Puzzles as Interview Questions

Like it or not, puzzles are a big part of interview questions for programmers these days. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have a tendency to give puzzles to test out software engineers that they are interviewing. But, a lot of companies don’t bother to ask potential candidates interview puzzles – it really varies from company to company.

Whether they really tell your employer anything revealing about your intelligence is highly debatable. It might have some truth to it, but we think it’s very unlikely that the ability to solve a puzzle has anything to do with how good someone will be at doing their job. The commonly held opinion by people who like to ask interview puzzles is that watching an interviewee solve a puzzle gives the employer a chance to see how an interviewee approaches problem solving. In any case, in this section we present some puzzles that we’ve come across in some interviews. Just try to have fun with them!