[jmillikin]

How to drive clicks in four steps:

1. Invent a bunch of silly riddles that a non-technical reader might accept as tech interview questions.

2. Pull a major tech company out of a hat (today it's Google), and claim with no evidence that their interviews are based around silly riddles. The article will be cited for years as proof that people working at $COMPANY are weird and obtuse.

3. Wait a couple years. Ignore all evidence that $COMPANY does not use silly riddles in interviews.

4. Once traffic on the original article dies down, write another article claiming $COMPANY has "admitted" silly riddles aren't useful for interviews.

[pathy]

I see you didn't read the article. The basis for the article is a NYT interview with a SVP at Google, claiming that the brainteasers are not useful (among other things). Surely that is good source? I haven't got a clue if Google actually used these kinds of questions but the interview sure seem to suggest it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

That said, the riddles listed are of course a bit clickbaity but they did not conjure the story out of thin air.

[jmillikin]

The same list of riddle questions has been circulating for at least twenty years. Before Google existed, it was credited to Microsoft. I know they've been explicitly banned at Google for many years, and have seen no evidence that they were ever in common use at either company.