HOW WOULD YOU MOVE MOUNT FUJI?
Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle
How the World’s Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers

Future Tense

Microsoft, more than most big companies, accepts a candidate as blank slate. Its avowed goal is to select the candidate for what he can do rather than what he did already. Predictions about future performance are invariantly based on how the candidate answers the questions posed during the interview. Microsoft believes that it can judge a person’s caliber in a four to five one-hour interviews. Adam David Barr, a Microsoft developer, compares the interview process to the National foot ball league’s annual draft. There are some teams which are selected based on college football record. There are others where the selection is based on individual workouts where college players are tested more rigorously.

Microsoft follows the later method in selecting for all positions except the most senior people. Microsoft’s goal is to assess a general problem-solving ability rather than a specific competency. It uses logic puzzles, riddles, and impossible questions to meet this end. Microsoft people believe that there are parallels between the reasoning skill necessary to solve puzzles and the skill necessary to address the real problems of innovation and a changing marketplace. Solver of puzzles, and technical innovator should be capable of identifying essential elements in a situation that is ill-defined at least in the beginning. It is not clear often how reasoning should be employed. Hence, the solver of either the puzzle or problem concerning innovation must persist till it is possible to arrive at a solution.

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.

Wall Street and the Puzzle Interview

The puzzle interview exactly serves the purpose of Wall-Street, when competition is no less intense, and market share is no less tenuous compared to Silicon Valley. This high finance business is increasingly changing into software business. Sophisticated financial instruments and derivatives are very much software based and have to be designed and implemented by math-savvy nerds who are happy working long hours. Many of the questions posed in Microsoft and some other similar companies’ interviews are very much common in Wall Street interviews. Goldman Sachs (which handled Microsoft’s 1986 initial public offering) asks the puzzle about weighing eight balls to find the heavier one. Management consulting industry is no exception to this trend. A good consultant is supposed to be a “quick study”; and puzzles and riddles are seen as a good way to judge “non-contextspecific” intelligence.

More....Next Page

2004, ICMR Case Studies and Management Resources. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic or mechanical, without permission.

To order copies, call 0091-40-2343-0462/63/64 or write to ICMR Case Studies and Management Resources, Plot # 49, Nagarjuna Hills, Hyderabad 500 082, India or email info@icmrindia.org. Website: www.icmrindia.org

This case study is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a management situation. This case was compiled from published sources.