HW interview best practices

March 6, 2017 2:07 PM

After theora55's post last week on awful, useless SW interviews in which job candidates are put through the ringer with no clear benefit. I started thinking about my company's interview process for hardware people. So, Hardware People, what would your ideal interview process look like?

Our interview process largely consists of some qualitative whiteboard style stuff in the vein of "A New Graduates Guide to the Analog Interview" just to get a feel for a candidates basic circuit analysis skills along with some "walk us through the hard part of something you've designed" along with general questions relating to the position we're hiring for. This has worked OK, but I'd like some ideas of ways to do this better.

posted by Dr. Twist to Work & Money (2 answers total)

As a recovering hardware engineer, the stuff in the document you cited seems a reasonable way to separate wheat from chaff.

Recognizing a high pass filter or a current mirror in a schematic is something a good candidate should be able to do.
posted by monotreme at 6:04 PM on March 6, 2017

I haven't interviewed all that much, but I think the approach you've outlined is fair. Make sure your logistics are solid, and that the interviewers actually prepare ahead of time. Tell the candidate roughly what they can expect, but you don't need to give too much away.

I don't consider myself a programmer, but my reaction to Fizzbuzz is, yes, a programmer should really be able to do something like that. Maybe the equivalent in the hardware world would be calculating op-amp circuit gain or drawing out a CMOS nand gate. For more advanced positions, like RF or IC design, I would expect more difficult questions though.
posted by Standard Orange at 11:49 PM on March 8, 2017