better question would've been "There is a directive throttling the number of Apache processes - true/false".

The answer for the original question is "I'm not interested in working for your company as you expect me remember some junk, which I would normally look up on as-needed basis". Duh.

Re:Apache directives

[tjgrant]

Dang, I wish I hadn't burned my Mod points before seeing this reply!

That is such a great response. I am terrible at answering questions about minutiae that a man or grep or google can turn up. I can't remember all the details, but the thing that separates me from others is that I always know where to find the answers.

Re:Apache directives

[drinkypoo]

Or, maybe the answer they're looking for is "I don't know, I'd search the Apache documentation, which comes with apache. Assuming I had internet access, I'd probably search the online documentation, because apache.org provides a search engine. Given that I am implementing a web server, it seems likely that I will have such capability." Of course, you should omit as many sentences as necessary to make the interviewer happy.

How would you Move Mt. Fuji?

[dbretton]

Make it watch "Old Yeller"

?

Re:My Interview - THAT'S the problem

[Havokmon]

Split the balls into 2 sets of 6, place the sets on both ends of the scale and weigh them

It's all in the presentation. I immediately thought of using a bathroom scale. It doesn't have two sides.. (Though I can't think that I've ever used a two sided scale.. only had one side in chem..)

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[banzai51]

You're kidding right? Because the industries you listed are most likely to ask the standard questions (what is your greatest weakness, etc) than anything off the wall. They don't want creative thinking types.

Begging the question..

[Ogerman]

Microsoft's success would seem to make the argument pointless: Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?

Of course it can. Having the marketing muscle to force lousy products down people's throats does not make one a success. Nor does it say anything about the intelligence of people working at M$. Perhaps if the brains there had some common sense as well, they'd have jumped ship long ago and started making a positive difference in the industry.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[jmccay]

How many open source projects that you know of use strange questions to filter out possible developers? It's not the same thing because most OSPs don't ask questions like those presented here. Instead, they wait for a developer to prove themselves.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whatyou guys are doing, but I use boxers to cover my manhole.

green defined

[firewrought]

Define the color green.

The sensation excited in the human eye by light with a wavelength at or near 510 nm.

How would you move Mount Fuji?

It's going to take lots of heavy equipment, a large labor force, and ~16 rail lines in parallel to the destination site. Please sign this waiver and wire 11.6 tillion Japanesse Yen to my account.

How would you design a remote control for venetian blinds?

Ha ha... silly. Why would you want a remote control for your blinds? Everyone I know just hooks a servo up to their old 802.11b cards and writes a device driver to control it over the network.

...

Questions like these were great ones to ask the UseNet Oracle. I got a great response once on the manhole cover question...

IBM

[Chagatai]

Big Blue has two main parts when you interview (at least, they did when I was a college hire four years ago). The first part is a test they call the IPAT (can't remember the acronym) and the second is the actual interviews. The IPAT is supposed to be a type of intelligence test to determine your analytical skills, broken down into three sections: pattern matching (a, b, a, b, what's next?), following instructions with a 5x5 matrix (i.e. switch the second and fourth columns-what entry will be in the second row, fourth column?), and math problems.

Being one of those kids growing up who received IQ tests all the time, I found the IPAT to be too formulaic. I thought that I had even found a question with two correct answers on the test. The question was:

What comes next? B, C, E, H, ?

K, L, M, N, O

I said that the answer could be either L or M. The answer would be L if the process involved skipping letters (0 skipped between B and C, 1 between C and E, etc.). But the answer could also be M if the series was a number-to-alpha conversion of the Fibonacci Series (2, 3, 5, etc.).

Turns out that this question wasn't on the test, but sending this info to the IPAT designer impressed someone and helped get me the job in the end.

technical questions

[mzs]

I do not know about other people's experiences but these kinds of questions were not the kind I was presented with when interviewing for a job at Microsoft some many years ago. I was applying for software positions so that may have had something to do with it. I did get an offer so I must have done well enough in the process to have seen all of the successful candidate path.

The interview process was a grueling four day affair. With one full day of intense interview and some time off to explore the Redmond area (at least that is what I did with a free evening and one mostly free day). But even in the off-time there were interviews because HR scheduled lunches and dinners with employees for me. There the questions were mixed between very technical and personal. I would say that when not asking technical questions the interviewers were very interested in finding out how passionate I was about writing software and how I felt about working together with others.

But most often questions were _very_technical and I was expected to write C++ on the spot on white boards, notepads, or napkins in how I would solve a particulr problem. They were also very interested in the thought process that I used to arrive at a solution. I even got a problem that was genuinely impossible and after working on it for a while I started to figure that out. The interviewer knew this of course and I had to prove it to him that this was the case. Then I had to restrict the problem and solve that. I think that that was a novel type of question to ask. First, if I actually wrote some code that I claimed was correct, that would indicate very poorly on me. If I did not realize that the problem was not able to be solved as presented, then that would not be good either. Once the problem was identified, could I figure out a way to state a restricted similar problem that was indeed solvable? Also, I am sure that the interviewer was trying to judge my reaction. Did I reactly logically or did I just get frustrated and confused.

Thrown into the bag of questions, there were also some 'vision' questions. What did I see the future of computing to be like. I did not have any mind teaser questions like those in the article. The vast majority of the questions were very technical, answers were expected in C++, and were stated as practical problems that you might expect to have to solve when working on an OS.

My interview questions

[husker_man]

While I never interviewed at Microsoft, I have been on several interviews with different companies, and been through both the "problem solving" type questions and the "technical knowledge" questions. Since I've done well on both types of questions I've never had a problem landing a job offer (turned down most of them, though).

However, I have performed several interviews for people for jobs doing Unix systems administration work, and I followed a script (home grown), that combined both the puzzle and technical knowledge type questions into one interview format. What I did was to ask some fairly basic Unix command questions of a candidate (for instance on a HP platform what is the difference between rsh and remsh). If the candidate didn't know the question, I'd explain the difference in terms of what the candidate did know (i.e. remsh on HP is similar to rsh on Solaris, etc.). Then, two or three questions later, I'd ask the candidate a question that built on the previous question and combined it with some new technical data, and I'd see if he remembered what I told him a while back.

The best person who I hired into that position only got the right "technical" question right five times - but he remembered what I had explained to him earlier and came up with an answer that showed he could integrate what he had learned with his current knowledge to come up with an answer. Of course, what I was looking for was if he would be able to build on new information or not, and he did very well.

If you could remove any of the fifty U.S. states..

[jbum]

Clearly the best choice is Canada.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[AutumnLeaf]

I did read it. And I disagree with that statement as well. The reviewer of the article was an ex-microsoft employee who worked for the author. You think he might be biased in his perception.

My interview here at my currently employer was a full day in length, and involved eight people. They were all easy save one person, who a current employee who got me a line on the opening warned me about as being really tough. That individual looked at my resume, and started walking through it line by line, hammering on me to see if I really knew what I'd said I know. ABout a third of the way down he decided to get really picky about OS Theory and started hammering me with questions about that, and then we ran out of time. We walked back to customer support center (because I was initially interviewing for a job in that department, but was hired into an engineering position instead). Upon arriving in the CSC to turn me back over to the hiring manager, my interviewer learned the hiring manager was indisposed for another twenty minutes. Thrilled to have an extra twenty minutes, my interviewer sat me down in the middle of a room full of people and started interviewing me right there! And, he was asking me the logic questions Microsoft is being praised for having thought of using in an interview.

You think on-the-spot logic questions are hard? Try "performing" for strangers and potential co-workers at the same time!

niece vs. daughter

[AdamBa]

I googled this and also found it reported both ways. I personally had always thought she was his niece so I ran with that. Anyway I think people know the "famous female-relative-of-some-sort of Lord Byron who had something to do with early computers" that you are talking about.

- adam (author of the book review)

The real problem

[3ryon]

The much more challenging problem would be making Mt Fuji stay in place. Currently it's rotating around a central point (the center of the Earth) at approx 1,000 MPH. Not only that, it's also orbiting around the sun at an some (unknown to me) speed. It is constantly moving! QED.

The real problem, as is often true, is a poorly worded question. (And I wonder why I don't seem to get that many job offers :)

Hum

[Dark Lord Seth]

Why do MS employees need to be innovative then? I thought that was only required if you were to join the Marketing & Legal Department where innovation involves selling out smaller companies?

A question you've never heard in an interview

[Mikey-San]

How about something an inch to the left? Something really odd, and almost akward?

Instead of:

"What is your greatest weakness?"

How about:

"What do you wish your greatest weakness was?" ... Instead of the reverse of "What's your greatest strength?", it's the reverse of "What do you wish you were best at?"

Or maybe I just wanna fsck with the applicant's head. Yeah, that one. Heh. :-)

-/-
Mikey-San
Burninating karma at the speed of TROGDOR!

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[Drakonian]

Are you kidding me, could it get any easier? The answer to 2 is "make sure they are worn female ones and then sell them". I don't think you've been to enough p0rn sites on the web!

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[buffer-overflowed]

I've never had a kernel panic in 6 years, the problems were in openSSL (which affected services on several OSes, including Windows, Linux, etc.), and anyone who still runs sendmail is an idiot (I mean with it's track record, why? It's the *nix equivalent of IIS). SAMBA is more secure than say Win98's filesharing holes (none of which have been fixed).

But, that's not the point, and I'm not going to muddle in vague fandom here and make some kind of definition of "the Linux OS" so that I can compare it to a version of Windows. Suffice it to say that Windows is unlikely to ever be as secure as a Linux system because of how much is irremovably included in a vanilla Windows Operating System install. Whatever you tack on to those base OSes, well that's not the fault of the operating system, that's the fault of bad software (which inflicts itself on all OSes equally).

Besides that, aren't all these OSS tools and programs the work of a bunch of amateurs and hobbyists who should be less skilled than their proffessional betters? It should be inferior, right? Disappointed that it's not, are we?

Thats the other divisions job.

[Unknown Poltroon]

I found the needle, its in this cow. My union rep says all i had to do was get it out of the haystack. HAve a nice day.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

bodily fluids?

[Wakkow]

What was next? Did he try keeping anyone from sapping and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids?

Re:bodily fluids?

[spencerogden]

Floride, Mandrake, Floride, in ice cream

Two Types:

[sbillard]

Microsoft puzzles can be divided into two types

1. [OK] [Cancel]
2. [Back] [Next] [Finish]

Interesting

[Pope Raymond Lama]

It seens that the people found apt through this
kind of interview are not only more creative, or
productive, but inerently evil.

Maybe you United-States-of-Americans could adopt
them in airports to catch more terrorists.

VCR question

[grantham]

Someone once told me about a job interview he had at Microsoft. This was circa 1992. One of the questions they asked him was, "Why is there no eject button on VCR remote controls?" He was proud of himself for knowing the answer. "Because if you're going to eject a tape, you're going to have to get up anyway to do anything with it, so it's unnecessary." Microsoft was pleased with his quick-wittedness, and he got the job.

Two things bothered me about this question and expected answer. One, there are VCR remote controls with eject buttons. (My parents had one at the time, and I thought it was great.) Two, there are valid reasons to want to eject a tape without wanting getting up. For example, you may have just taped something really good that you want to be sure not to tape over accidentally. Eject the tape, and your chances of doing that drop. Also, many VCRs take several seconds to eject a tape (I don't know, maybe they're checking to make sure they're not playing it at the time). By ejecting the tape from the comfort of your seat, it'll be all ready to put away when you get up there.

This story, to me, explains a lot of Microsoft's behavior.

Re:VCR question

[Ozan]

There is no eject button on most of the remote controls because by leaving it out the manufacturer can save a cent or so per unit without giving the buyer a valid reason to chose another model.

In the long run every company move can be deducted to money.

Why are manhole covers round?

[TaleSpinner]

I've gotten that one several times, and I always
have the same reply: "So the covers won't drop in.
Now, can YOU tell ME why manhole covers in Nashua,
NH are triangular?"

It's a pity we are losing those covers as the city
tries to rebuild its infrastructure. For those
not in the know, Nashua and one other city in this
country had manhole systems designed by a man in
the early part of this century who realized that
a three-point support system for a manhole cover
would minimize the "clunk-clunk" effect of an
even slightly warped round manhole cover as you
drove over it.

And what other city shares this distinction with
Nashua? Well, they've mostly replaced those old
covers, since you can't get them anymore, but that
town which shares this distinction with Nashua is
New York City.

And I've never had anyone at an interview be able
to tell me any of THAT.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Slime-dogg]

The true answer is "I'd jump."

When you jump, you do a little amount of work to get the big project done. Mt. Fuji moves in reference to the static world of you, you've pushed the Earth down, you've moved Mt. Fuji.

Gas station Question

[roberto0]

so you've got a good formula and I like your estimates. But where did you get 250 cars/gas station? Also, something tells me there are more than 1.16M active cars in the US.

Re:Gas station Question

[dAzED1]

MINOR details. Yes, I'm quite curious where the 250 cars per station came from too. You see, I'm not going to make wild guesses when there are so many factors missing.

Its NOT just about the number of cars (and you know, gas stations also service these things called semis, or tractor/trailers....lots of mileage there). Its about distance traveled. If the average vehicle gets 20mpg, and the average vehicle travels 15,000 miles a year, and there are 1.6 million cars...then we're getting somewhere. But those are 3 wild guesses already. Then we gota guess how many gallons of gas the average gas station can put out. Then we gota figure out that some gas stations are no where near optimum output, staying in business only because they sell 32ox sodas at a 90% profit. Then we gota figure in all the gas stations that exist not because of a steady market, but simply because they are between steady markets, and people don't have 100gallon gas tanks generally so they have to refill ever 200-400 miles.

Like I said, I don't like wild guesses, esp wild_guesses^4 or something. And as another poster said - I'd be MUCH more instered in WHY they wanted to move Mt Fuji. I almost always ask "why" first, and I always insist that the place I work makes the "why" available.

Re:Gas station Question

[AssFace]

At least we can see the short answer - that being that you will never get hired by any of these companies that would ask such questions.

Re:Gas station Question

[dAzED1]

those that object the question "why" at least

Re:How would you reprogram Windows so it won't cra

[slushpupie]

If you leave the CD's on the floor, they will not crash, either. And as far as I am consirned that is the best place for such CDs (I use one to prop up desk leg)

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[SeanAhern]

How many times have people cried uot for a decent GUI to bebuilt into the kernel? Thousands! And that's because it's a good idea. But programmers are stupid and think that people want the network transparency which makes X slow.

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:Microsoft not the only one

[buffer-overflowed]

You mean they don't have a pet Senator ask:

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Open Source Movement?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[SeanAhern]

anyone who still runs sendmail is an idiot (I mean with it's track record, why? It's the *nix equivalent of IIS)

Out of curiosity, what do you use as a sendmail replacement?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[H310iSe]

Have you ever USED their software? It may be best selling but it's certainly not best. Or even great. The fact that MS has SUCH amazing capital and SO many (allegedly) bright people and STILL makes so many horrible decisions (really, a lot of why their software sucks appears to me to be bad decision making not poor programming technique (though that's in abundance too I'd reckon)). I'd say whatever they do in interviews should be studied as a lesson of what not to do to make a great product. How did apple hire people in the 80s (when apple really was amazing). How about other companies that have done really unbelievable things (google?).

Microsoft's genius is not in software, it's in business practices. Talk about how they screen MBAs...

Re:Here's another Microsoft interviewing technique

[grumpygrodyguy]

Yes, these days it's best to do the following:

1) Post 3 job openings in a job search web-ring which is used by 100,000+ job seekers.

2) Collate the 8,412 responses to the 3 job openings

3) Spend 3 weeks finding the 7,000 or so applicants that haven't been coding for at least 10 years.

4) Have a meeting of the minds, let your 10 or so engineers sift through the remaining 1,412 on a big round table. Allow them plenty of leaway to reject candidates they don't like for whatever reason.

5) Take the remaining 300 candidates and verify that they have engineering degrees, or have at least twice as much experience neccesary for the job.

6) 150 left, verify those references.

7) 34 left, time for those phone interviews.

8) 10 remaining, first round of interviews.

9) 6 now, second round of interviews.

10) Ask obscure technical questions and judge according to how much they squirm.

11) Hire the 3 who squirm the least.

12) ...

13) Layoffs.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[AutumnLeaf]

And does the track record of Republican presidential candidates in years the NFC wins the Super Bowl mean anything?

Nope.

A correlation is not proof of a cause-effect relationship.

Unless you're really into conspiracy theories.

Lord Byron's Niece?

[Corvus]

I know about Lord Byron's daughter (Ada), but what's the name of and significance of Lord Byron's niece?

Ack, Microsoft BOB

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly how you'd do it in Microsoft BOB!

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[donutello]

The correct answer for "How would you move mount Fuju?" is "I wouldn't - it's fine right where it is." This is meant to be more than a facetious remark. Too often, we tend to add a feature because we can/think it will be nifty/were asked to, without reflecting first about whether we should. This is the number 1 cause of bloatware - coders not putting our feet down and saying - No, you don't need that! It's stupid, badly thought out, and won't work anyway!


A good question is one to which there are no right or wrong answers. Your answer is very good because it reflects original thought into the problem instead of just blindly trying to do what you are told to. Don't assume that the interviewer is looking for a specific answer to his question - they are looking to see how you think when asked to solve a problem and challenging the requirements is always a good first step.

What's up with the quality book reviews?

[PD]

The last book reviews I've read on Slashdot have actually been good. I remember some that were little more than a listing of the title, table of contents, and a thumbs up or down.

Good job on this one. Makes me want to read the book to find out more.

Why is M$ obsessed with moving Mt. Fuji?

[Colonel Panic]

George W's comments on this story:

"Can the pattern of Micro$oft's interview questions give us clues about the company's future actions? Why this obsession with moving Mt. Fuji? Perhaps the Japanese government should investigate Microsoft for planning terrorist activities that would destroy a national symbol. Of that country. Japan.

And what about this obsession with manhole covers? Could it be that Microsoft is planning some sort of covert para-millitary operation in our sewers? Perhaps the office of Homeland Security should look into this. I've instructed Tom Ridge to look into this.

First they took over our computers and now they want to take our sewers and destroy Mt. Fuji in the process. This evil must be stopped! I'm adding Microsoft to the Axis of Evil. If there are weapons of mass destruction in Redmond, we will root them out."

Later in the day...

"I just got off the phone with Bill Gates. I fogot what a good friend Bill is. Microsoft is good. I've removed them from my axis of evil list. Forget I even mentioned it."

Broken Syllogism

[PMuse]

While the Microsoft questions appear to be a better way to evaluate people, the issue has never really been seriously examined. Microsoft's success would seem to make the argument pointless: Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?

Yes.

Fact: Microsoft has made a lot of money.
Fact: Microsoft asks puzzle questions.
Hypothesis: Asking puzzle questions caused Mircosoft to make a lot of money.
Prediction: If you ask puzzle questions, you will make a lot of money.

This is a classic example of an argument that, if valid, would prove too much. If MS's success alone implies that its interview methodology is correct, then MS's success alone should also imply that every other little thing MS does is right.

"Oh no my young [Bill], you will find it is you who are mistaken...about a great, many things". - Emperor Palpatine, ROTJ

As if you haven't read enough stupid answers...

[fzammett]

Ah, what the hell, everyone's gotta give their answers, right?!?

(1) How to move Mt. Fuji... I would ask the interviewer if it had to be intact after the move... If not, nuclear weapons should do the job nicely, but you'd have a pile of rubble at the new location... If it had to be intact, I'd say simply re-drawing every map in the world would be the most viable solution. If they didn't like that answer, I'd tell them I'd be more concerned with them moving Mt. Reiner some time this century before worrying about moving Mt. Fuji.

(2) How many gas stations in the United States... I'd say I don't know, but if they're willing to commission me for a $250,000 research project, plus give me a car and of course per diem expenses, I'd get right on it.

(3) How to design a remote control for venetian blinds... The same way I'd design a remote control for any other kind of blind... It would have a voice synthesis chip for audio feedback and it would yell everything really, really loudly.

(4) Why are manhole covers round... I'd say because the rectum of gay men's rectums aren't square. (Come on, MANHOLE COVERS... think about it!)

(5) How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?... This is how I'd solve it... cirsumscribe a parallellagram around the oval shape of the rink to determine a square footage... now take the connical sections forming the four corners of the unfulfilled parallellagram and determine their total area... now determine the depth of the ice (we'll idealize it and say it's a constant depth)... now add up the area of the leftover sections and the ice and use that in conjunction with the depth to determine the total volume of ice... now make an ice cube and weigh it... determine the volume of ice in the ice cube and, assuming you're using hte same units to measure the cube as the volume of ice in the rink, divide the latter by the former and there's your answer, but I'll save you the time because the answer is I FUCKING HATE HOCKEY, WHY DO I CARE?!? (and yes, what I said is just a bunch of bullshit, I don't know what half of the things I named even are!)

By the way, if they were to ask what are my three greatest weaknesses, I'd say that I'm indecisive and then stop talking.

That's it. Do I get the job at MS?

Re:As if you haven't read enough stupid answers...

[JRHelgeson]

Why are manhole covers round? So the cover won't fall down the hole.

The weight of ice in the rink? Find out how many gallons of H2O it took to fill the rink, 1gal=8lbs. Its simple math.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[taybin]

Ha ha ha. Brilliant! Your humor seems to have eluded others though.

I too was a Microsoft employee...

[thoth]

for five years. In my time I interviewed lots of candidates, probably around 80 or so. Probably 1/3 were for summer internships, 1/3 for full-time, and another 1/3 were a special category of contractors interviewing for full-time lab positions (i.e. no programming, and this was mostly in 2000 when Microsoft decided to convert qualified contractors to full-time).

I always hated puzzle interviews, and did my best to avoid giving them. Because at a certain level all you are testing for is whether they've heard the puzzle before.

I used puzzles to break the ice, just to get them thinking of something for the first 5 minutes. I always used easy puzzles (e.g. two containers, one 7 liters, one 4 liters, measure 6 liters exactly) so the candidate wouldn't get too nervous.

I would generally ask some CS or EE (my grad and undergrad respectively) theory related question. For interns, I would start by asking what classes they were taking and then ask them question related to their coursework.

I switched between two programming questions:

1) iterative and recursive Fibonacci
2) find the longest repeated letter in a string

If they got both parts of #1 correct, I'd ask about efficiency and then if they had any ideas about making it faster.

#2 has a couple of interesting test cases I'd have them step through.

Anyway, that was about it. I could go on about lame questions I've had while interviewing for other positions inside Microsoft ;)

As an aside -

[Lemmy Caution]

Kudos on an excellent, well-written, informative review. A few articles of this depth and maturity and I could start sending money!

Umm, is this off topic?

[befletch]

Wow. Lots of discussions of puzzle questions here. Does that mean it is off topic to suggest that this was a really well written book review? I don't remember ever reading a review of this quality on Slashdot, although I don't read them all.

No, you fool!

[drivers]

cp /mnt/fuji/* /wherever

No you fool! That'll never work properly. You should do this instead:
# cd /mnt/fuji
# tar -cf - * | (cd /wherever ; tar -xvf -)

Stock in Manhole Covers on the Rise

[Shamanin]

Thanks to you /. link, znminmet.com is now upping production of their manhole covers by a factor of 100 based on the recent increase in the number of hits to their site ("it was just a matter of time til the world realized that they can't do without our amazing manhole covers").

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[NanoGator]

"The correct answer for "How would you move mount Fuju?" is "I wouldn't - it's fine right where it is."

My answer was sort of along the same lines. I was thinking along the lines of moving the mountain just by bending light or transmitting an image of it. In other words "Why move the mountain when we can simply satisfy the basic need to see it."

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Lemmy Caution]

"It's already moving."

Something about it being Mt. Fuji does invite pseudo-Zen one-line responses, I'm afraid.

Re:My Interview (solution enclosed)

[telstar]

1) Put 6 balls on either side of the scale. One side will be heavier than the other. (weighing #1)
2) Take 3 balls off each side of the scale. The scale will either balance, or it will still be heavier on one side. If it's balanced, then one of the three that you took off the initial heavier side has the odd ball. If it's not balanced, then one of the three on that side is heavier. (weighing #2)
3) Take two of the three balls from the group of 3 you devised above and put them on the scale. (weighing #3)

If they balance, then the one ball you're not weighing is the odd ball. If they don't balance, then the heavier ball is the odd ball out.

12 balls ... 3 weighings ... Done and done...

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

[schepers]

On a related note, from Joel on Software is The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing.

Reminds me of another ridiculousinterview question

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of another interview question I got, "What would you do if you were chased by Big Foot, a Raptor, and a pack of wild wolves in the middle of the forest far from civilization?"

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).

A list of more riddles

[failedlogic]

I go to this site every once in a while. There are various riddles on it of increasing difficulty incl math and science ones. There happens to be riddles Microsoft uses during interviews. Enjoy!

Microsoft Interview Questions

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[i_am_nitrogen]

Postfix is more than adequate for my needs. There's also Qmail and others. I've just found Postfix to be a lot easier to configure. Note that my server is a personal one with only three users... I'm not sure what features sendmail might have that a large organizati

From an excerpt: why interview past 2 seconds?

[DuctTape]

At this long excerpt, Poundstone notes that interview decisions tend to be made in the first two seconds, and, "Only rarely does anything that happens after the first two seconds cause the judger to revise that first impression significantly." So, you almost want to ask: what's the point of the book? Unless the rest of the time spent in the interview is for the interviewer to ask questions to bolster their position, and this will help you iff their answer is positive.

Almost makes you want to stop the interview after you've shaken hands and say, "Now that you've already made your decision, how about handing me off to the next person?" and cite the quoted study. Though it would save everybody's time, maybe that shows too much creativity, .

Nope...still gotta go through the motions.

DT

Round

[piobair]

Manhole covers are round because they cover round holes.

I just don't understand the big mystery behind that one.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Fulcrum of Evil]

When you jump, you do a little amount of work to get the big project done. Mt. Fuji moves in reference to the static world of you, you've pushed the Earth down, you've moved Mt. Fuji.

You've moved it less than 1 Planck, so you haven't really moved it at all.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[mdfst13]

It seems obvious to me (YMMV) why this kind of interview technique would lead to buggy code. These kind of questions attract people who like to solve odd thought puzzles in intriguing ways. The people who will show up best are those who will come up with novel solutions, because a new solution is inherently more interesting than a correct solution. This means that the kind of people who will perform best on this are those who come up with new ideas for existing problems.

New ideas for existing problems can be good. However, proven ideas that are known to solve existing problems are better. Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to do so?

Perhaps what MS really needs is to come up with an interview process that finds people who can handle the boring and mundane, rather than the new and exciting. The kind of people who can slog through acres of code to find errors and inconsistencies.

In the article it mentions that the main effect of these kind of questions is to get a lot of people with the same mindset. Perhaps MS needs more people with different mindsets who complement each other rather than supplement each other.

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[Joe the Lesser]

Wait wait, I know this one.

Let's see.
Step 1: Collect Underpants.
Step 3: Profit!!!

Step 2........... : '????'?

Re:Reminds me of another ridiculousinterview quest

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine the correct answer would be to hide behind Big Foot since he's never been known to kill people. The raptor will attack the wolves since Big Foot is not the natural enemy of the raptor and because raptors can more easily swallow wolves whole. Either the pack of wolves will win or the raptor. If the wolves win, they will be so full from eating that raptor that they won't be interested in eating you. If the raptor wins, it'll be so full that it couldn't eat anymore. Just in case either is hungry, you're hiding behind big foot so if anyone goes next, it's him.

See, there's a solution. It's called the "sick marketing against the tech support people and QA people" approach to project management. While their fighting each other, you can safely reduce the problem down to something reasonable.;-)

ah, a grammar question :)

[cliveholloway]

If you ask it without the apostrophe, you're making whos an object/person, therefore the answer must be, "No, whats is".

.02

cLive ;-)

One answer

[sootman]

I can't believe it, this was a Problem of the Week in 3rd- of 4th-grade Math, I kid you not. The next 3 letters after "O T T F F S S" are "E N T".
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven

Re:One answer

[Quill_28]

This is an old puzzle. The way I heard it was:

The puzzle took astronaunts 2 days to solve, while it only took a kindergarten class 20 minutes.

Of course that should be a hint as a kindergartener would be limited in knowledge scope.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Fulcrum of Evil]

You think on-the-spot logic questions are hard? Try "performing" for strangers and potential co-workers at the same time!

I'd think a demonstrated ability to deal with assholes would be invaluable.

other articles arising from the book

[AdamBa]

The Economist is supposed to be running a related article by Poundstone, and I even got email from someone from Reader's Digest who was fact-checking an extremely condensed version of the book. Both of those will probably come out closer to the book's official May 1 release date.

- adam

I was going to buy the book...

[Magius_AR]

Until I realized they posted the full-length of it as a book summary on Slashdot.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[i_am_nitrogen]

Postfix is more than adequate for my needs. There's also Qmail and others. I've just found Postfix to be a lot easier to configure. Note that my server is a personal one with only three users... I'm not sure what features sendmail might have that a large organization with 1000+ users on a mail server would need, that might not be provided by other packages.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[bbqBrain]

I think you bit on a troll. :-) It's borderline at times, but I think some of the details like the kernel-based GUI and AC author give it away.

Obvious.

[JKConsult]

All these answers, and I bet 70% of you have read HHGTG. You paint it pink with polka dots, erect a simple SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) Field, and everyone will think it's gone.

Question I got

[Fideist11]

Say you have 10 buckets, and you can put as much water as you want in each.

How do you fill these buckets in such a way that one can empty any subset of these buckets into a pool and you can determine by the amount of water in the pool precisely which buckets were emptied.

The answer is just the principle of binary numbers...1 gallon in bucket 1, 2 gallons in bucket 2, 4 gallons in bucket 3, 8 gallons in bucket 4, etc.

Why is the parent getting modded up?

[los furtive]

The users should be consulted primarily since they tend to have good ideas. A look over the X project proves this.

Wrong. The user will make suggestions for little tweaks or the odd enhancement, it takes someone who knows the capabilities of the system and the limitiations in implementing features to say what should/could go in next. The X project is a bad example because the users are highly technical people to begin with. If you just listen to the user, you're gonna run down some bad wild goose chases. Much better to step back and say, "do we really need to move Mt. Fuji?"

Only programmers would have the idea that NOT adding features is a good thing. ... The only time that listening to the users is a bad idea is when they want to take features away.

Oh I should have realized before that this is a troll!

Re:To make Mt. Fuji disappear, use a SEP field

[Cybrex]

That was my first thought. `Ya gotta paint it pink first, however.

-Cybrex

Re:Is MS really this pathetic?

[glenstar]

I'd bet they think higher SAT scores make better engineers or managers, too.

Actually, no. MS is one of the few remaining software (large) firms where education is a not considered the uber credential. Amazon on the other hand is education obsessed. I did a phone interview at Amazon in '96 that went very well. Two days later I get a phone call from HR asking which college I went to. When I replied "The School of Empiricism" (okay, I didn't actually say that this particular time, but have since then), she said "Ok, no big deal." Another two days and my phone rings again. HR woman: "What were your SATs?". I was floored. Honestly, what in the world does that have to do with *anything*?.

Puzzle-solving...

[DrCode]

Great. You end up with employees who are good at solving logic puzzles. But can they design and write decent software? (Thinking of the 5 times Windows98 auto-rebooted on me the other day, I think I already know the answer.)

Aha!

[sootman]

That's the answer to all these questions!
MS: Why/what/how...
You: just a second, lemme search Google for that.
Seriously, that's one of the things that makes a good employee--if you don't know the answer, knowing where to find it. I get asked a lot of questions at work because everyone knows, if I don't know the answer, 99% of the time I know the person who does. Asking me a question usually means you're 0 steps or 1 step away from the answer.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Ageless]

I use their software all/every day. I like Windows quite a bit. I think it's a great desktop. I think their server sucks, but on the other hand I think Linux's desktop is shit.

Microsoft is incredibly successful because their software, in general, is easy to use and accessible. Everyone can do it so damn near everyone does.

Re:Is MS really this pathetic?

[pmz]

MS is one of the few remaining software (large) firms where education is a not considered the uber credential.

Did Bill G. ever get a degree? If not, this may be one reason they can't expect the same thing from their employees.

Regardless, I agree that some companies place too much emphasis on whether a canidate has a degree. U.S. government positions tend to be refreshingly degree-agnostic, where they consider years of experience to be equivalent to schooling.

Manholes

[sootman]

Being as lazy as I am, my first thought was that manhole covers are round so they're easy to put them back in--just plop them down in any direction.

Re:Manholes

[Qender]

I think it's so they don't fall down the hole, they could do that if they were square and you turned them at an angle.

Re:Manholes

[Dethpickle]

Ya know... You can have a square cover. In fact, you can have a round one that DOES fall through. Its really a question of the smallest dimension of the cover and the largest dimension of the lip it sits on.

For example, a square cover over a round hole with a diameter just smaller than the side of the square. Because a 1m circular cover will fit through a 1m circular hole just as easily (more easily, really) than a square cover through a hole with a lip just an inch smaller.

I like the 'no orientation' and 'easy to roll' arguments for round ones the best.

Re:Let me illustrate my stupidity

[kasparov]

Actually, if you picked up the sqaure cover and oriented it vertically and spun it 45 degrees about the vertical axis it would still be able to fall through if it just had a small lip since the hypotenuse is 2^(1/2) times as long as one of the sides of the square.

"ottffss"

[Dante]

One two three four five six seven.....Eight!

Re:"ottffss"

[BrainInAJar]

Wierd, I got the same answer, but in a different way.

I ignored the initial 'O', it had some bearing to what was before it, likely.
Then, i took the second and third group: 'TT' and 'SS', and compared it alphabetically ( s directly precedes t ), and inferred the third group 'FF' would have the same pattern as the ones it was sandwitched between, and got 'EE' as the next two letters.

Same answer, different logic.

Re:My Interview (SPOILER)

[sholden]

-DIFFERENT: Note which side goes down. Weigh 3 marbles from one side plus 3 from the other against 6 'known good' ones. Keep track of them!

You don't have 6 known good marbles at that point, you only have 4...

Re:If you could remove any of the fifty U.S. state

[u38cg]

I would remove the state of stupidity. Or perhaps the state of blind faith in national leadership.

Re:Covers are round so...

[i_am_nitrogen]

It's entirely possible that the original poster was on his way to lunch when the workers began, and an hour later, on his way back (it was a long lunch), they were still at it.

William Poundstone is cool.

[rickmccl]

Anyone else read "Big Secrets"? There was a book I loved when I was in elementary school. I have high hopes for the entertainment value of this book based on his authorship.

This is great... if you get quality candidates...

[Punk Walrus]

... and have a job someone really wants. I swear, even though it's an employer's market out there, I'd disqualify so many people based on not on how they answer some complex question if the can't even get basic skills right.

Example: I got a resume once where a "Unix expert" had half his resume page taken up with how he mastered the "man" command. Really? Tell me how you'd find options on any Unix command. You don't know, huh? How about cp? mv? How do I find out who's logged into the box? Ask? Yeah, don't call us, we'll call you.

A coworker asked a potential network admin candidate to point to a router in the lab. Any router. The guy thought for a long time before picking out the thermostat on the wall.

Best "wriggle in your seat" interview I got was were the potential boss spent an hour defaming the company's own product. Then he wanted to know what *I* thought about what he just said. At the end of the interview, he said, "Tell me three reasons not to hire you." Man. That's a tough one. I gave some pretty weak answers, but they must have been the right ones, because I ended up working with that company for three years.

And then you can have some guy who knows his stuff, wants the job, and will settle for the pay and hours... and then he turns out to be a total slacker, a political player, or worse, a thief. Check those references! I have found that candidates who did great work will have former bosses and coworkers who will boast about it, even miss them. Beware of people who give only friends or relatives as references. I almost never follow up with those. I want proof you do good work.

__________________________________________________ ____
www.punkwalrus.com - what is this guy doing?

How would you move mount Fuji?

[teyu]

Wouldn't a better question be, "How would you stop mount Fuji?"? Being that its constantly rotating about the earth's axis, around the sun, through the...

Wow

[virg_mattes]

You did a fine job illustrating it, then. A square fails miserably, because if you put it vertically, then turn it so the edge lies diagonally to the corners of the hole, it'll fit with inches to spare. The same goes for many other symmetrical shapes.

Manholes aren't drilled. They're dug with backhoes. They dig out a big pit (usually pretty close to square) and then put a manhole on top of it, which looks like a big metal or concrete plate with a round hole in the center. Cover the plate (except the hole) with dirt/asphalt/concrete, put on the manhole cover, and you're done. Manholes are usually molded (if they're metal) or cast (if they're concrete).

Virg

can $250B be wrong?

[192939495969798999]

SURE! It Depends on how you get it. There are legal ways and not so legal ways...

Nonsense, here's why.

[LibertineR]

Consider how many companies, with arguably brilliant people, have been made to eat dirt by Microsoft.

There are downsides to Microsoft's competive nature, but that is easily outweighed by the positives. You lose good people; Brad Silverburg is probably the best example of what can happen if you dont know how to fight as good as the other guy; but overall, it is a huge benefit to know that your company is staffed with people willing to back up what they say.

Contrast that with companies like Sun Microsystems and Oracle. Each headed by someone who considers himself a "street-fighter", but staffed with pussies, unable to get their ideas beyond the boardroom for fear of taking a risk. Sun and Oracle talk big, but that's all. No one even pays attention to the rantings of McNeely or Ellison anymore, because what do they deliver? Both have great technologies, that they cant manage at all. What does it say about a company, when your most important product(Java) was a fucking accident? These companies can only talk about what Microsoft does wrong, instead of what they do right.

The most unethical thing that a business can do, is FAIL. I would rather work for a company that has the occasional fist fight, then the company that has the occasional retreat or ass-whooping, courtesy of Microsoft. Say what you want about Ballmer, but that man is the heart and soul of the company, and were it not for him, Microsoft would be a shell of what it is.

The "distructive forces" can, and are channeled into productivity; something Microsoft's competitors could learn from. Everyone loves to bitch about our company, but funny thing, no one seems to actually get around to shutting up long enough to beat us.

Look at Linux. Great opportunity, with practically NO chance of beating Microsoft. Not because there are not some very smart people trying, but because too many people would rather devote their energies to being pissed off about Microsoft, then improving their own products.

Sure, lots of good stuff falls through the cracks, but a lot less good stuff gets lost here because someone didn't fight for it. Sometime shit gets out the door too, only because someone argued well for it. Microsoft is the only company that I know of, that takes HUGE risks in developing new products. Sun doesnt and neither does Oracle. They just flail their arms and bitch about Microsoft, then go to court and cry when all else fails. You dont win customer loyalty that way. "We'll ship this, but if it doesnt work out, we'll just sue". Yeah, that works.

Like I said before, everyone working here is already pretty bright, or they would not get through the interview process to begin with. What matters in not being smart; what matters is can you be smart and kick ass at the same time.

You dont have to like it.

Re:Nonsense, here's why.

[LibertineR]

Failure, from a Business perspective, is clearly unethical. Businesses exist to profit. Profit is responsible for growth, resulting in jobs.

If a business fails at success, then people suffer. Most people depend rightly or wrongly on the availibility of a job, in order to support themselves and their families. No one goes to work for a company, knowing that the actions a company takes will result in it's failure.

Now, one can argue that most Business failures are the result of OTHER businesses, but that would be false. Some company HAS to succeed, or there would be no market for the particular sector that company was created to supply.

If one company can succeed in a market sector, it is logical to assume that others can as well, either as feeders to the market leader, or as competitors. If a company chooses to compete, then they must assume responsibility for doing whatever works to win. It they cant win, then they should capitulate and gear their business towards supporting the winner, or a WORTHY competitor. Companies that do neither are in my opinion unethical, because they really have no reason to be in Business. Their employees are at daily risk of being let go, which has a negative effect on the overall economy. The employees of stressed business dont buy things. The whole economy suffers, including persons who dont even work for the stressed company.

Succeeding in business is hard, therefore it should be left to those willing to do what it takes to succeed. Those companies that take risks, and either succeed or go under, instead of flailing around, throwing good money after bad, in search of a market.

Re:Nonsense, here's why.

[jdbo]

Something that concerns me about the model you describe (which could be primarily a matter of my reading, or something that you glossed over to focus on your main point, so please correct me if necessary).

It would appear that combative individualism is very ingrained into the coporate culture at MS - what about balancing behaviors, such as cooperation, constructive compromise, and reflection/reconsideration?

My concern is that the "be smart and kick ass" culture you describe seems destined to find locally optimal solutions (by imposing win-all/lose-all decisions on the work process), versus driving (groups) towards globally optimal solutions that may require both sides in an argument to acknowledge that they don't have all the answers, in order to work towards the actual better answer.

Another way to look at this is - how does MS deal with failure, a the individual/group/corporate level? In partic., are failures seen as something to build on, or are they left behind?

I'd be very interested to hear about the MS culture/process in relation to these questions.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[parliboy]

The more accurately phrased answer is, "Dude, why would I want to do that? If I moved it, there'd be nothing in the background when I played Pole Position!"

Re:O T T F F S S

[bensgroi]

i hope an answer that needlessly complicated didn't take you all day to think of... cause it's wrong. the next letter would be E

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight....

How I Would Move Mount Fuji

[Daetrin]

Wait five seconds.

...

What? You wanted it moved somewhere other than 15km down the earth's orbital path? You should have specified that in the original problem!

Re:How I Would Move Mount Fuji

[kcelery]

godzilla can move it in days.
next question....

Re:How I Would Move Mount Fuji

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Actually, he couldn't. Even with a giant shovel, he wouldn't noticably dig faster than a small construction company.

Now a large hydrogen or teeny cobalt bomb (can't wait for the next hundred years, we ain't gonna make it) you could do a lot more a lot more quickly.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[malfunct]

Yup exactly, I think what is supposed to be the key of MS puzzle questions is that they have multiple levels of answers, and you can judge a person not only how how he/she answers but also on the process they go through to solve the problem. Actually MS stresses that the puzzle questions should NOT be the main criteria for deciding whether to hire.

The better questions are about how they handled some big project in the past, especially if the process didn't go so smoothly, and find out how that person handles the process. MS picks hires based on a vast array of "competencies" that have been heavily researched and time tested to produce good candidates. Even then MS doesn't always make a good pick and the trial by fire approach to getting a new hire into the workforce usually does its job to weed out people that aren't up to the task and if that doesn't do it the first poor performance review will give them the hint. MS also has wonderful mentorship programs to help someone learn the info they need and learn to tap into the brain trust that resides on campus.

My personal opinion is that MS generates more successful programmers because they have a solid base of successful programmers already in the company that are more than willing to help newcomers get on thier feet.

Re:This is great... if you get quality candidates.

[Punk Walrus]

Oh, and how to move Mt. Fuji? First, I'd have to establish the reasons for the move so I could best guess what the project goal is. I mean, move it to get more flat land? It's an eyesore for some mad scientist who got a mansion in the Fujishima hills? They need the basalt and pumice? There might be easier ways to achieve good results for any of these.

Okay, no reason, just move it? By "move" to you mean "remove" as in you don't care what happens to Mount Fuji as long as it's gone? Or move it several feet to the left? Or move it to the ocean to get more valuable farm land? Just move it a few miles offshore? Which shore? The Pacific side with the trench, or the Chinese side?

I bet I wouldn't be hired by Microsoft, because obviously, I ask too many questions, and try to find practical and efficient solutions to inane initial concepts in the first place.

Coins?

[samael]

Ok, how does the coins one work?

So why should we read this book or even care?

[xant]

Gladwell is right. Poundstone is just showing off how much he knows about Microsoft. According to Gladwell, if you go into an interview and get every question wrong from start to finish, your chance of getting the job is not affected in any way. As soon as you sat down, the interview was over.

Since my first days of interviewing potentials...

[slarti]

I've asked the question:

"If your driving in a vehicle at the speed of light and you turn your lights on, would they do anything?" - Stephen Wright

My favorite answer was "Are they Halogen bulbs?"

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[SeanAhern]

I think you bit on a troll. :-)

Yeah, you're probably right...

Something similar happened to me

[DG]

Not exactly a job interview, but a similar situation in a military context.

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:My Interview (solution enclosed) (It's Right)

[telstar]

Nah, not really. I wrote it as "heavier" for comparison's sake, but you can interpret it as "different". You're just isolating the ball from the grouping that doesn't balance things. It could be heavier or lighter, but you know it's not balanced, so it's the odd ball.

AI is not "an academic disipline"

[coaxial]

quototh the post:

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.

As an AI Guy let me defend AI by first stating, most people don't know what AI is. As evidenced by the above comment.

There is not one serious researcher that takes the Turing Test seriously. In a world full of 6 billion people, can you not find anyone to talk to? And if you had a Turing Machine that passed the Turing Test, would that machine want to talk to you? People make mistakes. People make typos, gramatical errors, should a machine that performs instructions without error really insert errors just for sake of mimicry? This idea of the mimiced human as a serious research died back in the 60s. It's too hard, and even if you did solve it, so what? You just made a faliable machine.

Instead modern AI is far from "an academic disipline". It used in control theory, filtering, pattern recognition, ddiagnositcs. You know that Bayseian spam filter your oohing and ahhing about? That's AI. That call you got from your credit card company saying they detected fraud on your account? That's AI. You know that doodad you just bought? It's cheap because the company that makes it's supply chain is precisely scheduled and automatically adjusts for slipage. Yup, AI. Those medical tests you took last week? Odds are your doctor used an expert system to help him diagnose you. AI does that and a whole lot more.

The goal of AI never was to make a synthetic human, it was to make humans' lives easier. It's just in age when people thought everyone was going to go to the prom on the moon while wearing white crash helmets and silver jumpsuits and driving atomic powered flying cars, they thought that was the way to go. (No one seriously says, "I don't have atomic powered flying car. The automotive industry failed.", way should AI be different?)

The problem AI has is the same problem magic has. Once you see how its done, you say "Well that wasn't hard at all. You didn't really need to 'think' (whatever that means). AI will only succeed when it does this new thing!" Lather. Rinse. Repeat. AI can never win, because people keep changing the criteria.

So the next time you think about bashing AI as a failure or an "academic", maybe you should actually find out what AI really is, because you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Re:AI is not "an academic disipline"

[AdamBa]

OK, I admit the "Turing Test" reference was not a good example of AI. Also I did not state that AI was a "failure" and you are the one who implied that saying it was "academic" was an insult.

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:My Interview (solution enclosed) Oh, wait ...

[telstar]

Wait, yeah, I see what you're saying ... screw it.
I guess that's why I don't work there...

no! it is the bad kind of puppy!

[klparrot]

Fry: "Uh, is the puppy mechanical in any way?"

Guard 1: "No! It is the bad kind of puppy!"

Leela: "Then we'll go with that data file."

Guard 1: "Correct."

Guard 2: "The flower would also have been acceptable."

Re:no! it is the bad kind of puppy!

[brakk]

my bad. and I just watched that a few days ago too.

real life example

[Lxy]

20 min ago my co-irker came up to me asking me for some weird proprietary cable. She needs to connect a floppy drive to a PC and it's a proprietary job, so the cables to connect it are all wierd. In other words, she needed to move Mt. Fuji, but didn't have the right tools.

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.

Re:real life example

[multi io]

It's not that we need to move Mt Fuji, it's that I need to see around it.

Is that the expected answer? Mine would have been something like "relative to which point of reference?".

Re:Manhole Covers... (now: Gas Stations)

[AssFace]

Doesn't tell me if he or she is gonna crack when they've got an angry engineer on the phone wondering why /usr/local is locked down

Of all my friends that interviewed with MS - I never heard them asked this question (like I have said in my other posts - I have lots of management consultant friends that were asked questions vaguely like that - "how many lawn mowers are there in the US").

The MS questions were usually more logic based things that showed how they would think through a problem.

The traditional grid of dots, connect them all with N number of lines where N looks impossible - you then have to draw the lines so that their length exceeds the dimensions of the box... perhaps where the "thinking outside of the box" thing came from.

MS also does the "you are in a room with 3 light switches and in the room next door there are 3 light bulbs on the wall, etc etc"

We've all heard them - some are much more geared towards seeing how logically one thinks - which are actually useful for finding programmers.

Also, those people that have noted that they would ask specific programming questions have a valid point - but the majority of interviews that will have these questions are for people that are straight out of college - nearly any company that is smart will plan on teaching you everything and will assume that regardless of how good a school you went to, you know nothing - but if it is a good school, you learned *how* to learn/think and you are good at it.
That is what the questions are going for.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Trolling4Dollars]

Ya think? ;P I wonder if you can guess who wrote it?

Sorry.

[lucifuge31337]

I can't believe I just thre away the modding I've done so far to post this.

14.) Profit!

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[utd-blaze]

The correct answer for "How would you move mount Fuju?" is not "I wouldn't - it's fine right where it is." that is the correct answer for "Would you move mount Fuji?" Nobody asked if you wanted to.

how?

[klparrot]

It's doable in O(log-base-3 of n), well log3(2n+3) to be precise...

Care to explain how?

Re:how?

[mesterha]

Well since no one else answered.

You can do it in ceiling(log3(n))+1. On the first step divide the marbles into three close to equal sized groups. (The groups may differ by at most one marble.) Compare group 1 to group 2. If both groups are equal, you know the strange marble is in group 3 and you can use one more weighing to see if it is light or heavy. If they are not equal then call group A the lighter group and group B the heavier group. Compare group A to group 3. If these groups are equal then the strange marble is in group B and it is heavy otherwise group A must contain the strange marble and it is light.

So far we have used 2 comparisons. The rest is trivial. Just keep on splitting into three close to equal sized groups. Each split will remove about 1/3 of the marbles and therefore you get log3(n). The ceiling comes from the fact that the number of marbles may not be a power of 3, but it is not difficult to modify a rigorous proof for n=3^k to the general case by adding the ceiling function. (Intuitively, if n=3^(k-1)+b where b < 2*3^(k-1) then you can show that assuming n=3^k must give an upperbound.) The plus one comes from the extra comparison needed at the first step to determine if the strange marble is heavy or light.

The key here is that the comparison model has three outcomes. Whether group 1 equals group 2, group 1 is less than group 2, or group 1 is greater than group 2. Most likely one could prove, using arguments similar to comparison sort proofs, that log3(n) is a lower bound.

Re:how?

[sholden]

A log3 lowerbound is pretty simple...

A weighing only has three outcomes.

Hence with 1 weighing you have 3 outcomes.
With 2 you have 9 outcomes.
With 3 you have 27 outcomes.
With W you have 3^W outcomes.

If there are N balls, then there are 2N possible answers. Obviously you need at least as many outcomes as possible answers.

Hence 3^W = 2N
Simple math: W = log3(2N)

We can easily show log3(2N+1) - since the result: [even, even, even] can never tell if the odd ball is heavier or lighter, since we obviously never weighed it :)

With more math we might be able to raise it a little more...

Re:how?

[sholden]

ceiling(log3(n))+1

We have a solution for n=12 in 3 weighings:

ceiling(log3(12))+1 = ceiling(2.262)+1 = 3+1 = 4

So clearly you can do it better than that.

Re:how?

[mesterha]

Well, I'm not going to go through the effort of proving it, but as I said log3(n) is probably a lower bound.

If you look closely at the technique I gave, when I determine if the ball is heavy or light, I only use two value of the comparison, not all three. This combined with some extra leverage when n!=3^k, and you can probably squeeze out an extra comparison in some cases. (If I had to guess, I'd say when n=3^k+b and b<=3^(k-1).)

Re:how?

[sholden]

Well, I'm not going to go through the effort of proving it, but as I said log3(n) is probably a lower bound.

Since I already replied showing that the lower bound is higher than log3(n) then of course log3(n) is a lower bound. So is 1 after all.

If you consider that each weighing generates a balanced ternary digit then you can construct a number of weighings that give you the answer by looking up a table.

The requirement would be that each marble is assigned a number if that number is the result then that marble is heavier, if the resulting number is the negatin then that marble is lighter. Clearly this means the number 0 can't be used (since 0 == -0).

In order to do the weighings each weighing needs equal numbers of marbles on each side. That restricts us further. Essentially we create a table, for the case of n=12 we would construct:

A 0 0 1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
B 0 1 -1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
C 0 1 0 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
D 0 1 1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
E 1 -1 -1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
F 1 -1 0 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
G 1 -1 1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
H 1 0 -1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
I 1 0 0 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
J 1 0 1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
K 1 1 -1 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard
L 1 1 0 #padding for idiotic filter which makes life hard

Each column becomes a weighing of -1 marbles .vs. +1 marbles. That means we need an equal number of -1 and 1 digits in each column. To do this we can negate rows.

Column 1 needs 4 1 turned into -1s. Column 2 needs a 1 turned to a -1. And column 3 is fine.

Column 2 can be fixed by changing C from 0,1,0 to 0,-1,0. Column 1 can be fixed by flipping 101, 10-1, 110, and 1-10 - we simply make one column 0 and the other column we use both 1 and -1 - this not changing the other 2 columns.

So we have (sideways due to idiotic 'too few characters per line filter'):

A B C D E F G H I J K L
0 0 0 0 1 -1 1 -1 1 -1 1 -1
0 1 -1 1 -1 1 -1 0 0 0 1 -1
1 -1 0 1 -1 0 1 1 0 -1 -1 0

That gives us three weighings:
FHJL .vs. EGIK
CEGL .vs. BDFK
BEJK .vs. ADGH

The results give us a 3 digit balanced ternary number which we look up in the table. If it is there then that marble is heavier. If it isn't we look up the negation, that marble is lighter.

So each marble is simply assigned a positive number (we then negate some of them to balance the weighings). We need an even number of non-0 digits in each column, this means we can't use '1 1 1' in the three digit case (so four 13 marbles we would need 4 weighings).

Essentially W weighings gives us 3^W numbers ranging from -(3^W-1)/2 to (3^W-1)/2. We only use the positive ones (negating some of them later) so we have 1 to (3^W-1)/2, We can't (3^W-1)/2 itself since it results in an off number of 1s in each column. So we have 1 to (3^W-1)/2-1.

That means W weighings can be used to determine which marble is odd in a set of (3^W-1)/2-1 marbles. That's the opposite of how we want it expressed - since we will know the marble count and want to know W. So do some simple math:

N = (3^W-1)/2-1
N+1 = (3^W-1)/2
2N+2 = 3^W-1
2N+3 = 3^W
log3(2N+3) = W

Hence:

W = log3(2N+3)

Which is what I put in my first post on this topic...

That's a better lower bound than the log3(2N+2) one in my previous reply to you.

log3(2N+3) is the minimum weighings for N marbles if the weighings are done with no branching. In other words the results of previous weighings do not effect which marbles to weigh next.

For bra

Re:how?

[mesterha]

Since I already replied showing that the lower bound is higher than log3(n) then of course log3(n) is a lower bound. So is 1 after all.

Yes, I missed that post. Slashdot is not really a great forum for discussion.

Re:how?

[klparrot]

Slashdot is not really a great forum for discussion.

Still, this one was interesting. Thanks for answering my question. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me to determine at the beginning whether the odd marble was heavier or lighter. Well, my next school term starts in a couple weeks; maybe they'll drill some sense back into me then.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[SeanAhern]

Good job. You had just enough elements of sense in there to make it "bite-worthy".

Mr. Wizard?!

[bbqBrain]

Holy friggin' crap! I still remember a wooden (I believe), rounded triangle rolling along a table, and Mr. Wizard explaining that it would roll just like a wheel. I was pretty young at the time and eventually convinced myself that I must have imagined it or not understood. When I tried to remember, I kept picturing an axle through the center of the shape as if was attached to a car and thinking, "no, you're dumb, that would never work." Only today did I find out that 1) these do exist, and 2) they're called Rouleaux triangles.

And I thought I was wasting time here on slashdot!

And out of all this...

[jpellino]

We get a campus full of people who believe that combo boxes and flipping ranks of tabs are good ideas? Not to mention "I want to stop now." "OK - then click 'Start'."

Maybe we should feed them rabbit turds in the interview.

"What are these?"
"Smart pills."
"They taste like shit."
"See - you're getting smarter already."

My very own moderation stalker!

[ergo98]

Every now and then I get a moderation stalker, and it gives me the warm fuzzies inside knowing that I've inspired someone. Someone, presumably offended by something I've stated as of late, just went through my message history moderating them all "troll". I wish like Kuro5hin you could see the moderators as I really do get a kick out of rather psychotic actions like that.

Good 'Ole Microsoft -- My Story

[ratboy666]

I have been programming (managing, designing) for a living since 1976. I have hardware patents for graphics chips (and, yes, the chips where actually made). I have designed, built and sold disc controllers, SCSI (SASI) interfaces, and some other stuff. I know typesetting and word processing. I have produced software and hardware that has been named "best of breed" by Seybold.

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

Re:Good 'Ole Microsoft -- My Story

[taradfong]

Had to laugh at your 'clock puzzle' answer as it's exactly what I'd do - the pragmatic approach. Maybe they were concerned that if you ignored the missing screws you were just delaying a problem down the road. On the other hand, this _is_ Microsoft, no?

Bravo on your accomplishments, BTW.

Re:Good 'Ole Microsoft -- My Story

[drinkypoo]

Maybe they just wanted to know if you knew the difference between a plastic screw and a machine screw. If it's a machine screw, it probably needs to go back in. If it's a plastic screw then you might be able to omit it as they are usually used in at least pairs (or more) and one screw is typically enough to hold, say, the circuit board in place.

Microsoft or McKinsey questions?

[leandrod]

As far as I know, much before Bill Gates started being worshipped, McKinsey (The Firm) used these questions...

Re:Um, are you guys idiots?

[ggwood]

Yes, yes, you found out our dirty secret. We were all idiots - in fact most physicists are idiots. We have great propensity to lock our keys in our offices and can't dress ourselves without looking like a Father's Day Gone Wrong.

You know algebra, right? Go pick up Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler. Read chapters one and two and do the exercises at the end. That's what I did for fun one afternoon.

I encourage you to do so not because I think you are not smart enough. I actually think you are - heck I think anyone who can grasp algebra as in: "x is a number, but we don't know which one yet, mkay?" can learn virtually everything we do. It just may take a bit of time.

By the way, if you really understand Taylor and Wheeler you will know why you can get in a fast enough rocket ship and (if you can stand the acceleration) travel anywhere in the galaxy within your life time, but when you return to Earth many, many years will have passed by.

I have shown this book to many people. It even has a little cartoon bird in it and lots of pretty pictures and nice, friendly large print. They don't get it within a few hours. People just are not used to thinking along these lines. They see the square root of one over one minus v-squared over c-squared and their eyes gloss over.

Perhaps intelligence is just not being afraid, intellectually. It seemed to indicate that in the article.

manhole covers

[drwho]

I heard that manhole covers are round so they don't fall in the holes.

How to move Mt. Fuji

[sudog]

Walk up to a large stone that you know is part of Mt. Fuji and give it a good, solid kick.

Or even better, stomp your foot on the ground beneath you.

Or even better--wave your hand in the air.

Hey, they didn't say how much you had to move it--only that you had to move it.

2. *MARKETING*!

[johannesg]

Isn't it obvious?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Sunda666]

er, I DO need network transparency and use it every day, albeit not in the way
it was designed to work, but trough the ssh X hack. But it is still the good old
X network transparency that has been in X for ages (first time I used it was in
1992 in some sparcs).

cheers

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[rifter]

X11 does not go over the network for local desktops. You need to read up on unix domain sockets. XFree86 is not "slow because it is going over the network all the time." That is the uninformed opinion of many non programmers but that does not make it true.

There are many reasons for perceived slowness in Linux guis. Some include the state of drivers on various video platforms, what window manager and desktop environment you use, how bloated they are/aren't and what they choose to helpflly load for you (damn Nautilus! 120MB RAM for a file exploration program??).

If you just use Xfree86, you will find it runs pretty fast. Even if you throw on a window manager like fvwm2, it is still fast. It is only when you throw in all kinds of other stuff that you start to slow down, and even then only if you have old slow hardware anyway. Also, Xfree86 != X11. It is an X11 implementation common on open source OS's, but its speed or lack thereof is *not* an indictment of the X11 protocol itself.

you win!

[twitter]

Bing Bing Bing! Your answers are SO Microsoft that I am hearby authorized to hire you as Steve Baller's Replacement! Not only have you wasted your time and energy with such mental masturbation, you have come up with answers we approve of. Let's examine:

If asked to move Mount Fuji relative to myself, I could just walk.

Double Pluss Good! You have simply convinced yourself that it moved. Fuji is Fuji but you are ours. Other correct answers involve name changes and crossing your eyes.

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.

Again, you see clearly the Microsoft spirit, do nothing and say it is changed! Once you have decieved yourself, you can lie to others as well.

We love you! With that kind of thinking, you could pass five, fifteen or fifty M$ employees without earning a blackball. When can you start, bright man? We will ink a copy of our 500 page unilaterally changeable NDA's and employee contracts right away. Welcome to the world's smartest soon to be extinct company, where delusions of moving Fugi are matched only by visions of world conquest and neo-Darwinian madness.

Does this mean...

[g0_p]

A lot of people in UK keep falling into manholes 'cos manhole covers keep falling through?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[rifter]

In my previous post, I rebutted your assertions about the network behaviour of X11. Your assertion that the GUI would be more stable if it was in the kernel defies belief. Clearly the less things in the kernel the better, because anything which goes in the kernel can crash the whole machine if it goes south. At least with the GUI away form the kernel, when Mozilla crashes my XFree86 server my whole machine does not go down, just all the local gui stuff.

Re:My Interview - *spoiler*

[sholden]

No you don't.

I already posted code for the best solution I know of which does it in 3. Another **SPOILER** below...

However, back in high school when I first came across this problem a few of us came up with a solution by making sure that every weighing counted. A weighing has three outcomes so in three weighings you have a tree with 27 leaf nodes - since there are only 24 possible outcomes we managed to only have 1 unused leaf in each of the three main branches it'd work.

We solved it with a decision tree, I'll try and recall the reasoning we used (I use the terms high and low to mean weights which are possibilities for the bad marble and must be heavier or lighter, and normal for known good marbles):

First weigh is 4 .vs. 4. If it is equal then the solution is easy. You just weigh any three of those 8 against 3 of the remaining four. It leaves you with either 3 all high or 3 all low, or 1 competely unknown which must be the bad marble. Those three are easy to do in one weighing.

If the first weighing is uneven, then you now have three sets: 4 high, 4 low, and 4 normal.

To succeed in one weighing we need to reduce the possibilties to just 3 marbles. Since we know if they are low or high, one weighing will give us the answer from there.

If the second weighing reads even then the unweighed marbles must contain the bad marble, this means we can only leave 3 non-normal marbles out of the weighing. So we must weigh at least 5 of the non-normal marbles on the second weighing.

An uneven reading must also only produce three possible bad marbles. That means only three of one type (low or high) on one side. And marbles of the opposite type on the opposite side count. We only have 4 normals available which restricts us.

So we simple enumerate the possible weighings and see if anything works:

left right out
NNNNH HHLLL HL bad (1H and 3Ls opposite)
NNNNH HHHLL LL is one possible weighing
It gives:
NNNNH = HHHLL (LL) => NNNNN = NNNNN (LL)-solvable
NNNNH < HHHLL (LL) => NNNNN < HHHNN (NN)-solvable
NNNNH > HHHLL (LL) => NNNNH > NNNLL (NN)-solvable

So there we go an answer!

Giving us the following algorithm: (sorry about the annoying extra words, the stupid slashdot software didn't like my short lines...)

1?2?3?4? .vs. 5?6?7?8? # i need more characters per line
- = : 1N2N3N .vs. 9?A?B? # i need more characters per line
-- = : 1N .vs. C? # i need more characters per line
--- = impossible # i need more characters per line
--- > C light # i need more characters per line
--- < C heavy # i need more characters per line
-- > : 9H .vs. AH # i need more characters per line
--- = B light # i need more characters per line
--- > A light # i need more characters per line
--- < 9 light # i need more characters per line
-- < : 9H .vs. AH # i need more characters per line
--- = B heavy # i need more characters per line
--- > 9 heavy # i need more characters per line
--- < A heavy # i need more characters per line
- > : 9NANBNCN1H .vs. 2H3H4H5L6L # i need more characters per line
-- = : 7L .vs. 8L # i need more characters per line
--- = impossible # i need more characters per line
--- > 8 light # i need more characters per line
--- < 7 light # i need more characters per line
-- > 5L .vs. 6L # i need more characters per line
--- = 1 heavy # i need more characters per line
--- > 6 light # i need more characters per line
--- < 5 light # i need more characters per line
-- < 2H .vs. 3H # i need more characters per line
--- = 4 heavy
--- > 2 heavy
--- < 3 heavy
- < : NANBNCN5H .vs. 6H7H8H1L2L
-- = : 3L .vs. 4L
--- = impossible
--- > 4 light
---

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Sunda666]

I must agree with you about nautilus... I am a GNOME user but absolutely hate it.

Fortunately, after upgrading my GNOME I do mv /usr/bin/nautlus /usr/bin/nautilus.sucks and
get rid of it.

cheers

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[rifter]

In other words "Why move the mountain when we can simply satisfy the basic need to see it."

And that's a perfect Microsoft answer. Now where did my Program Files go again? ;)

Re:I'd walk out!

[spanky1]

Sounds like you simply suck at logic problems.

Re:How Would I Move Mount Fuji? USE VBA

[boy_afraid]

dim objMt as new object
dim objMtFuji as new MtFuji

set objMt = objMtFuji
set objMtFuji = Nothing

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[mwolff]

A Microsoft guy spoke at my Information Technology class. He used to work for Apple. In your post you mentioned that Microsoft asks you if you had ever worked for Apple, etc. Did you mean that people who worked for Apple don't get hired at Microsoft?
On a funny note, the guy had a file server in his house that he used to serve out movies, etc to his neighborhood. Said something like 150 dvd's.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[tomhudson]

Putting the gui into the kernel will also bring down the whole box if the gui crashes. That's one reason not to put a gui into the kernel.

Another is that servers, and some user boxes, don't need a gui, so why load up on cruft?

but of course, anyone who writes " If the company that made Linux ..." obviously doesn't have a clue or is doing a good job trolling :-)

That's so M$

[twitter]

They know the right answers and then do the wrong thing anyway. I hope they don't expand their monoply into construction.

broken process

[bigdave64]

Hiring and recruiting must be one of the most dysfunctional processes in business today. I just accepted a new position after having been unemployed for two months. The ridiculous crap that I saw and went through with more than a few companies amazes me still. Technology companies, including Microsoft, routinely fail this essential business practice. Idiots get hired and qualified candidates are overlooked on a regular basis.

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.

what are *you* thinking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... All of these unanswerable questions! Has Microsoft been talking to my girlfriend?.

Re:Reminds me of another ridiculousinterview quest

[tomhudson]

The real answer is to take your laser-guided bazooka and blow the shit out of all them. When the interviewer asks you where you got the bazooka, tell him "the same place you got Bigfoot and the Raptor" :-)

Or, to paraphrase - there are no dumb questions, just dumb HR personnel.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[buffer-overflowed]

Depends on my needs. Generally qmail, but occassionally postfix.

I don't do much admin work anymore, but both can handle mid-sized ISP level mail traffic quite well.

How would I move Mt. Fuji?

[Jerrry]

I don't know how I'd do it, but if I could, I'd move it to Redmond and drop it right on top of the Microsoft campus.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Dead_B0b]

Yup, intervied at Microsoft as a project manager and at Apple as an Server Engineer. I know for a fact that one of the microsoft interviewers cost me the job. He could not formulate a question to ask me in 45 mins. Drove me nuts afterwards.
Microsoft

• odd thinking questions on phone interview
• some cool design questions in person
• extra day to muck around in seattle!
• lunch was an interview, not cool
• interviewed by about four people, one on one in their office.

Apple

• stayed at a nice place near the mother ship
• lunch with one of the managers, very cool dude
• one room, where a total of three people interviewed me
• very cool tour of the engineering area

The correct answer:

[NineNine]

Who fucking cares? We're only paying those Indians $5/day, so I'm happy if we get *any* software from 'em.

No

[taniwha]

I would have if I said to put the point of the compass at the center of the triangle - but I didn't

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[djcapelis]

LOL!!! But please... make your trolling believeable next time...

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[crazyphilman]

Sigh... That's your "correct answer"??? No wonder everyone's out of work. Does no one think on their feet anymore? Woe, woe...

"Hey, Phil, how would you move Mt. Fuji?"

"Well, first I'd get a contract from you in which I'd get an hourly wage for moving Mt. Fuji, and total control of the project and its methods, with no sunset date on the contract and no deadline -- after all, we're not sure how long it would take, are we? I'd promise a measurable daily progress on the task, and I'd promise to work diligently on the task until the moment it is complete."

"Then, I'd get a little plastic spoon, and work diligently to move Mt. Fuji with it, one spoonful at a time."

Why leave it where it is? If the guy wants it moved, and his money is green, what the hell? Why not, I say. First shift, ready your spoons...

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[AutumnLeaf]

Dang... that is the funniest signature I've seen in a long time. :)

You've got 15 seconds, punk

[Pejorian]

Scary! Do the questions even matter??

From the article mentioned in the review:

"'[Tricia Prickett] took fifteen seconds of videotape showing the applicant as he or she knocks on the door, comes in, shakes the hand of the interviewer, sits down, and the interviewer welcomes the person,' Bernieri explained. Then, like Ambady, Prickett got a series of strangers to rate the applicants based on the handshake clip, using the same criteria that the interviewers had used. Once more, against all expectations, the ratings were very similar to those of the interviewers. 'On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,' Bernieri says. 'The strength of the correlations was extraordinary.' " ...

"For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date.
We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. "

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[AutumnLeaf]

Trolls usually post AC'ly.

Cheers!

Manhole covers are round,

[geekoid]

because manholes are round. duh.

Actually its so the manhole cover won't fall in. Its not like they wanted to spend time looking at every odd shape.
I thin it went something like this:
wavey line wavey line wavy line

[man glanes at co-workers paper]
"uhh Bob, if you make the manhole square, the cover will fall in if they turn it sideways"
"why would someone do that?"
"I don't know, but it is a hazard"
"So, then they deserve to have it happen"
"umm, you could just make it round"
"Thats stupid, Al"
"why?"
"just is"
"what are you, a software developer? just make it round"
[Bob grumbles ]
"Fine."

[6 month later--Bobs boss comes walking in]

"Bob, that was genius making those covers round, you're now VP of RnD"

[Al jumpsout of window]

Re:Manhole covers are round,

[iggymanz]

I first thought it was because men have round cross-sections, but then I remembered not all men are shaped like slashdotters.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[JWW]

The next question is "Did Enron ask these creative thinking questions of their financial people?"

It sure would explain some things.

There are certain jobs where accuracy, integrity, and detail should be preferred over flexability, creativeness, and shooting from the hip.

Great question.

[LibertineR]

I'll try to answer as best I can, but understand that these are my opinions, and others might have a different take.

I'll be honest, and admit that those "balancing behaviors" are pretty much in short supply at Microsoft, although effort towards them does exist. There is very little compromise going on that I can see, but I dont see that as a negative. Products like M.E.and NT4 were the result of too much compromise.

The worst thing someone can do is to pretend to know something when they dont, because it's always too late when it's found out. Therefore, people ask a lot of questions, and try to keep a good reputation. Having a bad rep is the single worst thing, and impossible to recover from.

On a group level, failure is usually a management issue; post-mortems are routine to prevent it happening again for the same reason. People usually quit, before having the chance to be fired. It is really easy to find out if you suck, and need to go. You wont have to wonder.

From a corporate perspective, it's really just herding cats, no matter what people will tell you. You cant control large groups of smart people, they will either fuck up or succeed in spectacular fashion. If assumptions are correct, things go fine. If not; = Microsoft Bob.

Bottom line; competition works to find the people best able to fulfill company goals, not so much to find the very best solution. This works, because the best solution is not always affordable or timely. Market pressures determine whether you have time to be elegant, and you usually end up doing what works FIRST, rather than works best. That is just reality. Look at Server 2003. You could argue that it is what Win2K should have been. If we waited until now to ship Win2k, we would have lost market share. Win2k works fine, Server2003 kicks ass.

You are correct though. Combative Individualism is a very accurate term for what goes on at MS. Is it the best way? I dont know. It works better than the competition, that's for sure.

Re:Great question.

[jdbo]

Thanks for taking the time for an interesting and thought-provoking reply; I work in non-profit R&D, so it's very interesting to see what's happening on the other end of the market spectrum.

Re:Great question.

[RealAlaskan]

Combative Individualism is a very accurate term for what goes on at MS.

So, a hypothetical question about this: say I'm a technically competent, egotistical swine. Further, say that I have a loud mouth, and my colossal conceit and self assurance give me a big edge in arguments. Given that I have enough social skills to suck up when appropriate, would I be likely to do well at MS?

More hypothetical questions:
If the answer were ``Yes'', would you want to work there?
What sort of person would want to?
How would you expect a company to fare, in the long run, with a crew like that?

"Trick" questions are dumb

[MeerCat]

.. because you end up hiring people who've heard the tricks, not smart people.

Me, I ask questions that lead to "discuss how this has affected your professional/personal life" type conversations.

My approach to Q's like "4 people crossing a bridge" is to give a silly answer "they all cross the bridge at once and find it is in fact strong enough to take the combined weight" and then accuse the questioner of being "overly constrained by the problem, whereas I'm thinking outside the box".

Disclaimer: I've walked out of interviews 'cos the interviewer was too dumb. I've also done enough to be able to afford to be this arrogant.

--
T

Re:Manhole Covers: Wrong!

[SnarfQuest]

Manhole covers are round because that's what fits the manhole. Ever try to put a square manhole cover on a round manhole?

Guys, this is Microsoft

[bill_mcgonigle]

"I would dereference a null pointer, thereby creating a buffer overflow condition. There I would insert some shell code to move the mountain without having any of the normal constraints apply to me."

Re:For the love of

[Fear the Clam]

The underpants gnomes of South Park

[In the gnome's cave]
Gnome 1: This is where all our work is done.
Kyle: So what are you gonna do with all these underpants you steal?
Gnome 1: Collecting underpants is just phase one. Phase one: collect underpants.
Kyle: So what's phase two?
[Silence]
Gnome 1: Hey, what's phase two?!
Gnome 2: Phase one: we collect underpants.
Gnome 1: Ya, ya, ya. But what about phase two?
[Silence]
Gnome 2: Well, phase three is profit. Get it?
Stan: I don't get it.
Gnome 2: (Goes over to a chart on the wall) You see, Phase one: collect underpants, phase two-
[Silence]
Gnome 2: Phase three: profit.
Cartman: Oh I get it.
Stan: No you don't.
Kyle: Do you guys know anything about corporations?
Gnome 2: You bet we do.
Gnome 1: Us gnomes are geniuses at corporations.

Funny sense of ethics

[Weasel Boy]

"The most unethical thing that a business can do, is FAIL."

I totally disagree. The most unethical thing a business can do is screw its customers. If you don't respect your customers enough to deal fairly and honestly with them, you shouldn't be in business. After that, there are plenty of other ethical priorities that should come before failure. Like backstabbing their partners. Committing fraud. Breaking the law. Pulling BS dodgy accounting tricks to cheat the IRS. If a company has to do any of these things to avoid going under, then they should go under.

the secret...

[AdamBa]

...is to stack three of the pennies on top of each other.

- adam

moving a mountain, or volcano

[CreGen]

I though about this for a short period of time and here's what i'd come up with. First of, what's the reason for moving Mount Fuji? If it's posing a danger to a nearby population i'd simply move that population and any buildings, it would be alot cheaper than moving a mountain :)
If you cannot avoid moving the mountain it becomes a little more difficult but not impossible, at least not if you don't have to move it far. Picking the mountain up and placing it somewhere else is out of the question with our current level of tech. If you only have to move it a small distance thought it becomes more plausible. My idea for this would not involve moving the entire mountin itself but instead moving one side to the other side. First build a lowfriction railway system from one side of Fuji over top to the other side. That done continue the track around the bottom of the mountain and connect it back to itself. Position railcars evenly along this track and attach them all to each other. This way you can use the momentum of the heavy carts going down the mountain to help pull the heavy carts going up the other side. From this point simply fill up on one side and empty on the other side.

There are probably a number of problems in this plan but the basic idea can be seen :)

How I would move Mount Fuji

[jsilver212]

Mount Fuji is already moving. It's on Earth, which is moving.

Here is why I differ..

[LibertineR]

Nowhere, will you find any of the practices you mentioned, expressed as corporate policy, no matter how much many would like to think so. Do those things happen? Yep. But in every case, it is subject to interpretation between the screwer and the screwee(sic).

Also, when those things happen, they are usually the act of one, or a group of employees, or even sometimes top management of a corporation that are guilty of the act, not the organization as a whole.

When a company fails, it is usually only through the act of individuals just doing the company's professed mission, whether that mission is sound or flawed.

Thousands of companies start with incredibly stupid ideas regarding how they are going to turn a profit. Some think that they can create demand just through their own brilliance, instead of a viable product or service.

All that said, I do agree with your final thought; any company in danger of going under, probably should just get on with it. Shoot it like a lame race horse. Put it out of its misery.

But they have a lot of influence

[Wee]

I worked at a dotcom for about a year and a half. Their interview process took a lot of cues from the MS "puzzle questions" it seems. But my dotcom interview had a twist.

I showed up for what I was told would be an informal interview (I had worked with many of the people there before). I was given a chair in the middle of a big room full of beanbags while the engineering group filed in and sat down. Then they each opened their laptops, pulled up a big list of puzzle interview questions, got on IRC with each other and grilled me for two hours.

I got the "Why are manhole covers round?" question (my answer was something like: "Uh... ah... err... Because the guy that invented the manhole liked round (and needed covers to match)?") and a few others like it, as well as some more "straight" tech questions (stuff like "What are your three favorite Unix commands and why?" and "How do sockets work?"). The only puzzle question I didn't answer on the spot was "How far apart are the hands on a clock if it's 3:15?" I said that there are no hands on a digital clock. Then when that got the looks I knew it would get I said "They aren't seprated" and immediately retracted it as being wrong. Then I said "Pass". On the way out the door, I figured the answer out and called the hiring manager on my cell phone. Apparently nobody got the clock one right.

I don't remember the other questions, but they were about half the nonsense "move Mt. Fuji" ones and half honest ones that tested analytical ability under some pressure. I got tired of the whole thing after about 45 minutes (witness my answer to the clock question). I started copping out with an attitude like "Look, nobody can be expected to know everything, but everyone should be able to find anything out and then quickly apply that knowledge. Let me use my laptop and I'll answer any question you want answered. Sit me in front of the hypothetical AIX machine and I'll figure out why it's not booting -- using some basic reasoning, a little general experience and the Net. But don't ask me questions my experience alone can't answer unless you expect me to also work in a similar vacuum. In which case I'm not sure I want to work here in the first place..."

I'm frankly surprised I got the job but I guess I said the right things.

I think those puzzle questions are more to make the interviewer feel smart than to test the interviewee. They want to instill a sense of "Ohhh, he's asking me really smart questions! I wanna work here with these 1337 people!" If I want to see moxie in an interviewee, I'll ask them to tapdance or something.

-B

Re:But they have a lot of influence

[Wee]

Took me about 20 seconds to figure it out.

Wow. That's really amazing. Truly. Honestly. Mean it.

Took me about 21 seconds. Once I was out of the bean bag room and away from the exasperation of two hours of bullshit rapid-fire questions from a dozen people from all directions. And by "nobody getting it right" I meant that they said that most people instinctively say "they're not separated", not that most people can't do basic math.

Anyway, the point of that type of interview was to see how people dealt with pressure, not math.

-B

Here's an actual solution.

[Noren]

The most marbles for which the outlier in weight (if it is unknown whether the unique marble is heavier or lighter) can be determined in n weighings is (3^n - 3)/2. (for n>1)

For 12 marbles, as the parent says n=3 is sufficient, and there are many weighing schemes which work, including:

Label the marbles A, C, D, E, F, I, K, L, N, M, O, and T

weigh MA DO versus LIKE
weigh ME TO versus FIND
weigh FAKE versus COIN

If the unique coin is known to be heavier or lighter, you can distinguish the full 3^N.
For the three weighings case, weigh 9 versus another 9- if you know the unique is heavier or lighter this tells you which of the three sets of nine contains the unique marble. Then weigh 3 against 3, then 1 against 1.

The grandparent poster incorrectly answered the question,and then blamed his mistake on the interviewer for not asking a simpler question which would have been trivial to solve ... not a good sign in a potential employee.

I'm guessing a response like, "There are 24 possibilities to distinguish between, as one of the twelve is either heavy or light. There are 3 possible outcomes to each weighing, so I can theoretically see 27 possible outcomes from three weighings. Therefore, there should exist a solution in three weighings." would be acceptable- I doubt the interviewer would require you to actually figure one of the solutions out on the spot as this is not trivial, though the ability to do so rapidly would be either exceptional or because you'd seen it before.

Windows crashes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Windows just crashed on me because the guy who coded the bug knew why manhole covers are round?!

Wait a minute...

[GunFodder]

What an unrealistic plan! How can a robot transform into a motorcycle AND a hover-bike? And who would want a lousy motorcycle if they had a hover-bike? Get real.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Carnivorous Carrot]

And who the fuck would want either if they had a robot?

Cool! My Jeri Lynn Ryan can transform into Janet Reno!

Re:developers vs designers

[SA3Steve]

It should never be up to just one person if the area is a large enough area...the PM will never make the final decision nor will the Developer without fairly long discussions about the design...pros/cons and what the requirements are and ways to implement (design wise) some of the stickier areas. It's too easy to miss interactions with other areas of the program or features/supported scenarios that seem abstract but need special planning.

If anyone really thinks they can do both the design/development on your own for every feature without bouncing ideas back and forth between a variety of people, then they are either arrogant or naive but are definitely not a smart Software Engineer.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[deepchasm]

The people who will show up best are those who will come up with novel solutions, because a new solution is inherently more interesting than a correct solution.

I disagree.

When a good puzzle solver hears an interesting problem it will start buzzing round their unconscious, and whether they are actively thinking about it or not it will be in the back of their mind bugging them. They won't be satisfied if they just get an answer, they'll keep going until the problem is demolished, until the answer is complete, elegant, and obviously correct.

Levy, in the book Hackers, describes this as The Right Thing, the straightest line between two points. Are you telling me that knowing the solution inside out like that won't result in clear concise code?

A solved problem is not a problem, and they won't waste time on it, so don't worry about them re-inventing the wheel.

Try these riddles

[mib]

This was posted to slashdot last time we had a story on a similar topic, but it's worth a re-post for everyone who missed it. If you like logic puzzles and riddles, check out wu:: riddles. They have a section of Microsoft questions as well.

Here's an example riddle to get you started:

NONHOMOGENEOUS ROPE BURNING

You have two ropes, each of which takes one hour to burn completely. Both of these ropes are nonhomogeneous in thickness, meaning that some parts of the ropes are chunkier than other parts of the rope. Using these nonhomogeneous ropes and a lighter, time 45 minutes.

Note: Some clarification on what is meant by nonhomogeneous. For instance, maybe a particular section of rope that is 1/8 of the total length is really chunky, and takes 50 minutes to burn off. then it would take 10 minutes to burn off the remaning 7/8, since we know that the whole rope takes an hour to burn off. that's just an example; we don't know any such ratios beforehand. The point is, if you look at one of your ropes and cut it into pieces, you have no clue how long any individual piece will take to burn off.

Re:Try these riddles

[Garridan]

Interesting problem. I immediately thought of a quite graceful solution, but when I read your clarification... I'm not sure it'd work. Thats quite a variance. Sounds like a string with a horkin' big knot on the end, not a nonhomogeneous rope.

OTTFFSS

[ChaoticLimbs]

ENTETTFFSSENT

took six seconds. OneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSeven

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[mdfst13]

Perhaps, but this kind of test won't measure that. What you are talking about is someone who will come up with a great answer over time. This kind of an interview is too short to allow that. Instead, it rewards those who arrive at a good answer *quickly*. In other words, it values speed over quality.

Your problem solvers will be arriving at a beautiful solution right around the time that they get their "We'll keep your resume on file" letter.

triangular manhole covers

[eht]

a picture of some including a triangular one can be found here at govind steel's website and this one here is neat too, including a history

Man Holes.

[Grendel Drago]

Dude, Microsoft MAKES a MANHOLE COVER!

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[jhantin]

The poster just says that bad software design is the result of not consulting with the users. This is the truest truism that there is.

Bad software design can be caused by a lot of different things; forgetting to consult with the users is just one way things can go pear-shaped. More commonly, misunderstanding the requirements supplied by consultation with the users, failure to understand concepts like the role of well-defined interfaces and boundaries within a design, or the dreaded "scope creep" can ruin a software design.

Depends.

[LibertineR]

You forget that among the technically competent, there is usually a mutual respect that overides the impulse for a jerk to be a jerk. It doesnt work that way, when a jerk is confronted by an idiot. It can be brutal.

On top of that; conceit and self assurance are exclusive of one another. You dont find one of those traits in people who have the other. Self assurance can be supported by results, where conceit cannot.

Social skills wont get you anywhere at Microsoft if you cant do the job. I know of a guy here who rarely bathes and has horrible breath, who is fought over by product groups, because he can code his ass off with no mistakes. If we had to work in cubicles, he would be a problem.

Egotistical swine usually reside in Marketing. However, since we have the best marketing group in the industry, who gives a fuck? Results matter, dude. However, I dont know of anyone in Marketing, or who deals with customers who cant smooze your ass off when required.

As for your last question, results dont lie, do they? I dont argue with success. I'm a pragmatist.

Re:Depends.

[RealAlaskan]

I'm going to take your points in order:

... among the technically competent, there is usually a mutual respect that overides the impulse for a jerk to be a jerk.

Your comment about mutual respect could indicate respect for competence, or respect for viciousness. Throughout all this, I've assumed technical competence; that's a given.

... conceit and self assurance are exclusive of one another.

I disagree. One can be self assured without conceit, but conceit ALWAYS leads to (at least the appearance of) self assurance. Someone who is technically competent is going to have results to back up his self assurance. Someone who is conceited will know that his results are intrinsically superior to your results, even if you haven't figured it out yet, even if those results are only just as good as yours.

If you and a conceited jerk are trying to convince others, the jerk is going to know he's right, and that since your idea is different, he's wrong. That gives him an advantage over you when talking to non-technical management, since you are honest enough to admit that he's competent, and his idea has some good points. The jerk may be honest, but his conceit will never let him see that you are equally competent, and your idea is also good.

Egotistical swine usually reside in Marketing.

I wonder if you perceive that because the Marketing folks usually aren't technically competent in your field? You probably aren't technically competent in their field; I wonder how they'd describe you and your collegues?

The point I wanted to make with my first question is that the culture being described leads to a company full of ``jerks'', in your words. People who are ready to listen, understand and either explain themselves or change their minds will soon find better places to work.

This matters because people who are ready to listen and understand can cooperate. They can tell you why you're right, and why you need to do it their way anyway. Or, they can tell you why you're wrong, or how you can do it better, or .... They can help you to understand. They have a lot of options in addition to being right and winning the argument.

... results dont lie, do they?

Well said. MS has turned out products which have made the shareholders a lot of money, and that much at least is a good thing. The products are certainly good enough to sell to the computer-illiterate, though I think that Apple has done a better job of marketing to the brilliant-but-clueless. What a pity that's such a tiny market.

I said above that MS products are good enough to sell. I'm not sure that they'd be good enough to give away. Could they have gotten their market share if their wares were free, but there was no marketing? I'm not sure that they could compete strictly on technical merits. I think that though their products are often technically good, they are never as good as they could be, and rarely better than the competition[1].

This technical weakness may be marketing-driven, or it may be because of the difficulty of getting a bunch of jerks to cooperate. I don't know which, but MS Bob gives me reason to say that bad cooperation is plausible.

Let's look at slightly broader definitions of results. MS is widely perceived as a company with which it is dangerous to do business. That might be attributed to envy of their success; after all, this perception seemed to arise after they got big. It might also be that they couldn't screw their partners and customers safely until after they got big.

In the long run, you can be second-best and still get along. In the long run, if you're hated and feared, people will crap all over you as soon as they think it's safe.

Arthur Anderson and Enron both seem to have been run by jerks, though the culture wasn't identical to MS's culture. In the short run, they were successful, Enron for years and AA

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[DrPascal]

Thank you for the laugh(s). I probably reread that line four or five times and laughed each time.

best MS question:

[hoochiepapa]

Why is the screen blue?

Re:If I was an interviewer I'd ask the following..

[cylcyl]

Japanese have had a business model where used panties are sold for money. In fact, there are even vending machines that sell them

Rope Burning Solution

[mib]

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.

For those who tried it, here is the solution to the "nonhomogeneous rope burning" problem. I'm ashamed to say this is the only one of the easy problems I couldn't figure out by myself when I tried them 6 months ago. If you didn't try the problem, you might want to go back and try it -- you become smarter by thinking about these, not by knowning the answers.

Light both ends of one rope, and one end of the other rope, and begin timing. When the first rope has burnt up half an hour has passed. At that point, light the second end of the other rope, which is now half an hour long. When the second rope has finished burning, an additional 15 minutes have passed, making a total of 45 minutes.

SPOILER - How to also decide the weight

[ralphbecket]

PROBLEM: given eight marbles, one is lighter or heavier than the others. Identify the different marble and whether it is lighter or heavier using at most three weighings on a balance scale.

SOLUTION: label the marbles a, b, c, d, e, f, g and h. Then...

1 - abc = def
2 - a = g
3 - a = h -- can't happen!
3 - a < h -- h is heavy
3 - a > h -- h is light
2 - a < g -- g is heavy
2 - a > g -- g is light
1 - abc < def
2 - ad = be
3 - a = c -- f is heavy
3 - a < c -- can't happen!
3 - a > c -- c is light
2 - ad < be
3 - a = b -- e is heavy
3 - a < b -- a is light
3 - a > b -- can't happen!
2 - ad > be
3 - a = b -- d is heavy
3 - a < b -- can't happen!
3 - a > b -- b is light
1 - abc > def
2 - ad = be
3 - a = c -- f is light
3 - a < c -- c is heavy
3 - a > c -- can't happen!
2 - ad < be
3 - a = d -- b is heavy
3 - a < d -- can't happen!
3 - a > d -- d is light
2 - ad > be
3 - e = b -- a is heavy
3 - e < b -- e is light
3 - e > b -- can't happen!

It's not too hard to solve this one systematically if you keep track of the knowledge of which marbles may be lighter or heavier after each weighing and exploit the fact that the four marble problem cannot be solved in only two weighings.

- Ralph

Re:Is MS really this pathetic?

[Billly Gates]

But in an economic downturn you do it because you can. Many people without degree's can't code for shit unless they have years of experience but the percentage of those who learned coding in school have a higher coding skill on average. Also they are smarter, have willingness to susceed and do not have an attitude.

To HR they have ask themselves why is it that you did not go to university? Do you not like studying? Were you not ambitious? Were not smart enough outside your field to graduate?

If you have 2,500 resumes comming in, a college degree is a great filtering mechanism. Yes you may lose some good coders but in return you can have good coders who have a guaranteed level of ambition, intelligence, who knows other things besides just coding. If the economy is hot and good coders are hard to find then yes the college degree option should not be considered.

PS I do not have a college degree and no longer work in IT and probably wont now for a long time thanks to the economy. Do I agree with this?

Yes. When I entered the work force I was greedy, and not ambitious and did not have other skills besides coding and solving desktop problems. For me it was because I was not willing to do the work required and I wanted a cheap way out to avoid school. Now its payback and it may take years to recover in this economic climate. I have to start 3 years at community college( since I must work full time)just to get accepted into a university, and then maybe into a while colar job before I am 35. Working at OfficeMax does not look good on my resume but its that or leaving a gaping hole. Sigh.

Pennies

[CreGen]

Since the interview at MS are in the USA, take the 4 US pennies to a bank and exchange for 5 Canadian pennies. The challange becomes much easier now with 5 shiny Canadian pennies.

__..__..__
__
__

Re:Wrong

[Eideewt]

First step, mountain is mountain.
Second step, mountain is not mountain.
Third step, mountain is mountain.

the history of the world

[Graspee_Leemoor]

I just read every post in this article. God, I must be bored.

On the plus side it was interesting to see the manhole problem being addressed in the same ways again and again, and the SEP field on the Mt. Fuji joke come up again and again.

It was very similar to experiencing the history of the world. The same things came up again and again after a period of time had passed. Sometimes they were the same, sometimes subtly different.

In between the same things recurring again and again were the gems that were never repeated.

How many really cool ideas in our history are forgotten?

After reading all these posts, and contributing with this insanely stupid one (at 5am ish local time) I realize I should really think about getting a job.

graspee

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Billly Gates]

The idea is to make a company filled with power freaks who do not sit still. They ask the questions to view your reactions. No one knows how many gas stations there are and that does not matter. What matters is how you handle stress and how would you manage innoviting or challenging something.

You can be brilliant but will not contribute anything if you do not let your views be heard. Microsoft is a ruthless company. Internal competition is just as fierce as external. Fights brake out all the time. Balmer and Gates view themselves as innovators because all the brilliant people at companies like Sun or Oracle talk the talk but do not do the walk. Microsoft wants ambition. They do so by hiring these kinds of people.

Bill Gates himself insults people during meetings. He will say things like That is the most stupid thing I ever heard. You need to convince him. If your good at this he will like you and promote you. If you can not sell the idea then you do belong at Microsoft or the idea is crap.

I do not agree with this. I would hate working over there but this is what they believe. I do not want the best debater making all the technical deciscions or making me look bad and compriming my job. If you fail at Microsoft its near impossible to continue because no one will listen to you or believe you.

Monty Python

[CrazyJim0]

The interview skit rules :)

Almost as much as the dad who is a theatrical performer talking down on his kid for being a coal miner.

Universal answer--look it up in google!

[blastedtokyo]

For every question, you could start with the answer: I'd look it up in a search engine. If I didn't have access, I'd go to the library. And if they ask you to solve it without those resources, I'd just say "hmmm. For $3 I could grab a bus to the library and back and find out how thousands of people have saved the same problem before. But, if you're into being creative about a previously solved problem..."

$250 billion in market cap...

[kubrick]

Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?

With the sort of resources Microsoft has, they can afford many inexpensive mistakes, maybe even a few years of outright technical and financial buffoonry, before they would even begin to feel any pain. Yes, they can be wrong, but no, they are unlikely to suffer any consequences for their errors.

Relative to what?

[jcr]

Mt. Fuji is (of course) already moving.

The second question would be, does it have to be intact after it is moved?

-jcr

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? - My answer...

[joejoejoejoe]

I couldn't sleep so I decided to post my answer to this... I would start by:
ME: "I assume you have a goal of moving the moutain. If that is your goal, then you should reconsider it. If the goal was assigned to you, then we need to
1) make sure it is not doable:

a) will breaking it up in to pieces and reassembling them meet the goal, even if the reconstructed mountain is slightly different?
b) do we have the resouces to say get a few million people involved in moving buckets of the moutain parts for say a couple hundred or whatever years?
c) have they decided on a location to move it to, adn could that place be used for a better goal?

2) come up with a good set of reasons for why the goal should be scrapped and present these reasons to the goal-assigner.

If the goal was decided on by the person you are speaking to, then maybe you are screwed, or maybe they are Egyptian or something, and are just recruiting for a noble task, and plan on it taking forever, and are getting paid by the hour, or are getting based on the number of man hours it takes, and more is better.

Re:Is MS really this pathetic?

[antiher0]

Technical managers are not requried to express technical knowledge during an interview?
Actually, the Program Manager (or PM) isn't a position of management over people. It's a position of management over a feature area. They design features, make decisions about the way they should work, and are they ultimate authority with respect to the feature. However, they don't code. PMs are asked more design-related questions. Of course, PMs in more technical groups (like... say... networking) tend to be more techinical than persons in less technical groups (perhaps PMs on a game).

Re: a whole class of shapes

[iggymanz]

Here's a fun page on shapes that could be manhole covers, if the only criteria was not being able to be made to fall into a slightly smaller hole: Here

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Mr_Silver]

You're kidding right? Because the industries you listed are most likely to ask the standard questions (what is your greatest weakness, etc) than anything off the wall. They don't want creative thinking types.

If you've actually been interviewed by any one of them, you'll find out how wrong you are.

Rectangular manhole covers

[slim]

It seems to me there are a number of reasons for making rectangular manhole covers:

• To fit in among paving slabs without cutting
  
• For ease of manufacture and minimum wastage when punching and bending from sheet aluminium
  
• For ease of storage and transit between manufacture an installation
  

A lot of the arguments for round covers make different assumptions:

• Hole is in a non-tiled surface (grass/tarmac)
  
• Cover is cast, not cut (a circle gives you the highest area/mass)
  
• Cover is heavy and unwieldy (cast iron vs aluminium), and hence dropping it down the hole is a big deal.
  

Probably other factors... I have work to do ;)

Answers

[archnerd]

Move Mt. Fuji? Move it relative it to what?

The remote control would have four buttons - two to spin the blinds clockwise and counter clockwise and two to move them in and out.

Manholes are round so that:
a) You can roll them - they're quite heavy
b) They won't fall through the manhole if you turn them the wrong way

I have no idea how many gas stations there are. But you could estimate it by finding the number in a certain area, adjusting that number relative to the population density of the area versus the population density of the US, and dividing by the fraction of the area of the US that your sample represents.

Re:Since when?

[glesga_kiss]

I'm pretty sure I've never seen a manhole cover on the MS main campus.

Security through obscurity?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[carlos_benj]

The next question is "Did Enron ask these creative thinking questions of their financial people?"

How do you move Mt. Fuji to an offshore holding company without arousing the suspicions of the government, shareholders and employees?

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[carlos_benj]

But if you build the GUI into the kernel like Windows does, it will be faster and more stable!

Curse you, AC. How was I to know that I would read something that hilarious (with an exclamation point no less) today and need a fresh pair of pants? Guess I'll just keep myself parked under the desk until I dry out....

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[carlos_benj]

Whaaat?? Where were the elements of sense? The whole thing was as funny as could be.

Re:Fermi Questions. / MOD PARENT UP!

[AdamBa]

Very interesting. I had never heard that before.

Mostly I replied so your post would have a reply to it, which might inspire more people to read it.

- adam

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[banzai51]

I've been interview and hired by several. You're dead wrong.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[carlos_benj]

I was thinking along the lines of moving the mountain just by bending light or transmitting an image of it. In other words "Why move the mountain when we can simply satisfy the basic need to see it."

Wouldn't that depend on the "REASON" for moving Mt. Fuji? If the reason was, "to get a better view" then your solution might be just fine. If the reason was, "to make way for a construction project" your solution is worthless.

And that's one of the reasons development fails miserably so often. Insufficient data from which decisions are made. Whenever a user asks for a particular feature, DON'T under any circumstances start thinking of ways that could be implemented. Instead, start asking questions. Why do they want the feature? What will they do with the feature? How do they do that now? What do they do with the information once they get it to that point?

I can tell you for certain that 9 times out of 10 the user wants something other than what they ask for. Many times what they ask for is an interim step toward what they ultimately want. By not asking questions you may get Mt. Fuji moved and never know it was because they thought it'd make a nice spot to plant mushrooms when you could have shown them the mushroom rich environment at their back door. By asking the right questions, you can deliver MORE than the customer is requesting and may find the ultimate solution was easier than moving a mountain.

You're not the first to say that . . .

[llywrch]

Unfortunately, your answer is very close to what Chairman Mao wrote in his Little Red Book: he tells the ancient Chinese tale of the old man who enlisted his family to move a mountain, one stone at a time. And since your answer is so close to something a famous Communist said, obviously you must be a Communist.

Your mention of ``Open Source" is just more confirmation of this conclusion. (Although had you said ``Free software", your Microsoft interviewer would be on the phone to Ashcroft immediately.)

Sorry, there is no opening for you at MS -- you're doomed to remaining part of the human race.

Geoff

Zen for dummies....

[carlos_benj]

Thanks! I was beginning to think that Zen was just the Far Eastern version of the "In Soviet Russia Mt. Fuji moves YOU!"

Re:Zen for dummies....

[carlos_benj]

Try laying that one on the interviewer at Microsoft baby!! :-D

Hah! There is no interviewer at no Microsoft.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Mr_Silver]

I've been interview and hired by several. You're dead wrong.

If you're going for SC level Management Consultancy (not IT) and never experienced interviews like that then I'm surprised.

If you're not talking about that, then I wouldn't know and certainly wouldn't go so far to claim that you are dead wrong.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[SeanAhern]

This is probably the statement that got me:

So forget about what the programmers want. Pay attention to what the users want. Coders don't have any idea what the avearge users want

To an exent, it's true. I've seen too many in-house applications die a slow, lingering, painful death because the programmers didn't involve the users in the design cycle. They incorrectly assumed they knew what the user's needs were, and went off to build an app that didn't meet the actual needs.

I guess he hit a nerve...

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Given Microsoft's track record with security
> problems, buggy code--such as infinite
> registration, and the famous blue screen of
> death, it's probbably not a good idea to ask
> Microsoft type questions with Software
> Engineering candidates because something isn't
> working.

Some goofball at work made a similar statement just the other day. To which I respond:

When slamming a corporation because of its hiring and engineering practices, one would do better than to pick the most wildly successful business enterprise of all time and say, "don't try to be just like them!"

Anybody giving such advice should be immediately fired, as should the person who hired them.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[Carnivorous Carrot]

I concur. However, most of you nerds are lacking in true creativity and critical thinking.

The correct answer on how to move Mount Fuji is to have an encounter of intimacy with your favorite starlette at the base of it, said intimacy increasing until the mountain moves for you.

No thanks, Microsoft, don't want the job, unless you make a nice offer.

Re:YOU FAIL IT

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Umm, "This is not a pipe", sorry, don't know Frenchy.

Re:Let me illustrate my stupidity

[Carnivorous Carrot]

> Actually, if you picked up the sqaure cover and
> oriented it vertically and spun it 45 degrees

If you accelerated the hole along its plane to near lightspeed, like 99.99999%, it would stretch along the diameter in that direction. A manhole cover shooting at it at about 75% of the speed of light in an orthogonal direction should be able to fit through, with minimal stretching itself, it would have ample time to slip thru the enlongated hole.

It's only in the relatively rare world around us that such "features" of "circles" hold true, luckily for the climbers.

Re:Manhole Covers... (now: Gas Stations)

[Carnivorous Carrot]

That's a rough ballpark to what I got when I thought about it for around 12 seconds.

My reasoning:

A certain number of miles of interstate, 2 or so per intersection, multiply up by similar argument for normal roads in cities, etc. etc.

Re:Microsoft not the only one

[utd-blaze]

However, most of you nerds are lacking in true creativity and critical thinking.
I thought creativity and critical thinking were what being a nerd was all about.

Re:How-to find an answer in a haystack.

[Sabu mark]

Unless the hay happens to be buoyant. Guh.