William Poundstone

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, employers are using tough and tricky questions to gauge job candidates' intelligence, imagination, and problem-solving ability — qualities needed to survive in today's hypercompetitive global marketplace. For the first time, William Poundstone reveals the toughest questions used at Microsoft and other Fortune 500 companies — and supplies the answers. He traces the rise and controversial fall of employer-mandated...

This book presents answers and solutions to some of the weirdest and most challenging interview questions and discusses the importance of creative thinking and how to beat your competition in today's job market. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of America's best companies, you need to have an answer to this and other puzzling...

Our Electoral System is Fundamentally Flawed, But There's a Simple and Fair Solution At least five U.S. presidential elections have been won by the second most popular candidate. The reason was a "spoiler"-a minor candidate who takes enough votes away from the most popular candidate to tip the election to someone else. The spoiler effect is more than a glitch. It is a consequence of one of the most surprising intellectual discoveries of the twentieth...

In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory-the basis of computers and the Internet-to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible. Shannon and MIT...

Each year about 28 million Americans begin a search for a new job. Millions more live in the age of the permanent job search, their online profiles eternally awaiting a better offer. Job seekers are more mobile and better informed than ever, aspiring to work for employers offering an appealing culture, a robust menu of perks, and opportunities for personal fulfillment and advancement. The result is that millions of applications stream to the handful...

For years, Microsoft and other high-tech companies have been posing riddles and logic puzzles like these in their notoriously grueling job interviews. Now "puzzle interviews" have become a hot new trend in hiring. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, employers are using tough and tricky questions to gauge job candidates' intelligence, imagination, and problem-solving ability -- qualities needed to survive in today's hypercompetitive global marketplace....

Should you watch public television without pledging? Exceed the posted speed limit? Hop a subway turnstile without paying? These questions illustrate the "prisoner's dilemma", a social puzzle that we all face every day. Though the answers may seem simple, their profound implications make the prisoner's dilemma one of the great unifying concepts of science. Watching poker players bluff inspired John von Neumann to construct game theory, a mathematical...