Fireside Chat with a Favorite Uncle

TITLE: How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
AUTHOR: William Poundstone
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company

RATING
5/5 "Verrry Slowly"; 4/5 "Magic"; 3/5 "Get Godzilla to Stomp On It"; 2/5 "With Chewing Gum, String, and the Moon's Gavitational Pull"; 1/5 "A-Bombs"
SCORE; 4/5

After a really bad job interview, ever felt the interviewer had it in for you right from the get-go? It may not be just in your head. A Harvard study found that random people watching a 15-second clip of job candidates entering, shaking hands with their interviewer and then sitting down scored the candidates almost identically to the interviewers themselves.

That's just one of the fascinating anecdotes that percolates through William Poundstone's tasty blend of corporate history, puzzle book and job-seeker advice, "How Would You Mount Fuji?".

The book feels more like a collection of loosely-linked magazine articles than a single narrative. While it's ostensibly about the "logic puzzles" used in Microsoft's job interviews, Mr Poundstone is more interested in telling a good story than helping you land a job coding for Mr Gates and co. Instead of a how-to guide, it's more like a friendly chat with a beloved but scatterbrained uncle.

Mr Poundstone starts with a critique of traditional interview techniques, where he mentions the Harvard study. He explains how the failings of these methods led to the increasing use of logic puzzles and branteasers in interviews, especially at Microsoft and at investment banks. Next we get a look at the organization and corporate philosophy of Microsoft itself. Mr Poundstone follows with a sample of the puzzles themselves. The second half of the book is more prescriptive, with advice for both job-seekers and interviewers on how to ask and answer logic-puzzle questions.

Regardless of the slightly butterfly progression from topic to topic, Mr Poundstone is always a highly entertaining guide, and despite the math-heavy subject, he writes clearly and simply enough even for an amateur booker reviewer to understand. Some of his proposed solutions to the puzzles seem a little too literal (his answer to the question of the title is to calculate the volume of Mt. Fuji using the formula for a cone, then calculate the number of dump trucks required to haul all the stone away). For most of the others though, you'll be kicking yourself for not getting his answer.

Since the book was originally published in 2003, the reputation of Miscrosoft, and especially its spiritual siblings on Wall Street--such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs--have taken a bit of a beating, so whether their model of interviewing is worthy imitating or not is a bit of an open question. The book's utility and appeal to job-seekers therefore seems a little doubtful. However, it is an enormously funny read for anyone just interested in puzzles, the history of interview questions, or the culture of Silicon Valley.

How would I move Mount Fuji? Stand on my head. Voila! I've turned it upside-down.