Vitaliy wrote: > 1. References (as in, "people") are useless. They are hand-picked by > the candidate, so obviously they will sing him praises. True. To be fair, I've rarely asked for references myself when interviewin= g someone because I figured I already knew what they'd say. > 2. People who "can't talk" about most of their projects because they > "signed an NDA", are full of crap. I totally agree. We've had a NDA with just about every customer we've ever had. That's normal business. Most of the time they are just a formality, but that still doesn't give me the right to violate them. However, there are always ways around it without giving away anything the customer wouldn'= t want me to. Usually I can talk about how a particular technical problem was solved, jus= t not identify the customer or product if the problem was unrelated to the purpose of the product or the solution isn't a trade secret (it rarely is). Or if you know a patent has been submitted, you can talk all about it. For example, I'm not going to discuss the details of how the indoor location system uses information from various radios to determine location. That's their secret sauce, even if I contributed to the algorithms. However, ther= e is nothing wrong with talking about how two PICs had to communicate in a single project, or issues with TCP/IP in a PIC, etc, even though these coul= d be examples taken from the same project. These are generic issues as long as I don't identify the customer or product. After you've done this for more than a few years, there will be some products you've worked on that have been publicly announced. Unless your NDA specifies you can't even divulge that you worked for that company or on a particular product (quite rare), you can point to the company's web site and show the product you worked on. Anything the company says on its own web site is of course safe to talk about. As you said, anyone that's worth being called a engineer will have done som= e projects on their own. In fact if they haven't, then they don't have any passion for it and will be useless anyway. > Back in 2005, we hired a contractor to help us write some code. He > was in his late 60's, and had a very impressive resume -- at least > three pages long. It listed skills from PIC Assembly to FORTRAN, and > claimed that his work experience included doing secret research for > the US Navy and NASA. He spent the bulk of the interview telling us > tales of his adventures. Whenever we pressed him to describe an > actual project, he would invoke the NDA excuse. That's a big red flag. Surely someone with 40 years experience has done a few things he can describe, even if they were just personal projects. My best interview question is to ask someone to pick a project they have worked on and start describing it technically as if I were doing a design review. It doesn't really matter whether it was a small personal project o= r not. It doesn't even need to be in a field of my expertise. The point is to see the candidate's thought processes, how well organized he thinks of things, did he think about the architecture before slapping things together= , did he look at the next couple levels up of the bigger picture whether it was his job to or not, what are his presentation skills, how does he handle a technical grilling, etc? In my experience, technical people that know what they're doing don't mind being grilled about it. In fact, they generally like the opportunity to show they know what they're doing. Peopl= e get flustered by being afraid they will be caught at something. If you kno= w what you're doing and are being honest, there will be no such fear and that will be obvious regardless of anything else you say. ******************************************************************** Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products (978) 742-9014. Gold level PIC consultants since 2000. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .