Larkin, Here's mine...

That's way overkill for culling most EE applicants.

This is quicker:

What is the base voltage? What is the collector voltage? What is the emitter voltage?

What is the base current? What is the emitter current? What is the collector current?

Any comments?

Thanks for coming by. We'll be in touch.

I've obviously led a very sheltered life.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

When I interviewed at Tektronix back in 1987 (for that job doing electro-optic A/Ds that I mentioned a week or so ago), their old grizzled vertical amp guru, whose name I unfortunately can't remember, set me a circuit problem that turned out to be a 3-transistor sawtooth oscillator. I wish I could remember the details--it was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen.

He explained afterwards that it was done that way to enable it to start up with very low gain alloy junction transistors with a lot of leakage.

I didn't figure it out, because I naturally assumed it was built out of decent transistors. (It didn't look like it did anything at all--it actually depended on the huge leakage to work.)

It turned out that nobody else had ever figured it out either--he just wanted to hear what the applicants' approach to the problem was.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The old capacitor-into-the base trick? That used to work, sometimes.

I don't like trick questions. I don't like to use tests at all. What I like is to go to a whiteboard and ask the person about something they have done, or better yet actually design something with them.

You don't learn much about a person's personality when they are head-down working on a test. And some people just don't test well under pressure.

See bootnote.

I read somewhere that English grads actually make better programmers than CS grads.

That is a very good way but time consuming. I got my last two jobs that way though.

You shouldn't make tests too difficult :-) I once had a weird situation with an aptitude test. When the interviewer came back with the score he told me I made 3 errors which usually is bad. The thing was though that I messed up the first 3 question whichs where actually the really easy ones.

IMHO you should do both an interview and a test. What I usually did is take the test results and discuss them with the applicant. It is nice to use a test where some questions don't have just one good answer so you have something to talk about. If you're evil you can turn it into an assesment to see how the applicant deals with a conflict situation c.q. how well he or she can defend their point of view.

My quick guess was that all currents are equal so the voltages across the transistors must be equal. Temperature shouldn't make any difference. But it has been >15 years since I had to analyse these kind of circuits for my EE study (which was quite swamped with IC design analysis like we would all be employed by Philips / NXP).

re

If someone told me to take a test after 30 years of experience I would tell them to pound sand .... unless I really really needed the job :-)

That's all a Tulane graduate could manage ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

I never learn anything by staying within limits.

Actually, that's a lie. I am *always* disappointed when I learn that something works when operated within stated limits. And if I skew it so it exceeds the limits, magic smoke comes out.

Maybe after pushing limits here and there, I've gotten a more refined sense of "limits", and tend to do things more casually or cautiously? Sucks to be me I guess; I've engineered the engineering process itself to the point where I rarely even burn out transistors!

Often times, I'll design a subsystem to more-or-less satisfy the requirements of the overall system. Yes, I could go balls out and make a precision VCO, but if it's inside a loop, do I really care how accurate it is? Heck, toss a couple transistors at it, make a cheapass multivibrator for all that matters!

A big part of engineering is testing to define limits (particularly if the existing limits look fishy, or the thing you need isn't even specified!), but the other big part is making useful compromises. In an uncompromising way. (What?) I think what that's supposed to mean is... if you make a design that's uncompromisingly *coherent*, so that any given subsystem is built just to the minimum standards of its neighbors' requirements, you'll have a complete design which optimizes performance, cost and time all at once.

Tim

I was familiar with the term before I did any examination of it.

Get off your high horse, child. Particularly since you don't have one.

I do not need a primer, retard boy.

I remember that one of the transistors was used inverted. First time I'd ever seen that trick.

That's probably the best method--you can gauge a lot about somebody's ability, confidence, adaptability, and level of suspicion, which are all important when hiring a colleague.

It depends, I think. When I interviewed at HP Labs (also in 1987), they asked me to derive the Fresnel formulae for transmission and reflection at a plane dielectric boundary, and I didn't do it.

I said something along the lines of "You don't want to sit there and watch me go through all that algebra, but here's how the calculation goes." Then I walked them through the physics of the problem (phase matching at the boundary gives you the transmitted and reflected k vectors; splitting the problem into TE and TM cases and requiring continuity of tangential E and perpendicular D gives you the magnitudes).

I haven't been on either side of an interview table in quite awhile (except with lawyers, who don't count), but that time the "Kobayashi Maru" approach went down OK, or if not, they offered me the job, anyway.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There was a UK engineering cliche - we didn't have time to do it right, so we had to find time to do again. You don't have to spend enough time to get really good at it, but you do have to spend enough time to be able to do it well enough to do it right.

I never found a course that got me to the point where I was good enough to get it right. The better courses got me very close to that point, and pointed me at the bits of the literature that I had to read up before I could get it right, and the basic courses did give me the tools to understand what I was reading.

I'm not cynical about higher education - it's incredibly useful - but course work is only part of the process, and the examination system doesn't test a whole lot of the stuff that the system as a whole should be installing in your head.

I always look at the applicant's approach rather than the final solution. Knowing how to attack a new problem tells me a lot about ultimate capability. ...Jim Thompson

You were obviously wrong. You are AlwaysWrong.

nt.

ion

They can do, but it's not the way you bet. Somebody with a Computer Science degree would probably be able to get Google to find the reference that you probably misunderstood or mis-remembered. I did Theory of Computation 1 as an extra subject while I was getting my Ph.D. but it clearly didn't boost my search skills far enough.

Actually, both my oldest daughter and my oldest son are multi-linguists and are exceptional programmers... the son is the chief software/network guru for the largest call center system in the world (support now... not the annoying cold-call people he originally worked with :)

The daughter, of course, went into politics >:-} ...Jim Thompson

No, Johnny, your remark about computer science, however, absolutely was wrong.

No, Johnny, I am always the guy that will mash your face if I ever see you in person.