Why did I ever go into EE?? Even more, why did I ever go into DSP??

turbo93
Wed, 18 Sep 2013 23:07:03 +0000

A friend who makes awesome money designing analog IC’s ran into the same grilling interview (after 20+ years experience). Never mind a masters degree, multiple patents, and so on. Now, I understand the idea behind ‘purple squirreling’ of new hires regardless of experience, but in my 30 years of work my experience has been that those who are extremely good and answer tough, challenging questions without blinking are the same people that will, at least for our company located in the middle of FlyOver County, will either not accept our offer at all, will use our offer as a leverage to get more money elsewhere, or take the job and bolt a year later when his buddies at GAFAM etc pull some strings.

In contrast, the near genius people we prefer to hire stay with us for decades (layoffs nonwithstanding :D)) and really contribute in a very tough field where it can take a year or more to figure out how things work.

It’s not difficult to hire geniuses if you make the interview hard enough. It is difficult to get them to stay for more than a couple of years, work well with less-than-genius people, and understand the intricacies of selling devices to hundreds of thousands of people at a time (patch? what’s a patch?).

As for personal contacts, that seems to be the prevailing method of getting jobs. We had some decent size head cuts in the 2009 time frame and nearly everyone I know landed a job via connections… Even today.