interviewing

For an integer, just binary search the bits, like an SAR ADC.

What I usually do is to give the candidate a sheet of paper and ask him to draw a block diagram and describe their favorite project in great detail. This generally flushes the poseurs out - the know none of the expected details.

There was one time when I was screening June grads in EE, and asked this kind of question, and got nowhere. Long story short, I eventually asked him to state and explain Ohm's Law. Total blank.

It developed that he was on the Varsity Football Team. Hmm. Probably never attended a single class. I do not know whose idea it was to grant an EE degree, because there is no way he could ever fake it in an EE job.

Joe Gwinn

I was interviewed for the job of well logging engineer. Besides answering common engineering questions, I was asked to solve the problems written on a whiteboard behind my back. The usual stuff, like "what is the next number in this sequence". Anyway, I got the job.

Wim Ton

Quicker to start by finding the highest 1 (number of significant bits). This is a single opcode in many architectures. The square root will have half as many significant bits, or one fewer than that. Instantly narrows the search space by a *lot*.

CH

The open ended puzzle tests are not particularly useful when used by HR. Anyway they prefer multiple choice off the shelf standardised personality tests - so much easier to mark.

Although I draw the line at the nasty modern practice of tasking some bunch of poor unfortunate would be recruits with solving one of your tricky real world problems for nothing in an attempt to win the job.

You can generally tell pretty quickly whether or not someone really knows their stuff as claimed on the CV or has mugged it up from "Ace the technical interview for Dummies" or even done no prep at all.

"What would you like to ask me about the job?" can be informative too.

We had a couple of short test pieces of code ~20 lines for each language and the test was to explain what the code does. Much like you would with a circuit diagram in hardware. Quite a few had no real understanding of the language(s) that they claimed to know fluently. Saved a lot of time.

One of the key requirements is to have a balanced team.

You need the odd completer finisher to ensure that the last remaining uninteresting bits do get done when the people who break new ground are off doing the next interesting big project. Resource is always finite.

We did a job interview yesterday. The guy arrived at 11 AM and left just after 6 PM. I walked him over the I80 footbridge back to his car.

We brainstormed the architecture and details of a planned product line, including things that we haven't yet resolved. Free consulting.

I taught him a few things about pcb traces and grounding in picosecond circuits. He hadn't done any fast wideband stuff and had some conventionally silly ideas about return currents, but he is sound on grounding. Looks good at thermals and packaging too.

It was interesting to see not just his intelligence and technical range, but how he generated ideas and reacted to other peoples' ideas. Perhaps a tad dogmatic, but I guess people are stressed in interviews.

He also cooks, and bakes bread, so we took him for Thai lunch outdoors and then walked to Tartine and bought him a gigantic sourdough country loaf. All that sort of stuff suggests how people might work together.

He admits to being autistic, which is if anything an asset in our business. Another guy that we zoom interviewed this week is autistic too. Visibly so.

We agreed that if we hire him, it will be as a virtual intern, in other words we'd try it for few months to see how it works and part friends if not. That was his suggestion, and I like it.

77, 49, 36, 18, ... ?

8, 0, 0, 0, 0,....

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

==================================

** So in reality a whole lot and exactly like JL - another autistic. ** Nope - that is how most autistics permanently ARE. ** No it does not. ** My god, what a shitty business you are in. But I guess being socially awkward and obsessed with tiny details is some sort advantage when doing PCBs. ** So PCB design is one step below code scribbling ? ** Wonder what that means.

Hesitant speech, makes no eye contact and looks plain odd? Met more than a few of them. Otherwise know as " useful idiots ".

** So he is gonna be employing AI?

...... Phil

Isn't FORTRAN generic? Statement function would do it

squareroot(x) = exp(alog(0.5 * x) )

Given a Tom Collins glass, 4" high, 6" circumference. A spider sits on the outside, 1" from the bottom. A fly lands on the inside, 1" from the top, on the opposite side. The spider, who aced the calculus of variations, takes the shortest route and pounces. What route, what distance?

OEIS.org lists the 8, 8, 8, 8 variant only; you might want to submit yours for inclusion

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ==================================

** JL misreads, all the time.

His words "... a tad dogmatic" - are clearly an understatement. So in reality the applicant was a whole lot dogmatic Like JL is, 100% of the time, including now.

** Fraid that is a totally undeniable fact.

** Not something JL has ever done. ASD people cannot be genuinely objective. Lacking empathy just makes them mean and nasty. ** But there is NO need to be autistic and obsessed to deal with details when needed. ** LOL - better he not LOOK like a nut case - eh ? ** She is one, you fool.

** Blatant lie.

One autistic has no way to evaluate another. Be like a blind person trying to evaluate someone's vision.

..... Phil

Can it jump across from the opposite lip?

The issue isn't personality stuff, it's electronics: not in your skill set.

==================================

** It is and YOU raised it, in direst relation to " interviewing". FFS READ your own words !!!. ** Anyone can see " electronics" was never even mentioned.

What an absurd lie and pathetic obfuscation. How typically autistic of JL....

....... Phil

<snip>

Wrong. Electronics is about getting everything right, and some autistic people are good at concentrating on their task, rather than getting distracted by the social interactions they aren't all that good at.

It requires spatial skills, which coding doesn't. It used to be easier to get printed circuit layout drafts-people than programmers, but there's no reason to suppose that this still true.

Or thinks he has. Somebody talking to Phil would chose his words carefully - you wouldn't want to provoke a tantrum.

They aren't. Being autistic doesn't make you any kind of idiot. Lenin used the term "useful idiot" to describe people who believed in democratic socialism and thought that that meant that they ought to support the Communist Party, which claims to be socialist, but isn't democratic.

Sounds more like working remotely. There's not a lot of artificial intelligence in that.

Drat, those parentheses moved squareroot(x) = exp( 0.5 * alog(x))

<snip>

They lack the capacity to pick up social signals. That doesn't make them means and nasty - once they work out that they have been unintentionally offensive, they can be just as apologetic as anybody else. Phil seems to lack the capacity to be apologetic.

Dedication is all that it takes. But there aren't all that many dedicated people around. If you've got lots of printed circuit boards to get laid out, you may have to settle for obsessive.

<snip>

By which Phil means that he doesn't want to believe it.

Autism involves some deficits in social interaction. The small visual and acoustic cues that most of us pick up automatically do help in evaluating other people, but there is plenty of other information available, not that Phil seems to know how to process it.

Phil is actually very good at audio electronics. John Larkin has an inflated idea of his own electronic expertise. He's good but not as good as he likes to think, and he seems to have failed to notice when Phil's expertise was displayed here, as it has been from time to time.

John is also prone to insulting people by claiming that they "don't design electronics", which is a trifle ironic since John Larkin's approach to circuit design looks more like evolving a better circuit by trying out lots of tiny incremental changes. Most people's design process involves evaluating a lot of different ideas before turning one or two into prototypes and evaluating them, and they can talk about the blind alleys that they looked at. Maybe John Larkin is too vain to admit spending time exploring blind alleys.