On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 17:06 -0400, Chris Smolinski wrote:
> At one company I worked for, we had a simple little test we would 
> give to prospective employees, both engineers and techs. Well, before 
> we got bought by Honeywell and their HR dept made us stop. I guess 
> the tests were unfair to stupid people. But anyway, the tests had 
> rather simple questions on them, such as basic opamp circuits, 
> resistor dividers, etc. One set of questions had a sine wave fed into 
> a simple diode circuit, and you had to draw the output waveform. 
> Really basic stuff. But it was amazing how many recent college grads 
> couldn't answer them correctly!  What was more amazing is that we 
> found that the test was really a very good way to filter out the 
> duds, and find the kids who actually *understood* what they were 
> taught. It separated them out from those who were good as memorizing 
> answers but didn't grasp what they were supposedly learning.
> 
> I wish I still had a copy of the test.

You know, it's odd, but that sort of thing seems to be commonly done,
yet prospective employees have no clue it's done!

Reason I say that is between my 3rd and 4th year I did a 16 month paid
"internship" (officially it was called the Professional Experience
Year). Anyways, the way it worked is everybody filled out a standard
form, and "applied" to positions companies supplied to the university.
The companies would then interview those applicants (at the university)
it was interested in.

The interviews spanned a couple days, and of course feedback from fellow
students was golden information! It was then that we learned that some
companies were asking TECHNICAL questions in their interviews. This
surprised all of us!? We just didn't know that industry asks technical
questions during interviews for technical positions.

Anyways, in my case the questions were also very simple, things like
"draw a timing diagram that demonstrates the difference between a latch
and a D flip flop", or "what's the difference between passing an
argument by value or reference into a function".

TTYL

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist