On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy
statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating
them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He
would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to
do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and
asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very
useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and
vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them
right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most large
companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s one of the
things you learn on the job.
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them
right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most large
companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s one of the
things you learn on the job.
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them
right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most large
companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s one of the
things you learn on the job.
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious.
He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need
to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and
asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most
large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s
one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher and
work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able
to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious.
He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need
to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and
asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most
large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s
one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher and
work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able
to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious.
He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need
to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and
asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most
large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s
one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher and
work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able
to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy
statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them
right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most large
companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s one of the
things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher and work
your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able to
design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design circuits and
write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an acceptance that my skill in
those areas will never be found particularly exciting or valuable to the
electronics industry, intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it
valuable? Yeah definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy
statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them
right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most large
companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s one of the
things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher and work
your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able to
design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design circuits and
write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an acceptance that my skill in
those areas will never be found particularly exciting or valuable to the
electronics industry, intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it
valuable? Yeah definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
On 20/07/20 19:44, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was
obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you
need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of
software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot
still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out
rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and
asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at
most large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected
that\'s one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher
and work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able
to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design
circuits and write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an
acceptance that my skill in those areas will never be found
particularly exciting or valuable to the electronics industry,
intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it valuable? Yeah
definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
Somebody that can bridge two realms can be very valuable - while
those realms need bridging.
One of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
But I cant stride into e.g. Analog Devices with a portfolio of
circuits and be like \"Look I design circuits! you could hire me!\"
they\'re like \"ah that\'s nice but we wouldn\'t know what to do with you.\"
I\'ve tended to be a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none; life
is too short to be tied down to just one domain.
Nonetheless, I sometimes wish I had been a master-of-Xerox-
toner-mechanisms, for example.
I made my bed, and I\'m happy lying in it.
Yeah they\'re are a lot of newly-minted EEs that can\'t design circuits
or know what a transistor is but they\'ll get hired. some geek off the
street who can do it is not intrinsically exciting to anyone there.
Not been my experience so far, at least...
If they can\'t design /and/ can\'t analyse, then it
is difficult for me to regard them as engineers.
But there\'s nothing intrinsically wrong with being
a project manager or salesman, provided the engineer
is top dog
On 20/07/20 19:44, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was
obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you
need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of
software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot
still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out
rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and
asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at
most large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected
that\'s one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher
and work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able
to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design
circuits and write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an
acceptance that my skill in those areas will never be found
particularly exciting or valuable to the electronics industry,
intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it valuable? Yeah
definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
Somebody that can bridge two realms can be very valuable - while
those realms need bridging.
One of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
But I cant stride into e.g. Analog Devices with a portfolio of
circuits and be like \"Look I design circuits! you could hire me!\"
they\'re like \"ah that\'s nice but we wouldn\'t know what to do with you.\"
I\'ve tended to be a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none; life
is too short to be tied down to just one domain.
Nonetheless, I sometimes wish I had been a master-of-Xerox-
toner-mechanisms, for example.
I made my bed, and I\'m happy lying in it.
Yeah they\'re are a lot of newly-minted EEs that can\'t design circuits
or know what a transistor is but they\'ll get hired. some geek off the
street who can do it is not intrinsically exciting to anyone there.
Not been my experience so far, at least...
If they can\'t design /and/ can\'t analyse, then it
is difficult for me to regard them as engineers.
But there\'s nothing intrinsically wrong with being
a project manager or salesman, provided the engineer
is top dog
On 7/20/2020 3:00 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:44, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was
obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you
need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of
software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot
still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out
rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume,
and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview,
is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at
most large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected
that\'s one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher
and work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be
able to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design
circuits and write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an
acceptance that my skill in those areas will never be found
particularly exciting or valuable to the electronics industry,
intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it valuable? Yeah
definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
Somebody that can bridge two realms can be very valuable - while
those realms need bridging.
One of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
But I cant stride into e.g. Analog Devices with a portfolio of
circuits and be like \"Look I design circuits! you could hire me!\"
they\'re like \"ah that\'s nice but we wouldn\'t know what to do with you.\"
I\'ve tended to be a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none; life
is too short to be tied down to just one domain.
Nonetheless, I sometimes wish I had been a master-of-Xerox-
toner-mechanisms, for example.
I made my bed, and I\'m happy lying in it.
I think in a globalized world, the role for generalists is shrinking,
unfortunately.
Yeah they\'re are a lot of newly-minted EEs that can\'t design circuits
or know what a transistor is but they\'ll get hired. some geek off the
street who can do it is not intrinsically exciting to anyone there.
Not been my experience so far, at least...
If they can\'t design /and/ can\'t analyse, then it
is difficult for me to regard them as engineers.
But there\'s nothing intrinsically wrong with being
a project manager or salesman, provided the engineer
is top dog
What being a self-employed contractor without an EE or CS degree has got
me is over the past half-decade is I\'ve probably earned about as much as
being a manager at Taco Bell over the same time period. There\'s always
some work available, but never quite enough of it or the top-dollar
kind. And my attempts at going corporate so far have always been a \"hard
pass\" on me and I\'m not getting any younger.
But I much prefer being my own boss and doing something I\'m passionate
about 25 hours a week than working as a manager at a Taco Bell for 50 at
something I hate, I\'d be very unhappy in the latter position. So yeah, I
made my own bed but whatever happens this exercise never feels like a
dead-end job. I had plenty of those.
On 7/20/2020 3:00 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:44, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for
something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a
policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers,
treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s
book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was
obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you
need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of
software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot
still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out
rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the
Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume,
and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was
very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software
and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview,
is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at
most large companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected
that\'s one of the things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher
and work your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be
able to design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design
circuits and write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an
acceptance that my skill in those areas will never be found
particularly exciting or valuable to the electronics industry,
intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it valuable? Yeah
definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
Somebody that can bridge two realms can be very valuable - while
those realms need bridging.
One of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
But I cant stride into e.g. Analog Devices with a portfolio of
circuits and be like \"Look I design circuits! you could hire me!\"
they\'re like \"ah that\'s nice but we wouldn\'t know what to do with you.\"
I\'ve tended to be a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none; life
is too short to be tied down to just one domain.
Nonetheless, I sometimes wish I had been a master-of-Xerox-
toner-mechanisms, for example.
I made my bed, and I\'m happy lying in it.
I think in a globalized world, the role for generalists is shrinking,
unfortunately.
Yeah they\'re are a lot of newly-minted EEs that can\'t design circuits
or know what a transistor is but they\'ll get hired. some geek off the
street who can do it is not intrinsically exciting to anyone there.
Not been my experience so far, at least...
If they can\'t design /and/ can\'t analyse, then it
is difficult for me to regard them as engineers.
But there\'s nothing intrinsically wrong with being
a project manager or salesman, provided the engineer
is top dog
What being a self-employed contractor without an EE or CS degree has got
me is over the past half-decade is I\'ve probably earned about as much as
being a manager at Taco Bell over the same time period. There\'s always
some work available, but never quite enough of it or the top-dollar
kind. And my attempts at going corporate so far have always been a \"hard
pass\" on me and I\'m not getting any younger.
But I much prefer being my own boss and doing something I\'m passionate
about 25 hours a week than working as a manager at a Taco Bell for 50 at
something I hate, I\'d be very unhappy in the latter position. So yeah, I
made my own bed but whatever happens this exercise never feels like a
dead-end job. I had plenty of those.
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\" relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I then pose them a simple open-ended design question, and
watch their thought processes. One I\'ve used is \"a toy
manufacturer makes printed roads that young kids push
their toy cars around. They want to add some traffic
lights. What do you do\". I also tell them there\'s no
right/wrong answers.
Once upon a time I would have expected them to include
using a microprocessor, but to reject it in favour of
simpler alternatives. Now an MCU is probably the best
way
I\'ve seen customers use that gambit to smoke technical blatherers out
as well - they\'ll agree to anything.
Oh yes! I\'ve heard them agree to do things that are
proven to be impossible, e.g. a solution to the
Byzantine Generals problem.
Yeah. My favorite is the speed of light and large distributed
systems.
Many software types think that clever software can overcome
speed-of-light delays. The way you often see this is in the implied
claim that a system 1,000 kilometers in diameter has a single state.
No it doesn\'t, and one has to deal with beliefs contrary to fact
because node 2 has not yet heard that node 1 changed its mind about
something.
Oh, I\'ve had arguments about that too
in the notion that there is a single universal time.)
Nor have they heard of servo oscillations due to transport lag -
trying harder does not work, only causing wilder oscillations.
Not many people have done control theory, so that surprises
me less.
I did get the job, worked there for seven years, leaving only when I
decided to move back to the Boston area.
I was an embedded realtime programmer, writing in assembly code on the
metal in those days. All the embedded realtime programmers at that
company had hardware degrees, which was necessary to do much of
anything.
My experiences, in companies other than GEC, were
broadly similar.
Today, most programmers have CS degrees and do not understand how such
things as radars work, and must be spoon-fed.
As for the HRdroid, I forgot to mention that in Mechanical
Engineering, they push square pegs into round holes all the time - all
you need is a hydraulic press.
That might be part of the manufacturing process! I hate
things that are designed to be impossible to disassemble.
Press fits are not impossible to disassemble. The same hydraulic
press is used to push the part back out.
That square peg will now have rounded corners, but never mind...
I occasionally point out that it is a known technique to
use a hammer to insert screws into wood - for all but the
last couple of turns.
Still makes for a weak joint. But screws are not all that strong in
wood anyway - mortise + tenon and box joints are far stronger.
Oh yes indeed. It is only used for crude things.
Another example is how roof-trusses are held together.
A steel plate punched/bent to make many \"nails\" which
is then hammered or press fitted across the
(unjoined) timbers.
https://www.ukfixings.net/images/P/knuckle%20nail%20plate.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofK-WjqBREk
Sir (William) Lawrence? (I was going to be an X-ray crystallographerOne of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\" relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a battery and a resistor charging a cap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334
On 7/20/2020 2:34 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 19:19, bitrex wrote:
On 7/20/2020 12:52 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 20/07/20 16:22, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:29:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 14:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:42:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 20/07/20 01:52, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:29:35 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 18/07/20 00:23, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:32:33 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 21:42, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:54:54 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 15:32, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:42:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 14:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:28:17 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/07/20 06:32, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
E.g., why would someone on the dole ever work for something they
already get free? It doesn\'t make any sense.
True for some people, false for many more.
Many people feel defined by their work, and feel
pointless without it. Such people have a tendency
to \"give up and die\"Â relatively shortly after
retiring.
You seem to understand Theory X companies, but
have no clue about Theory Y companies, as described
by McGregor in the 1950s.
Long before McGregor, Hewlett and Packard knew the
difference instinctively, and created a rather
successful Theory Y company. You may have heard
of it.
\"Theory Y managers assume employees are internally
motivated, enjoy their job, and work to better
themselves without a direct reward in return. These
managers view their employees as one of the most
valuable assets to the company, driving the internal
workings of the corporation. Employees additionally
tend to take full responsibility for their work and
do not need close supervision to create a quality
product.\"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
Or, as famously noted at the time of Princess Fiorina,
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
Sure, but a company doesn\'t become a Y just with a policy
statement.
It requires finding and hiring the right workers, treating them
right,
and firing the ones that don\'t work out.
It didn\'t cross my mind anybody could think mere
policy statements could be sufficient.
In HP, the HP Way was continually reinforced and
re-explained by use of Bill and Dave anecdotes,
wheeled out to show how they thought and wanted
things to be done. Apparently when they were setting
up new sites the first hires became a little sick
and tired of them!
OTOH, Princess Fiorina made very animated policy
pronouncements, which nobody could understand.
That\'s one of the things that made me decide
to leave.
I have Packard\'s book, The HP Way. And I have Fiorina\'s book, The
Journey. The contrast is hilarious.
Not if you were in HP!
HP did that early on. By about 1980, not so well.
HP was /very/ careful about its hiring process, at least
until shortly before Fiorina ascended in 1999.
I interviewed at HP in about 1980. The guy was obnoxious. He would
have been my boss.
He looked at my resume and said \"The first thing you need to do is
decide if you are an engineer or a programmer.\"
What I decided to do was walk out.
Snap!
I had an interview at a GEC site in ~1981. After explaining
the hardware and software and systems I had designed, the
HRdroid asked me whether I was \"really a hardware of software
engineer\".
Somewhat surprisingly, I managed not to give him an earful.
I suspect the expression on my face and my answers becoming
terser might have alerted him to his faux pas. The idiot still
offered me a job.
I have a similar story from the 1970s, but it turned out rather
better.
I was applying to a middle size defense contractor in the Baltimore
suburbs, and the hiring manager looked over my resume, and asked which
I preferred, hardware or software. I replied that it was very useful
to be bilingual, to be able to speak hardware to software and vice
versa.
A very sensible response of course.
\"My\" GEC HRdroid couldn\'t comprehend anything beyond
square holes, and all round candidates has to be
force fitted into one of the square holes.
If the interviewer asks questions but listens to the
answers and avoids such destructive idiocies, that\'s
just fine.
One technique I developed was to ask ever wilder
questions, with the objective of getting them to
(sensibly) say \"no\". That gave me good insight into
the validity of their \"yes\" responses.
This would be for interviewing, versus being interviewed?
I was thinking of being interviewed. After starting my
second job (at a contract design and consultancy company)
they told me that I asked far more questions than most
candidates. I haven\'t stopped since
I haven\'t found it necessary when I\'m the technical
interviewer; there are other more fun and fruitful way
of smoking out blatherers.
What would that be?
Nothing magic.
I get them to describe what they have done in the past,
listen (unlike a few interviewers!), ask them why they
made their choices, and what they would do differently
next time.
I take them to a whiteboard and design something with them.
So do I, either directly or indirectly. That will be
something that is adjacent to their experience, and/or
something that illustrates how the company thinks/works.
The key word is \"with\"; interviews aren\'t (or at least
shouldn\'t be) willy waving competitions.
One thing you can\'t tell from a resume, or the usual interview, is if
they understand electricity. Lots of presumed engineers don\'t. Most
recent EE grads don\'t.
Wanna make a kid panic? Show him a 2-resistor voltage divider. Even
worse, a batery and a resistor charging a cap.
That\'s one reason why I like to see evidence on their
CV that they have done things on their own, without
it being any part of any course.
Doesn\'t matter what it is, so long as they can describe
what, why, and what they would do differently next time.
You don\'t need to be able to design circuits to get an EE job at most large
companies as a newly-minted EE, seems like it\'s expected that\'s one of the
things you learn on the job.
Not back in my day. I was thrown in at the deep
end on my first day.
I\'ve always had jobs like that, and wouldn\'t have
had it any other way.
All the jobs for \"product engineer\" have 8, 9, 10 year experience
requirements in the field, you start out as a QA guy/paper pusher and work
your way up or go into management or some other area.
Now you\'re frightening me!
They definitely don\'t need every out of college applicant to be able to
design circuits they have people for that.
True. They need salesmen, managers, ... and other
boring professions.
At the end of my first job I decided I didn\'t know
whether I wanted to remain technical for the rest
of my career. I searched for, and was lucky to find,
a job which involved /everything/, from initial client
contact, through writing Ts&Cs, project management,
and doing it.
Great fun, and I decided I did want to remain technical.
And did.
My undergraduate was in a different field so even though I design circuits and
write software for a living, now, I\'ve come to an acceptance that my skill in
those areas will never be found particularly exciting or valuable to the
electronics industry, intrinsically. Do people in other disciplines find it
valuable? Yeah definitely I wouldn\'t be making any money if nobody did.
On 7/20/20 2:00 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
One of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
Sir (William) Lawrence? (I was going to be an X-ray crystallographer until I
realized 2 things. There weren\'t very many jobs and I never had a good mental
model for reciprocal space.)
On 7/20/20 2:00 PM, Tom Gardner wrote:
One of the best electronic engineers I knew did a biochemistry
degree, and then a masters to convert to electronics and systems.
His surname was Bragg, and he had well-known forebears
Sir (William) Lawrence? (I was going to be an X-ray crystallographer until I
realized 2 things. There weren\'t very many jobs and I never had a good mental
model for reciprocal space.)