[sdiy] Who Needs a Degree?

[Paul Schreiber]

>
> The most intimidating thing I was ever part of was at one company where 
> two or three people simultaneously grilled the interviewee.

This was common practice in the late 70s/early 80s. It was *expected*, 
actually.

a) when I interviewed at Data General (where I wound up working), they sat 
me down in this little conference room with a 'D' size blueline schematic 
(for the noobs: before laser printers and PDF you had to 'draw' schematics 
on a 'drafting table' and to make copies you had this monster machine that 
ran off of ammonia, and this made 1:1 copies of the schematic (in this case 
like 2 x 3 ft) and the overall color was a dark blue (called a 'blueline' 
machine)).

The title block had been covered up with a piece of paper so you couldn't 
read what it was. They plopped it on the table and said "write down on the 
whiteboard everything you can tell us about this circuit" and walked out of 
the room.

Well, I stared at it for a while (this was 1978) and it didn't make a lot of 
sense. I was starting to panic a bit, but for some reason I picked it up and 
stood up. I then *very faintly* could make out the title block. It said 
"Switching power supply, 65W, data terminal". Well, up until that point I 
had only read about these in trade magazines. But I sort of figured it out 
(it was a flyback design, optical isolator feedback, using some LM339 quad 
comparators and a fancy starup circuit. I wtote a bunch of stuff and they 
said out of 12 people they interviewed I was the only person that knew what 
it was :) The first thing I wrote on the board was "Switching Power Supply, 
around 55-70W"....snert....

b) Later that year I interviewed at HP in Palo Alto CA where they made RF 
spectrum analyzers. I had *zero* RF background, but the job was designing 
the front panel switches & displays uning 6502 MPUs. But all day long, they 
dragged me cube-to-cube where I was grilled about 6502 code, matrix 
keyboards, etc. Just when I thought I was past everyone, it was "time to go 
see Joel". Joel was the senior EE, (he had a PhD from Stanford in RF 
amplifier design) and was the prototypical 'old fart': flannel shirt, 
suspenders, long white beard. He was sitting at a workbench with an Xacto 
knife and a VSWR meter, scraping copper off a little pc board to impedance 
match. I stood there watching for about 5 min until he was done. He then 
sighed, went over to the desk and pulled out a sheet of paper with a 
pre-printed "exam question". The question was to calculate the gm of a 
cascode FET preamplifier. He shoved it across the table and said something 
like "do the best you can" and went back to pcb carving.

Well, I stared at it for a while, then it dawned on me: I had this *exact 
same question* 1 week prior on a homework assignment. I remembered the 
answer! So what I did was something like "blah blah blah....and it's easy to 
see the answer is XYZ!" and I gave him this "is this all you got?" look. He 
was dumbfound, and claimed that in 5 years not 1 person have even got close, 
much less got the answer. They offered me the job on the spot but the cost 
of living was too high so I took the Data General job in Austin.


> BTW, I've worked with a number of non-degreed engineers - in my experience 
> these people were top-notch engineers, and deserved the title.

Like I said before: then go get the degree (no matter your age) and by doing 
so will increase not only your stature, but help to re-assert the EE "brand" 
where it was 30 years ago (before the freakin' JAVA and .NET toads took over 
the world).

Paul S.