Harold M Hallikainen wrote...

>On Thu, 10 Jan 2002 22:59:29 GMT Dave Dilatush <dilatush@HOME.COM>
>writes:

>> If you're looking for hardware design expertise as well, one
>> technique
>> I've found useful is to give an interviewee a circuit diagram of a
>> completed product along with a brief explanation of what it does
>> overall, and invite him to critique it and explain how it works.
>> You
>> can get a really good feel for someone's level of competence that
>> way.

>That's fun! I can always find a way to improve someone else's design
>(including the order line at McDonald's). The trick is to figure what is
>actually an improvement and what is an artifact of "Not Invented =
Here..."

McDonald's?  Not very hard to improve upon.  Most I've seen have a
veritable army of personnel behind the counter, each of them getting in
the way of all the others.  It doesn't matter whether you're standing in
a long line at lunchtime or you're the only customer in the place, the
result is the same: "Never have so many done so little for so few, so
slowly."

Regarding the "Here, critique this design for me" technique in
interviewing, you can get an amazing amount of information about a
person's design savvy from doing this, very quickly.  Alas, I don't
think the method translates too well into the software domain, though.

Dave Dilatush

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