Programmer's conundrums

I don't know why Microsoft does it. But if I were hiring, for some positions I might do it; I'd do it because such questions, when they depend on something the applicant has not already seen, can serve to probe cleverness and adaptability of thought. Martin Gardner wrote a book called "Aha! Insight" about this kind of thinking - the "aha!" moment - and how it can be coaxed into occurring more often. Many recreational mathematics puzzle books can serve the same function. This is not restricted to job interviews. In my career as an undergraduate in university, I wrote the Putnam[%] one year. One of the questions was to compute a particular definite integral (of a rather hairy function). The simple answer (which I did not get) was to notice that it had 180? rotational symmetry about a particular point and leverage that to deduce that the answer was exactly half the area of a particular rectangle. [%] The William Lowell Putnam mathematical competition, a *hard* exam held annually for undergrads in mathematics. A good standing on the Putnam can open doors, if you're interested in mathematics in academia. Furthermore... ...well, if you didn't previously get it, whether you can get it during the interview says something about your cleverness and adaptability. If you think out loud at all about it, how you approach it can say a lot more, if the interviewer is good. (And if you did previously get it, that can indicate something too, though it's a much fuzzier something.) Of course, I would never claim that all places that use such questions use them correctly. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B