with David L. Jones
The EEVblog is an off-the-cuff video blog and Podcast of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. Electronics professionals, hobbyists, hackers, and makers will find something of interest here. Presented in Dave's unique non-scripted overly enthusiastic style!
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EEVblog #7 – Engineering job interview tips galore!
Posted on May 5th, 2009 16 commentsBlog update, and Engineering job interview tips galore!
16 responses to “EEVblog #7 – Engineering job interview tips galore!”
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Your podcast is really cool, keep it up
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Your video should be required at all the engineering educational institutions. Great job!
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Interesting podcast. I’ll definitely take the tips to any interview I can get. I’m a grad with a MEng Elec Eng and haven’t found a single grad opening in UK and NZ since I started looking last July.
Soon i’ll be returning to Blighty and hit the ground running, not just in job hunting but also in project ideas that have been floating about in my head for a while. -
Hey Dave love your podcast. I think your interviewing tips are very useful and can be applied to many science-related disciplines (not just EE). Keep up the great work!
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Daniel May 8th, 2009 at 05:10
Great Tips, I am graduating in two weeks, I will try to implement some of these with my interviews. Cant believe you would rip one of their products apart in front of them!
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Why not! Engineers want to see how the product is engineered on the inside.
If you don’t want to take it apart (or you can’t because it’s moulded shut or something), ask them to show you the guts of one.
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ewertz May 26th, 2009 at 14:49
I lot of really good interview tips, especially about bringing your own toys.
However, I have to disagree about your advice on resume bluffing.
Some people lose jobs (sometimes after having had them for years) for lying on their resumes. And while that may be the exception to the rule, getting caught (significantly) stretching the truth during an interview is a huge red-flag that you simply can’t trust the interviewee.
I’m not alone in feeling that getting caught showing-down a bluff hand is a *fatal* resume mistake.
If I want a liar, I’ll hire a sales guy…
-e
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A agree about that bluff part, you should not bluff like that on an interview. There was lots of great stuff in this video and it was lots more informative that the tips given by councilors for how to do well at interviews.
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So… What if I open the product in front of them, and I see it’s completely crap? I mean, if I did it with the company I’m actually working for, I would have tossed it in the bin. 4 years ago, they were still using a 386 computer on a chip for an application that would work better on a PIC. They moved to an intel PXA based system, running windows CE (!!!), but they chose a consumer chip, and now that we are just starting to sell the new version, the chip has been discontinued. Not to mention that this system is completely overkill, for lots of reasons. The worse thing is that they hired me to write software, while I applied for a hardware job!
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“So… What if I open the product in front of them, and I see it’s completely crap?”
At least you’ll have something interesting to talk about! :->
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Embedded February 28th, 2010 at 14:28
If the item has nasty real world faults nicely make positive suggestions to improve them.
One of two things will will happen.
1) They will take you apart and you didn’t really want to work there anyway.
2) You will become the person they were looking for to help them out of their jam.
By the way I took a job at a place where they sounded ok to start with but everyone had been their for 20 years and they had a NIH syndrome. I should have been more selective and gone to the one my skills would have been better used and no one was there for more than a couple of years. Really bad mistake! (The second did an enormous number of questions about real world embedded pic design and took an extra 10 days, the headhunter committed me before they could get back.)
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I’d love to see a podcast where you take a random board you haven’t seen and talk about it.
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eljonas October 27th, 2009 at 23:46
I always ask people to bring something they designed to the interview. It’s the perfect ice breaker and makes a nervous engineer much more comfortable. It is also a very good screening tool – if they don’t have any boards at home they are typically not enough hands-on.
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Marvin May 6th, 2009 at 00:29