WTF #15: Interviewing Tip: Know Your Basics
I’ve been away from EngineerBlogs.org for a couple of weeks as I’ve been traveling. I finally made it out of China, and it was about time. I flew directly to a country that shall not be named, except to say she is the top exporter of crude oil to the United States. But I didn’t linger long in oil-country, just enough to take care of some personal business before heading off to my next stop, America the Beautiful and her Keystone State. For two straight nights, I had greasy burgers and fries for dinner and I must say, it felt pretty good. I’ve now returned to oil-country and will stay here a while before going back to China again. Despite my travels, one thing I continue to do is to interview candidates for our open analog IC design positions in China. I leave all the fancy questions, such as control theory,…
Bottom of the Design Curve with No Budget
This week is a Theme Week and we’re writing about our experiences at some point in the product or company’s lifecycle. My Location : Startup. I’ve always seen design engineering as having two distinct categories. Sustaining engineering and R&D engineering. Since I’d always seen Sustaining as being boring (sorry Chris!), involving designing the same product over and over, tweaking it to make it better, but basically understanding how it works already, I managed to start in R&D nearly right out of college. Seb’s recent post seems to prove me wrong, but maybe “Sprockets” have it better than us “Sparkies”! Some of the companies I’ve worked at on a project basis were similar. They had been in existence for years, eking out a living and had a common trait: No money for New Product Development (NPD). I’ve had many successful projects (I came, I designed, it worked), but the unsuccessful ones are…
The Future of Education
The Overiew I recently signed up for 6.002: Circuits and Electronics, an introductory level course and the first course available from MITx, MIT’s free, online school. Unlike MIT’s Open Course Ware, which has an incomplete selection of videotaped classroom lectures (some courses are more complete than others) and assorted problem sets, the MITx course has been designed from the ground up to be completed online. Each “week” of class has two lecture sequences, a homework set, and a lab. The lecture sequences each take about an hour and a half to complete, and are broken up into 2-5 minute segments. Some segments feature virtual chalkboard sessions, others feature clips from actual classroom demonstrations. Occasionally, the professor will ask you to solve a simple problem in the middle of class to reinforce a point. The video segments then switch to an untimed online mini-quiz. The student answers in a text field and get…
It’s STILL The Teacher, Silly
I wrote about my favorite class 2 weeks back; I talked about my favorite teacher/boss, who really influenced my engineering career and taught me some important skills. Today, I look at the flip side. I look at a class that really really was no good. However, it was the exact same reason: the teacher. At first, I was going to mention a math class, similar to Cherish’s post about how she nearly dropped engineering entirely. I completely associate with that. My calculus 3 teacher was a nightmare. However, it was still topped. No, the class I took was surprisingly analog circuits. Yup, analog circuits, the thing I do on a daily basis. Except not quite. This class was instead chip level analog circuits, as opposed to board level. I’ve made this distinction on Fluxor’s blog and my own before. I work with packaged chips, designing systems. Fluxor designs low level…