Electronics Design does it Again!

Not hard to find though:

Do you think that 2nd story thing is original 1918?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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What type of transistor? NPN or PNP?

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Thank you for coming by to interview. Best of luck.

John

with

You're welcome. I would never want to work for you anyway.

You could use either, even though one wouldn't work properly. It would either cause a shorted or open junction, but would give the voltages you indicated. Typical of a poorly thought out attempt to show 'superiority'.

Your little 'test' reeks of ego and does nothing to find real workers. The ones who will find every problem, and why a design doesn't work.

It reminds me of the employment test at Cincinnati Electronics. It had a dozen or so symbols you had to identify in one section. One of them was an N channel FET with a dot inside the circle. It looked like they started with the symbol for a gas regulator tube and added the extra lines to make a N channel FET.

They threw a hissy fit when people told them it wasn't a valid symbol, yet they couldn't identify what it was. This was in the mid '70s. It was a running joke about the head of the department who created the stupid test. He didn't want people who thought, he wanted drones.

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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

message

"It's

with

unremarkable

That little "test" is performed in scribble/discussion mode, not as some formal sit-down thing. I don't want to hire a test tech or an engineer who doesn't understand how a transistor works. Or in this case, what a voltmeter does. This question is *not* designed to be tricky; it's a bog simple emitter follower, which a shocking number of "engineers" don't seem to understand. They say stuff like "well, it's been a while since..."

Of course, when I draw this I use a real transistor symbol, not ascii art.

Last EE I hired, I flew him in and spent a full day designing an actual product with him... no test, no interview.

Those tricky tests are pretty lame. A few real, simple circuits will tell me what I need to know.

The best way to hire is to first work with someone part-time, as a consultant or intern, rather than interview/test, which isn't very predictive of reality.

John

No, no, John, your follow-up question is supposed to be about how one would go about measuring the height of a building with a barometer, wherein you see whether or not the many alternatives to the "intended" answer (e.g., "I go to the buliding superintendent and tell him I'll give him this fancy new barometer if he just tells me the height of the building") are sufficiently entertaining or not. :-)

There is sometimes a blurry line between "this is intended to be a straighforward problem and you should make any reasonable assumptions necessary" and "this is something of a trick question and you need to proceed like a lawyer unraveling the tax code to have any hope of ascertaining the answer we've deemed as correct."

---Joel

This is not a sit-down test. This is a thing I scribble and talk about. There is no intent to be tricky, but I need to know if the person understands fundamantals.

I use this one too:

+10V | | | R=1K | | +-------- A | | R=1K | | | gnd

What's the voltage at "A" ?

I'm not kidding. Lots of people don't know. They mumble about not remembering the equation.

John

Understood, some people just naturally seem to get really nervous and make bizarre assumptions that all interviews are going to be full of trick questions and are looking to ambush the interviewee at their first opportunity. Far better to go in with the assumption that you're dealing with rational, down-to-earth people... and if that's not the case, do you really want to work for them anyway?

"We're not hiring for the marketing department at present, but we'll let you know if that changes. Best of luck!"

:-)

Having been a TA while in graduate school, I know what you're talking about -- it was pretty depressing how many students were only interested in, "what's the answer?" and not "why is the answer what it is?" I'm fairly certainly if you told your interviewees that, "the only equation you need to solve this problem is Ohm's law, V=IR" it wouldn't have helped them anyway. (Well, OK, I suppose you need to know Kirchoff's law as well -- "current doesn't just disappear into hyperspace at a junction, what goes in must come out.")

---Joel

:)

I've been given similar "tests", but I don't like them. I keep looking for the hook. "Self, why would they ask this dumb question?" For the current position they asked the gain of a couple of opamp circuits and what the function of a few transistor circuits was (a pass FET with an RC on the gate didn't know why they would do such a thing, but an RC and a voltage follower is pretty simple). Pretty simple, still. I found out later that I was the only one they've ever interviewed that had the first clue.

They had to be spooked. Did they think they'd get a pass for the rest of their life?

Good point. When I graduated I had an interview with NCR in SoCal. They ran an Inquisition style interview. I didn't much appreciate the way they ran things otherwise, so came to exactly that conclusion.

In theory, it is exactly +5 volts. If you use an old 1K ohm per volt voltmeter to read it, it will be 4.5454545454545454545454545454545 volts. (give or take a few digits)

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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
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go

He didn't tell you to measure it! ;-)

Yeah, but until you measure it, couldn't it simultaneously be many different voltages? Like how Schroedinger's cat is both dead and alive at the same time until you actually go to look at it? :-)

I thought he was hiring an engineer, not a physicist or philosopher.

"Five" would do just fine.

John

with

Why are you smiling? Do you think he hires illiterates like you?

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

time

Spoilsport.

would go

to

proceed

The engineer calculates it, the tech measures it.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.