Level of difficulty in interview questions

[ClearWaterNW]

brilliant tutorials

I've been asked some real elementary stuff, and some circuits that required at least some thought... what does it mean to be asked a certain level of question? If anything?

 

[pakitos]

matlab plot

what is your question?

 

[dick_freebird]

difficulty of patients for interview

Don't put too much thought into this.

Engineers who get put onto the interviewer list have a
varying degree of interest / time / clue. Some will pull
out an old favorite they know the answer to and just
see if you get it right. Some will watch how you approach
the problem, more than the answer itself.

I look more for intellectual and personality traits, believing
that these determine whether learning will proceed once
the candidate is on the payroll (or cease).

I had a good friend interview with my company and get
rejected because he "showed poorly" on some peoples'
detailed RF questions (he was an old-school analog guy).

You can't know everything. But you can give the impression
that you would pick up the skill, if you knew which one was
important to the job. To that end, worry less about answers
and be sure you come with relevant questions.

 

[ClearWaterNW]

tagalog level of difficulty

I myself was expecting harder technical questions going into my interviews... instead got some very simplistic fundamentals questions, although I tried to mention everything I knew about each subject (characteristics, applications, nonidealities)

 

[rakko]

companies are getting smarter these days with interviews. they don't ask things they know you could have picked off the internet and memorized. If you are a fresh gradute, then I agree that its 90% your personality and grades. I myself give good review to fresh grads if I like their personality and even if they don't answer any of my questions. My suggestion is not to give up and become frustrated during the interview.
For experienced people, if they put it on their resume, I expect them to know it. Before the interview, I study their resume and ask questions directly from it. even if I don't understand their response completely during the interview, I write down their solution in the interview and simulate it after the fact and before giving my feedback to the company. Worst thing in my eye is if you put it on your resume then struggle with it during the interview. For experience people is 75% knowledge and the rest personality and ability not to get frustrated during the interview.

 

[betwixt]

I remember the first question I was asked at an interview was "Explain how DMA requests are processed on a PCI bus" and the questions got progressively more complicated - I got the job so I must be good at baffling people with technical words, even if I don't understand them.

Since then I have interviewed many applicants for engineering posts, possibly more than 100. I am generalizing, because some were very good and some were very poor, but the level of university students was on the whole exceptionally bad but applicants with a few years of real-life engineering were usually quite good. I found the university students were good at understanding 10 year old technology (probably what their lecturers were familiar with) but didn't know which end of a soldering iron gets hot. The people with practical experience were far more likely to find innovative answers to the problems they were set.

Everyone has to start somewhere though and a good education certainly helps although I would still rank appearance, confidence, clear communication and an inquiring mind as more important than a diploma. The real education starts when you face industry not a classroom wall and a good interviewer will know that the ability to learn a new skill is more important than having an old one.

As for myself - I'm a high school drop-out, self taught except for a half day course on programming in 'C' and the other half of the day on using UNIX. But I have been head-hunted around the World, worked in six countries and played a part in the development of mobile phones. So I must have got something right!

Brian.