[hinkley]

Before this people (like Microsoft) used to ask riddles. Now, I'm pretty okay at and enjoy riddles, and ridiculously good at multiple choice tests. Bits of this come out in how I approach troubleshooting and debugging.

The last place I interviewed at that did riddles ended up offering me the job, but I teased them even before they asked their riddles about how it wasn't a good interview technique. I could kind of tell they were thinking "oh boy, another guy full of excuses for why he's not gonna pass the interview process". Second riddle, I started talking and had the answer within a single sentence. No pauses, no sentence fragments. Now I had their attention.

Since it was a rapidly growing company I was in the interview pool within three or four months and it took me maybe six months after that to convince all but one person to stop using riddles for interview questions.

Point is, if you disagree with an interview technique but can manage to get through that filter anyway, you owe it to the rest of us to say something. Apply some peer pressure whenever you can.