The Brain Teaser Route to World Domination

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Over at the Observer, Leo Benedictus reviews William Poundstone’s Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

Some way into this book, you realise something, or at least I did. Only the first 136 pages have anything to do with Google’s interview technique. The rest, for almost as many pages, is consumed by “answers” to the many questions that we find along the way….Might I have preferred to settle down with a book that didn’t bother trying to be a practical, topical and revealing guide to hi-tech job interviews, but instead just called itself “101 Great Maths and Logic Puzzles”?

….You will get to ponder things like this: “You’re playing football on a desert island and want to toss a coin to decide the advantage. Unfortunately, the only coin on the island is bent and is seriously biased. How can you use the biased coin to make a fair decision?”….There is quite a lot of sucking up to Google, actually, even though the effectiveness of the company’s methods is far from proven.

Indeed. First Microsoft, and then all of Silicon Valley, became famous for subjecting potential hires to questions like the one above, or queries about how many gas stations there are in the United States. But has anybody ever produced even halfway persuasive evidence that this is a great way of hiring brilliant employees? My own suspicion is that it isn’t. It rewards a certain kind of shallow cleverness that might well be useful in certain roles at high-tech companies, but I’d be surprised if it were anything more. In fact, putting together an entire company characterized by shallow cleverness might well be sowing the seeds of one’s own destruction. It’s a mental trait that I suspect is organizationally useful is modest quantities, but might very well be actively harmful in larger quantities. Even in the high-tech world, producing clever coding hacks is only a tiny part of success.

But then, I have no proof of that either. All I know is that I’d probably be reluctant to work for a company that even asked questions like this in the first place. It’s a fad, and a lazy way of convincing yourself that you’ve figured out a shortcut to assembling a world-class staff. But there are no shortcuts. Not even in Silicon Valley.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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