Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

We recommend this book to people trying to get hired at Microsoft or companies influenced by its hiring practices; people who want to think critically about how hiring practices work; and people who want to see how smart they are. The last group includes those who enjoy puzzles, and will relish the fun, challenging questions presented here. The book's core is a collection of entertaining brainteasers from job interviews. Given the high level of competition, most people who are trying to get hired at Microsoft probably need the edge it provides. Readers can work methodically through the questions, and the reasons behind them, to build a general approach for dealing with most puzzles. Readers who want to reflect on hiring practices - such as human resources personnel or scholars of corporate culture - will find the book intriguing but incomplete. Author William Poundstone is incredibly useful when discussing the gaps between what these questions do and what they are intended to do, but he delivers only quick sketches of explanations about how corporate culture retains these approaches despite their relative lack of function. His suggestions for alternative approaches are equally brief. Even after reading this entertaining book, readers are likely to find that perfecting their companies' interviewing processes will continue to be something of a puzzle.

I had my interview yesterday. Microsoft is no longer doing questions like the ones in this book. If you want this book to train for the interview you might want to get instead "Programming interview exposed". Other than that, the book is well written and has a good history of microsoft... No, they will not ask you anything about the history of MS

As someone currently interviewing at MS, I was interested in reading several of the books on the subject, and someone recommended this one. The content focus is spread between historical data on various management styles and use of puzzles in interviews, and many of the now famous brain-teasers once used at MS. This wasn't exactly what i was hoping to read - it would have been nice to get more of an insight into other aspects of their hiring practices, because puzzles are just one little piece of it.

I found a much better book for those keen on understand how MS managers think - epsecially when hiring: "The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management: How to Think and Act Like a Microsoft Manager and Take Your Company to the Top" by David Thielen, while positioned as a book for management in other companies, is actually a fantastic resource for people interviewing - or hoping to interview.

A month ago a colleague of mine threw me two puzzles and asked me to finish it within 5 minutes. I got one right and one wrong. He told me that the puzzles came out of a book named "How would you move Mount Fuji?" "What an interesting puzzle book!" I thought to myself and urged him to lend it to me. So I read it and am now writing this review.

Unexpectedly, this book is more than only puzzles, but recruitment process and strategies of Microsoft which used puzzles extensively in job interviews. However, puzzle fans need not be disappointed because answers to puzzles or actually "means to reply interview questions logically" still occupy page 147-244 of this 244 page content book.

Though I am not a true enthusiast of puzzles, I still think this book is quite an interesting read if you have the leisure, or the desire to prepare yourself for a job interview in Microsoft or equivalent. Anyway, below please find some puzzles in it for your consideration:-

How would you weigh a jet plane without using scales?
Why are manhole covers round rather than square?
Why do mirrors reverse right and left rather than up and down?
How do they make M&M's?
How many piano tuners are there in the world?
How would you design Bill Gate's bathroom?
How would you test a saltshaker/toaster/elevator/kettle?

This book provides a good assortment of intellectual "puzzles" in the context of interview questions utilized in technical, financial and consulting interviews. The puzzles range from straightforward to challenging in terms of their level of difficulty.

For those individuals interested in a compact, well-written and interesting book that sheds some light on the role of puzzles in today's working world, this book offers a compelling read.

The title of the book is taken from an interview question posed to potential new hires at Microsoft. Their strategy is to pose questions that require the interviewee to think fast and deep about a problem that may not have a realistic solution. The goal is to see how the interviewee reacts, as the Microsoft mindset is that only the very best and brightest should be hired. To them, there will always be another bright person on the horizon, so it is better to err on the side of not hiring versus hiring.
Poundstone delves into the reasons for using this interview strategy and carries out a bit of historical analysis. Nobel Prize winner William Shockley used such questions when he was building up a company to make semiconductors. It is amusing and also sad to read how Shockley's eccentricities (paranoia) drove so many key people away. Had he not been so difficult to deal with, Shockley quite likely would have been far richer than even Bill Gates.
The highlight of the book is the list of puzzle questions that have been posed as part of a job interview. As the co-editor of "Journal of Recreational Mathematics", I recognized many of them. Variants of many of them have appeared in one of Martin Gardner's "Scientific American" columns, most of which I have read in the form of his collected works. In most cases, if you are familiar with the puzzle, then the solution is relatively easy. However, the majority of the solutions require you to do a little bit of non-confrontational attacking of the problem. I put them in the category of Gardner's "Aha" problems, where if you look at it the right way, the solution is obvious.
As a person with interests in business and recreational mathematics, I enjoyed reading about how the two can be mixed. An ability to solve puzzles is generally a sign of high intelligence, which is certainly an asset in business. The real question, only partially answered in this book, is the degree to which an ability to solve puzzles is correlated to an ability to solve business problems.

This book does a great job of helping you answer the most difficult type of interview questions, behavioral interview questions. As a training manager, who trains managers and executives on behavioral questions, I feel I am qualified to say this book works.

This book is a wonderful resource especially if you know what type of job you want. If you do not know what type of job you want you may want to read, "How to find your dream job and make it a reality," which by the way is a job hunting classic. Of course, there other books, but this one is my favorite.

Read this book, and practice for your job interviews and you will be successful in your job hunt.

This book is a good start for Microsoft reviews, but it is outdated. Puzzles are used less often, for several reasons. One of the reasons, which the book starts with and then gets stuck, is that it is the journey of trying to solve seemingly impossible problems. Unfortunately, with more people memorizing all the puzzles, MS and others are switching gears. So, if you want some of the problems, with solutions, this might be the book for you. If you want a job at MS, I would suggest visiting MSDN at the MS site and look around.

This was a pretty fun read. The book goes over the origins of brainteaser/puzzle interviews, how they are/should be used, and has a lot of well explained examples. For my purposes of going over brainteasers that I might run into in investment banking interviews, the book was pretty handy because the few brainteasers I did get, I had read about before. If you are trying to do the same thing for other types of interviews (with trading companies or something more quantitative) then the book isn't as good in those areas, because the questions are more probability/stat based.

Overall, very enjoyable and well-written.

For anyone looking for an entry level position at a financial or technology firm, this is a must read. Insane logic puzzles and brainteasers are the new craze in interviewing, and the ideas are spreading to more and more companies. Whether such silly interview questions are a good measure of a candidate's intelligence is debatable. But one thing for certain is that interview brainteasers are here to stay.

Mt Fuji covers all angles of the interview brainteaser, from its history and origins to how they should be handled in an interview. The first segment of the book about the history of interviewing and puzzles is an interesting read and gives you insight into why their creators first put them to practice. As both an interview and interviewee, the history may help you understand their application, but overall this segment is not very practical for a tough interview.

The meat of this book comes near the middle, where it gives a list of popular logic puzzles actually used by some companies (solutions to all puzzles mentioned throughout the book are in the appendix). If you have the time, they are fun to work out. After this page of puzzles, the author describes how employers applied them in interviews and gives general guidelines for defeating similar questions.

The final chapter before the appendix is directed towards potential interviewers. It explains how some companies have gone overboard and improperly used brainteasers to evaluate job candidates. For interviewees, it makes you feel better if you had a bad interview because of unfair use of brainteasers.

Mt Fuji is an excellent read for any young person currently seeking a job, and any employer who would like to incorporate brainteaser questions into the interview process. The puzzles and history are geared towards technology firms like Microsoft, but these brainteasers are also very common with Wall Street firms. Not only is this read informative, but will be fun if you enjoy thinking out of the box.