How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

Abstract: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? explores the riddles and puzzles used in interviews by Microsoft and other high-tech companies. The author traces the rise and controversial fall of employer-mandated IQ tests, the peculiar obsessions of Bill Gates (who plays figsaw puzzles as a competitive sport) and the sadistic mind games of Wall Street (which reportedly les one job seeker to smash a forty-third story window).

 

About the Author: William Poundstone is the author of nine books, including Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, Prisoner's Dilemma, Labyrinths of Reason, and the Popular Big Secrets series, which inspired two television network specials. He has written for Esquire, Harper's, The Economist, and the New York Times Book Review, and his science writing has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Terman ad Silicon Valley

Lewis M. Terman, a Stanford professor, popularized the concept of IQ. He created the traditional IQ test, and promoted conducting IQ tests everywhere. In fact, Terman's dream was to build America into a meritocracy, in which, people ranging from feeble minded to brilliant, are allotted suitable jobs based on their IQ test performance. He defined intelligence as, “the ability to reason abstractly.” Terman used various types of questions to test this ability. He used analogies, synonyms and antonyms, and reading comprehension questions as a part of this test. There were some logic puzzles as well. The popularity of Terman's IQ tests can be ascribed to the convenience of his method. He expressed the scores as a catchy number-the intelligent quotient, or IQ. It was in 1917, when the IQ tests were first used in the workplace. A team comprising Terman, Yerkes, a Harvard psychologist, and some other psychologists created an IQ test meant for US army. The Army scores were classified into classes, A through E. Based on these scores, the army employees were given appropriate responsibilities. The army experiment gave the much needed publicity and prestige to intelligence testing.

Almost all major American school systems adopted the practice of intelligence testing. Subsequently Terman and his associates went on advertise for IQ tests around Palo Alto. In 1956, William Shockley too got impressed with these IQ tests. Thus began the Silicon Valley's fascination with IQ tests and logic puzzles. But, since 1930s they have been disenchanted with intelligence testing. They realized that IQ testing was not the cureall that Terman had made it out to be. In 1964, New York City dropped IQ testing in its schools. The race issue was prime reason behind that decision. Educators have been complaining that the culture gap between white male test takers and minority test takers resulted in unfavorable IQ scores for minority students. IQ test was harming the prospects of minority students by assigning them with lower IQ scores. Companies were also forced to abandon the intelligence tests by lawsuits that blamed the tests to be discriminatory. All this might suggest that Intelligence tests are no longer in use. But it is not so. Intelligence tests are used as widely as ever in education as well as workplace. They are, however, used in disguised form.

Do Puzzle Interviews work?

Microsoft does not want to be a place for high-IQ never-do-wells. One of the partially acknowledged merits of its interviews is that puzzles test motivation and persistence. Logic puzzles and other Microsoft tests with questions that claim to have a beginning, middle, and end. The candidate has to encounter and overcome some obstacles to answer these questions. The successful solver of puzzles has to be, believed by some, persistent and smart. And in this way, they claim that a logic puzzle is a better predictor of workplace success than other intelligence-test items such as analogies, synonyms, or sentence-completion tasks.

Most of the hirers agree that traditional questions (i.e. questions such as “Why should we hire you?”) are no better than puzzle interviews. And rarely anybody disputes the contention that, puzzle interviews test the problem solving ability better than traditional interview, when there is no specific skill set that can be tested. Thus, the strongest argument for the puzzle interviews turns out to be that everything else is worse.

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