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

ClassicRockerDad
Tue, 17 Sep 2013 07:23:56 +0000

wearymachine, I suspect that you will get more interviews.

What I can tell you is that for R&D the purpose of the technical questions are several fold.

First of all, we want to see what the bounds are of what you know and how well you learned the material that we care most about. This is important, because in R&D, our problems are harder than most things that you’ve seen, and we often don’t know the answers. If it was easy, they wouldn’t need us. No matter how much you know, we’re going to find the bounds because they exist. We can’t find them without going beyond them. So while it’s uncomfortable, you shouldn’t expect that we expect you to know how to do everything. Hopefully you can show some capability before those bounds are reached. When those bounds are reached, it’s time to show that you can and want to learn, and it doesn’t freak you out. I can tell when I’m torturing someone and when someone is genuinely curious and the discussion turns to them learning how we think about the problem and genuinely becomes a positive experience for both of us.

Secondly, we want to see what kind of intuition you’ve developed and how you break down problems into smaller pieces. You should work on the white board and think out loud. Ask clarifying questions about the problem. Your attitude plays a huge role in how you are perceived. When someone is stuck, I’ll often ask leading questions. I’m looking for a discussion. I’m looking for a bulb to light up.

Finally in our internal discussions, you will probably be compared with other candidates and junior people we’re hired before. The people that interviewed you need to feel like you can make a positive contribution to their projects without folding when things get rough.

The ideal is a fearless attitude back up by some demonstration of some capabilities, and a willingness and eagerness to quickly learn what you don’t know.

In terms of real-time programming, maybe you can get a TI or ADI DSP starter kit. You may be able to find some older ones on Ebay. You can also learn to program the Intel Extensions and other low-level stuff right on your own PC. Learn C. Maybe take some stuff you did in matlab and port it to C. Then learn C++, which is actually quite a different beast.

I’m just throwing out some ideas. But maybe a small investment in time and money to learn some things that people seem to want would keep you busy and wouldn’t be a bad investment.

I agree with NeoDymium though that if you really hate engineering, go ahead and try something else.