Four years of going through resumes and conducting interviews convinced me 
that tests are the best and the most objective way to judge a candidate's 
qualifications. Here's an example that tests basic electronics knowlege:

http://scantool.net/pub/electronics_test.pdf

This particular one was put together back in 2004, right now I'm working on 
updating it to make it more relevant to what we do (feedback is welcome).

I'm thinking about putting together a couple more tests, to test math and 
software development skills. While math test is easy to write, I'm having 
difficulty coming up with specific problems to evaluate programming skills.

Joel Spolsky has this to say on the subject:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

Specifically, he suggests the following exercises:

1. Reverse a string in place
2. Reverse a linked list
3. Count all the bits that are on in a byte
4. Binary search
5. Find the longest run in a string
6. atoi
7. itoa (great, because they have to use a stack or strrev)

The exercises are followed up by a design problem (design a house or a trash 
can or ...)

What do you think of those? In your opinion, what skills are essential for 
embedded developers? What sets them apart from desktop app programmers?

Best regards,

Vitaliy 

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