| General > General Technical Chat |
| Giving interviews, disappointing, am I getting old? |
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| Sal Ammoniac:
When I interview people, I'm looking for someone with an engineering mindset--someone who can solve problems. Specific knowledge is something they can learn on the job--the field is too big at this point for anyone to know everything about everything. With that said, I do make sure candidates know the basics before I let them pass Go and collect $200. In other words, someone interviewing with me for an embedded development position had better know C well along with knowledge of how a microcontroller works at the bare metal level. They don't need to know details about any specific MCU, however. |
| paulca:
I suppose putting it into electronics/electrical engineering terms... from a software engineer perspective... this ought to be good..... Say the current trend has been pushing more and more things into certain main chips, 90% of what you see is projects using those chips and very often assorted support chips. They come with easy IDEs and out of the box examples for nearly everything. With a few months working on tutorials and a few months in a project using it, you could "pass" yourself off as knowing how to deliver solutions on that platform. The fact they only used one brand of design tools, process or they really have no idea of how to achieve the same things without the digital processor or even understand what the support passives and associated circuitry do.... Well the market says that those expensive processors are producing products faster and cheaper in the long run and they want to recruit a load of them ... The fact they can't tell you why it's important to analysis critical path code in a latency sensitive application or tell you the downsides of using certain features as they are not performant.... or that they stuff they are using is so complex and over engineered that performance is impossible.... </rant> |
| paulca:
It's why I am creating a set of code tests, one of which includes this: Write a program to generate all combinations of a shuffled deck of cards. The right answer IS "No". The "better" answer is realising its impossible and explaining why. |
| SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: paulca on October 20, 2021, 10:53:33 am ---They seem to want to push towards minimising code by increasing architectural complexity, dependencies and overheads. Stacking frameworks on top of frameworks for fear of having to write a few hundred lines of code. Of course few of them understand those things beyond having followed a few tutorials and worked in a project that used it a few times. --- End quote --- That's been the trend for years. I'd say even for a good couple decades now... with it getting worse in the last 10 years or so. --- Quote from: paulca on October 20, 2021, 10:53:33 am ---Am I being too picky to expect critical thinking from people with 3-5 years experience? --- End quote --- Unfortunately, these days, yes you are. It's particularly bad for pure software engineers. Their world has mostly evolved into this huge pile of frameworks, hype languages and trendy methods. Who cares about the fundamental concepts, requirements and critical thinking, when you got those shiny frameworks and all those user stories and stand-up meetings? Not sure what your field is exactly, and what kind of people you are recruiting. For "embedded" software development, things are still a bit different. Candidate profiles for this have a lot more variety, with a good chunk of them having an EE background. But pure software people - very hard to deal with these days, unless you are yourself formatted the exact same way. |
| YurkshireLad:
I'm guilty of this now. Too many years of working with web frameworks and I've lost many fundamentals. Now I spend most of my time fighting the tech I'm using rather than maintaining my skills. That's after 25 years of working as a software developer; maybe I'm just feeling/getting old and the mental decline has already begun. |
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