Interviewing

[salnem]

So I'm interviewing (phone screening at this point) new people for our company to do just about exactly what I do. We've gotten a variety of applications, even a lot of people with Masters degrees (which seemed strange to me at first). None of them have been even slightly ok. Perhaps my standards are too high. But if you call yourself an

Comments

[takeyellow]

wow... even I know more than that guy about what he did... maybe he was intimidated? you should ask stupid questions like, "what essentially is a resistor?" and "how many resistors do you think can you fit in your mouth?" Those would be much nicer questions and would give you insight... of sorts.

[tomstampy]

oooh! 2153 metal-film 1/4 watts.

[coliningus]

Those better be the 1 W and not the 1/4 otherwise I am simply not impressed.

[coliningus]

Yeah, like "What is wrong with this circuit?" and then hand them one of those ink blot tests.

Seriously though, I tend to like questions that let you see not what a person knows of the top of their head (though they should know basics!) but how deeply they have it. "so if I take this full coke can and put it in a vice with flat jaws to compact the ends, how will the can fail? Side splitting? Side buckeling? Bottom popping out? Top exploding?" The whole trick is you want to see how they think.

I figure I'll learn about this laster, but

[thesuperalice]

how will it fail?

Re: I figure I'll learn about this laster, but

[coliningus]

Well, you probably won't learn it at mudd...

It is a trick question really. Because aluminum is a good portion of the price of each coke, they try to minimize the material. They have done a ton of research and modeling, and are using better than aircraft grade aluminum to get the defects down and the walls thinner. Each part of the can is designed to fail at roughly the same point. If you get one cold and still you can get it to buckle. If you shake it up good it is a toss up what will fail.

The really boring guy who spoke at graduation, Henry Petroski, wrote a chapter "Aluminum cans and failure" in Invention By Design that I would recomend to all engineers. It just so happened to be at my desk...