Microsoft Job Interview Questions

I was surprised to see that Wikipedia has started collecting job-interview questions that have been asked by Microsoft's interviewers during followup (second round) interviews. The questions posted so far include the following:

• Design a cellphone for a blind person.
• Design a music system for a car. What are the features? Draw a picture.
• Design a GPS navigation unit for a hiker
• Design a communication device for Canadian park rangers.
• Design a remote control for an automatic window-blind system.
• Design TV Remote Control with Two Buttons.
• Design a coffee maker that will be used by astronauts.
• Design an alarm clock.
• Design an alarm clock for a blind person.
• Design a search function
• Design a website for a library
• What method would you use to look up a word in a dictionary?
• What are examples of poorly designed software?
• Design an instant messaging system.
• I am your grandmother. Describe what MATLAB is to me.
• How would you explain what a database is to a 5-year-old?
• How would you explain computer networking to a kindergarten kid?
• What is your favorite software, and how would you improve it?
• Write code for an electronic messaging board. What happens when a user logs on?
• Develop an algorithm for selecting objects in Visio.
• Tell me about a time when you made a decision and later found out that it was incorrect. What did you do to resolve the issue?
• Suppose you are one week away from the product shipping date and discover a bug in your software. What do you do?
• You have a linked list and don't know how long it is; how do you find the middle of it?
• How would you test a keyboard?
• How would you test a pen?
• Write code for finding a duplicate in an array.
• Write code that returns the length of a string without using any built-in functions.
• Reverse a Singly Linked List with and without using Recursion.
• Determine if a Binary Search Tree is well formed.
• Reverse every word in a String (abc def becomes cba fed).
• What method would you use to look up a word in a dictionary?
• Write a function that returns the angle between the hour and the minute hands of a clock, given input of the time.
• Write a function that takes a string consisting of numeral characters and returns all possible alpha character strings of same length as input that correspond to the keypad of a typical telephone.
• Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
• How would you test an elevator?
• How would you test a vending machine?
• How would you test a program that takes in two points and outputs the distance between the two points?
• Test the Windows scroll bar.
• Switch every pair of words in a string ("ab cd ef gh" becomes "cd ab gh ef")
• Write the function for strstr function (finding a substring inside a string)
• Reverse the order of words in a string ("ab cd ef gh" becomes "gh ef cd ab")
• Write the function for string comparison. How would you test it?
• Write a function to zero all duplicate values in an integer array. How would you test it?
• Write a function that compares two strings and returns a third string containing only the letters that appear in both.

I guess I'm surprised at the breadth of irrelevancy of the questions. Image that you have a closet full of shirts?? How would you test a pen?

Are we hiring Ron Popeil, or are we hiring programmers and QA testers?

Even the technical questions seem incredibly pointless. Reverse the order of words in a string?

The real question is this: Suppose someone does well on these questions. Do they end up doing a good job for the company? Do they do well at Microsoft? Does Microsoft do well? How do you track those things? How do you know what was (in retrospect) a good interview question to ask -- a question that had predictive value, a question that told you whether the interviewee would be a productive employee -- versus a crappy question to ask, a question that ended up predicting nothing, or (worse) caused the wrong person to be hired?

Does Microsoft track such things? One has to wonder. If not, then all of this becomes a silly hazing ritual with no demonstrable value to anyone. I suspect Microsoft (like most companies) has no metrics whatsoever for determining the business value of interview questions. In other words, it's all basically a joke. Please someone tell me that's not true. (And then post the reason to Wikipedia.)