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,…
With A Little Help From My Friends
Getting laid off. This was what happened to me more than a half dozen years ago now. I was the first one to be let go from a start-up that was starting to show cracks in its hull. It wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t get along with most of my colleagues. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get along with the rest of the team; rather, a clique had formed before I arrived and they had apparently decided that I wasn’t to be part of it. In the two years that I was there, the only person that I got along with was with the wife of a colleague from a previous job and another outcast that wasn’t part of the clique. Unfortunately for me, the outcast left voluntarily a year before I was let go. When the kraft envelope was gently pushed across the cafeteria table by my…
Getting a Job Requires Good Intercourse
Back when Engineer Blogs was still just a young and innocent babe, waiting for loving hands to write upon its empty pages of life that still lay before it, I put down a few words regarding Transistor Interview Questions. A gracious reader named Phil was kind enough to pen his thoughts in the comment section, even going so far, and humbled am I that he did, to ask for advice not only regarding interviewing tips, but also, I presume, an open-ended general appeal of counsel for, as he describes himself, “an aspiring analog designer”. I promised Phil that I shall in a future time write another post responding to his entreaties; that time has come. Let me tackle the first of the two inquiries — interviewing tips — not because it is easy, but because it is hard, thus necessarily bounding the size of this post with my limited wisdom.…
Transistor Interview Questions
Last week, I wrote about an interview with a disappointing candidate that was applying for a analog IC design position with FluxCorp. Although he wasn’t able to answer many questions regarding his own past designs (or alleged designs), I still thought it necessary to give him a chance by moving to more basic questions, like the transistor. In my opinion, these questions are not difficult. If one bothers to prepare for an interview like this by flipping through some old text books, these questions should be a breeze. Unfortunately, the candidate (let’s call him Mr. Flop) in question failed horribly, which illustrates a few things. First, he doesn’t know how to prepare for an interview. Second, he has not internalized undergrad material in his brain so that he can claim to be qualified to be an analog IC designer. Third, he grossly overstated his abilities on his resume. And I’m…