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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the interviewer tried to use this tactic, and did a lousy job of applying it.

1) "Why it wouldn't work" is vague and nonspecific. "Applying power and hearing a pop/smelling smoke" is a big hint. You have to phrase the question in a way that gives up some information for it to be a decent use of time.

2) Complexity fucking kills these interviews. You shouldn't be handing off a multi-page schematic with complex interconnects. Five or six major components, max. Label your subsections for clarity: things like "microcontroller", "EEPROM", "LED driver", "half bridge driver", "ADC", etc.

Sounds like you did the right thing, and got penalized for it. Fuck 'em. They weren't the right fit for you anyway.

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Ok, to be fair, they did say "when we turned it on, part of it blew up" when I asked for more details, and it was just a 2-page schematic with 6-7 subsections. I think it was pretty fair, I'm just frustrated that it felt like I couldn't solve it by thinking slowly and methodically.

It was a really cool company and I'd have loved to work there. It's the kind of place where I want to be a good fit.

I do wonder if this is just a scenario where there's no way to win. The person writing this blog post has exactly the same interview prompt - something went pop when the board was powered up - but they expect candidates to spot subtle things like missing decoupling capacitors that almost certainly aren't the cause of the problem.

Just about every person I've used this prompt on has found the prompted error, and then gone on to find a few more. However, I don't really care about the number of errors you find nearly so much as I do seeing and hearing you reason your way through a new problem.

I don't expect you to find all the issues. (But if you do, then congratulations! I'm gonna try to hire you.) I do expect you to talk to me about your thought process when confronted with a novel issue.

That's what good electrical engineers do. They don't know all the answers - they reason their way through unexpected challenges.

Did they tell you exactly where it blew up? Then it might be fair, 2 pages is not that big. Though you'd still be at quite a disadvantage compared to someone who spent a lot of time designing the thing.

I gotta say though, if they themselves designed this board that promptly blew up, perhaps they should recalibrate their expectations for EEs.

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