Is the old interview question about manhole covers narcissistic or revealing?

‘Why are manhole covers round?’

That clichéd brainteaser was allegedly made famous after appearing in a 2003 book cataloguing interview questions Microsoft would put to prospective employees, testing their skills of lateral thinking.

Over the years a number of ‘correct’ answers have been suggested. 

However, recruiters are now questioning whether it was ever useful in the hiring process, and psychologists have even pointed to malicious intent 

Perhaps the most commonly cited response is that round covers cannot fall into the hole, whereas square covers would slip down if inserted diagonally.

Others have made the case that the round tubes they cover are the most structurally sound shape, and alternatively that a round cover would never need to be rotated in order to be slot into a hole.

More abstract answers suggest that round covers can be rolled, making them easier to move, and that they use less material than square covers of the same width/diameter. 

The notorious brain teaser, ‘Why are manhole covers round?’ was allegedly made popular by Microsoft in the early 2000s but, since then, hiring managers at tech companies have said the question is not useful for recruitment

Jerry Seinfeld captured down a manhole in NYC as part of a photoshoot by photographer Annie Leibovitz

The problem was just one in a class of interview questions that grew increasingly popular in the early 2000s and was widely attributed to emerging tech companies.

Other such questions could be along the lines of: ‘Why is a tennis ball fuzzy?’ ‘How many cows are in Canada?’ or ‘How many piano tuners are there in the world?’

In William Poundstone’s 2003 book, ‘How would you move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft’s cult of the puzzle’, he writes: ‘Microsoft is famous for its brutal refinement of the form, subjecting candidates to a withering barrage of brainteasers and ‘unanswerable’ questions to separate out the logical, motivated, unflappable, innovative thinkers.’

In his 2003 book, ‘How would you move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft’s cult of the puzzle’, William Poundstone criticizes the way such questions are used by interviewers

Although the problems were originally linked to Microsoft and then later to Google, the latter has increasingly distanced itself from them.

Ten years after Poundstone’s book, in 2012, Laszlo Bock, a senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times:

‘On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.’

In a 2010 blog post, Gayle Laakmann McDowell, who had previously served on Google’s hiring committee, wrote of the manhole question: ‘This is an infamous interview question that has since been so very, very banned at both companies.’

Making matters worse is that, in many cases, the questions do not make much sense, nor do they have sensible answers.

‘To anthropologists studying the hiring rituals of the early twenty-first century, the strangest thing about these impossible questions would probably be: No one knows the answer,’ wrote Poundstone.

A number of factors likely impacted the shape of manhole covers and notably, they are not always round. In the UK many manhole covers are square.

In the United Kingdom and in other parts of the world, some manhole covers are square

A 2018 paper in the International Association of Applied Psychology outlined a study of 736 adults to understand the effectiveness of the brainteaser interview question. Not only did it find the questions are useless from a hiring perspective, it even suggested they were posed out of malice. 

‘Results of a multiple regression, controlling for interviewing experience and sex, showed that narcissism and sadism explained the likelihood of using brainteasers in an interview,’ wrote the paper’s authors.

Even though brainteaser interview questions appear to be out of fashion, interview guides by job sites like Indeed and Monster still advise candidates to be prepared.

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