> Heh. I don't even go that far.

Yeh the written test (which they do unsupervised) is meant to test the basic 
Engineer (and maths) fundamentals.  In the mechanics test we throw in a few 
easy electronics questions and vice versa.

> I just have a bunch of questions like "why do they call it raytracing" and 
> "what's the difference between a deterministic and a non-deterministic 
> state machine" and "what causes a SIG_SEGV" and "what's the difference 
> between an inner join and an outer join" and "what's an advantage of UTF-8 
> over other encoding schemes" and "what does a translation look-aside 
> buffer translate".

We have ones like "draw a diagram to show how an injection molding machine 
works" :-)  It's surprising how few people get taught this at university (I 
certainly wasn't), yet most people at least have a rough idea what's going 
on.

> If you can't get at least a handful of such questions right from outside 
> the field you're applying for, I know you're inexperienced, unschooled, or 
> uninterested/incapable of expanding your responsibilities.

We have a separate section of the interview where we give them an LCD and 
tell them to take it apart and talk through what they think each bit does, 
why it's like that, etc.  It's a good one because virtually nobody has ever 
done this before so it puts everyone on an equal level, and there are plenty 
of mechanical and electrical things to talk about.

Post a reply to this message