interviews

Maybe start with diodes and passives. A little voltage doubler with diodes and caps. See if they can do an RC time constant.

George h.

"You mean I actually have to know the shit they taught me in class?"

Maybe you should start by hiring interns and bringing them up right.

Or look for folks that have actually completed some project work that involves making a circuit function correctly.

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Apr 2014 09:06:50 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Just for fun ask them what direction electricity flows, from + to -, or from - to plus. If they say + to - ask how a radio tube works. If they mention 'electron' perhaps hire them.

LOL, we are looking for interns too. Our office is adjacent to a large university with a supposedly good EE program. We have not found anyone that can actually design something. Or maybe the ones that are good have internships at Intel or some other Silicon Valley company.

I was not the greatest EE student but even in high school I could design a circuit, lay out a PCB, assemble the board, and do debug.

UGH! Scary! I have some contact with masters EE students as the guy who does our chip designs has his masters students do a lot of the brute force analysis and most of the layout. Of course, he only has the SHARP ones work on this stuff, so that is a very selective sample. Those guys are quite good, but I have no idea how bad the others might be.

Jon

He probably gets to cull a few good ones out of hundreds of students. Wish I could do that.

One problem, these days, it that "analog" courses are usually IC oriented, and many of the kids with analog talents are hoovered up by the semiconductor industry.

Of course, I interview kids who took the IC courses, and designed chips as exercizes, and don't understand what they did.

Ridiculous. I get the impression that if you want a competent engineer you are going to have to hire people who graduated decades ago, since it is clear the quality of education in the US (and the UK) has been in deline for a long time now. Maybe the same situation throughout the West, in fact?

If you want someone who can design something, put up a job posting for someone with EE coursework and design experience "even as a hobby".

Then don't hold your breath. I would have been quivering at your door since daybreak, but you're about 30 years too late to hire me.

When I was working on my MS I got to be a TA for the op-amps lab. There were lots of students that were just going through the motions without having a clue what was up. There were others that were struggling with their grades, yet obviously knew how to design stuff.

One of the fun parts of that job was the (very occasional, unfortunately) joy of seeing someone suddenly realize that the stuff actually had practical application, and that they could do it.

That was the lab where I replayed, with variations, the conversation:

Them: "it's not working, and there's this wiggly line on the oscilloscope screen".

Me: "It's oscillating"

Them: "Osci-what?"

Me: "Singing. Oscillating. Generating its own signal. You need bypass caps on the power supply lines."

Them: "Oh. What are bypass caps?" "What are power supply lines?"

Me: "Just put 0.1uF caps here and here, to ground" (long spiel about how power supplies aren't a circle with pluses and minuses, but actual devices with impedance, that could be thought of as a Thevenin equivalent, yadda yadda.)

Them: "That's not in the lab manual, you're full of crap, I'm not doing it."

Me: "OK, that's fine. Do what you want, but don't ask me any more questions until the caps are in place."

Them, sheepish and astonished: "We tried EVERYTHING, and NOTHING WORKED until we put in those caps! Howdoyoudothat?"

Seconded. I got my first and only pure-EE job with an astronomy and physics degree plus a hobby background. I've never had a circuits course, other than the one they made physics undergraduates take, which was all RLC circuits and IF transformers.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You are asking the wrong questions. Maybe these will help:

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What does #hellno mean

If you update your Facebook page saying you are at a bar with

Explain the pos and cons of Xbox vs Playstation

Is it OK to take a selfie at work in front of the new super secret project

I am talking to one guy who has a BS in physics and an MSEE, who is very interested in real electronics. I'm optimistic that I can teach him what I know. It's not as though *all* of those kids were born stupid (whereas we were all born brilliant) it's just that their hobbies and education didn't involve much real electronics.

I certainly don't want to hire anyone as old as me!

See if you can find any that can draw basic logic gates in CMOS. It is amazing what graduates don't know these days.

OK, their MATLAB skills are probably better than when you graduated....

Reading research papers these days, I've found the physics department often does more interesting electronic circuit design than the EE department. And Harvard of all places.

en

nd

AoE was written for the Harvard "electronics for physicists" course.

And physicists do come up with more interesting applications for electronic circuits than EE departments can invent for themselves. But Review of Scie ntific Instruments has published a lot of total rubbish electronics over th e years, and I've published a couple of comments that were rude about indiv idual cases.

Sloman A.W. "Comment on 'Modular digital box-car for applications in pulsed laser spectroscopy" Review of Scientific Instruments, 67 3763-4 (1996)

Sloman A. W. "Comment on 'A versatile thermoelectric temperature controller with 10 mK reproducibility and 100 mK absolute accuracy' [Rev. Sci. Instru m. 80, 126107 (2009)] ", Review of Scientific Instruments 82, 27101 - 02710

To be fair to the Libbrechts, their paper, while grossly unoriginal and uni nteresting, wasn't total rubbish - they did make one obvious mistake in dis sipating too much power in their thermistor, but rest was boring, rather th an wrong.

LOL

And they'll want you to spend $20K on Matlab and Simulink.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Yes.

True, but I don't see that that is the issue. Who taught Einstein General Relativity?

If someone is truly interested and is going to be good, they will teach themselves. My own formal courses in transistor level design at uni were minimal to non-existent. It was all Maxwells Equations and Fortran.

The issue is that people today are not hobbyists as kids. They don't have the engineering motivation. This does not come from teaching. They want to be celebrities.

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Apr 2014 09:06:50 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I agree, its truly stunning the lack of knowledge from people with EE degrees on EE. You can't make it up.

Er.. neither. The pointing vector is at right angles to the current direction and right angles to the the voltage. Apparently, the electricity flows into a resister sidewards.... :-)

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

Unless they are into Linux. SciLab is an open source equivalent of MatLab.

In my last job, I wanted to do some stuff in Fortran - and could have downl oaded an open source Fortran compiler for nothing - but the computer manage r was terrified at the prospect on a compiler anywhere on his computer syst em, so I had to use Excel instead, which was much clumsier.