Skills Assessment Questions

[MKS_sjacques]

I have been given the task of interviewing and assessing someone's LV skills over the phone, and I was wondering if anyone out there might have encountered this before, and if so would you be so kind as to share your experience and process? I have interviewed 3 people so far, with mixed results. I usually try to have them walk me through a high level thought process of a basic configure/test/output results test routine, then I try to zoom in on certain areas of fundamentals, like state machines, error control, data collection/reporting, and some basic communications. Then I try to get a little more detailed, describing a device that we are to gather data from, and having them walk me through it, complete with asking me the right questions...

Which brings me to the dilemma. During this whole process, I'm basically listening for the right buzzwords spoken at the right times. I'm also trying to gauge their thought process... but there HAS to be a better and more quantifyable way! Does anyone have any sample tests that they give out? Something that I can have them fill out at a recruiter's office?

Thank you.

Steve

[Louis Manfredi]

Hi Steve:

I haven't been at the hiring end of such a telephone interview, but as a consultant, I've been the interviewee more than a few times. I find the best way to confirm my credentials is to talk about some of my more challenging programming projects. If the potential client doesn't voluneteer it, I try to find out something about their application. From there, I steer the discussion to a past project of my own in some way similar to the client's project. This gives me the opening to discuss the specific technical challenges of those projects in a way that (I hope ) demonstrates that I've got a good understanding of the relevant general programming principles.

So I'd suggest that you start by telling the interviewee a little bit about the potential assignment and its challenges, and ask them to dissuss similar work they've done which has similar challenges. Keep steering the interviewee towards the nuts and bolts. Any real programmer-- any real engineer for that matter-- will be happy to chatter about the technical details of their prior work.

I think you'll get a far clearer picture of the interviewee from such an approach that you can hope for by asking a pre-planned canned list of questions. The canned questions are going to get you the canned answers. Motherhood, Amerca, Apple Pie -- and State Machines. The discussion of the inteviewee's specific prior assignments should give you a better feel for the person. Of course, there may be confidentiality issues related to prior work for some interviewees. In that case, try "O.K., without going into the details of what you were doing for XYZ company, perhaps you can discuss some of the programming techinques you've used (or hardware you have written interfaces for) in your past work?"

That said, there is a comprehensive list of questions which I feel does do a pretty decent job of evaluating a person's competence as a LabView programmer-- National Instruments' exam for Certified LabView Developer. Those of us who have taken the exam are not allowed to discuss the questions, but I think it is safe to say that the exam is fairly tough. There are still plenty of established and very competent programmers out there who haven't yet taken the exam whom you might not want to reject out of hand, but if someone has passed that exam, its a good bet that he or she is at least a decent LabView programmer. (And you can check CLD status on the NI site, you don't have to take the interviewee's word for it.)

Hope my answer is at least a little help, Best Regards, Louis

[Mike Ashe]

In a sit down interview situation a quick set of simple problems may tell you more than complex exams. Try giving them a race condition between two loops and ask them to define what the problem is and then solve it.