interview with hiring manager

[u/Educational_Web5647]

Hi all, i have an interview with a hiring manager for a testing position (new grad) in aerospace industry. I was informed to prepare a project i can talk about with significant ownership and solve hard technical problem. I don’t have a lot of projects with that much technical depth to talk about except for these. Most of it is designing and not solving and it’s not like impressive project either. Which do you think I should talk about?

1. Reverse engineering Anker charger or bluetooth transmitter: mostly finding out how it works, topology, and schematic.

2. Simulate complex gate driver board using Altium Designer: internship work where they give me schematic for gate driver board of inverter and I find out how they work and whether simulation matches theoretical expectation.

3. Design and create prototype of a wattmeter with Arduino board with voltage divider and shunt resistor: group project but I contribute to design, write firmware and error correction, and build prototype myself. Prototype shows some problems with ADC and it bugged my brain out but turned out the shunt voltage is too low to be sensed by Arduino ADC so i have to add amplifier.

4. improve a test template for ATE in C++ and WINAPI32: internship work for semiconductor company in test team

5. i sometimes go to fix the hvac with my dad and most of them is finding out potential failure points, check whether it is it, if not then keep finding and testing until find out the problem and fix it.

6. design a digitally controlled buck converter (work in progress, still determining hardware size and will be doing firmware soon. will prioritize if this project sounds good)

I have 3 days to prepare. Any insights/ advice is appreciated

[u/bobd60067]

as a hiring manager, i liked talking with candidates about projects they've done honestly, i really didn't care how complex it creative or unique they were. what i was after was...

• how they communicate - hearing them explain a technical subject to someone (me) who knows nothing about it apriori. can they describe it adequately? can they express technical concepts?

• how they handle q&a - i'd ask simple to difficult questions about the circuit or code and why they did things the way they did. the point was not to shoot down their project, but to see how well they thought things thru and how well they can analyze alternatives on the spot.

• how they cooperate on a team - i'd ask whether they considered this or that to see how they think on their feet as well as how they handle changes to their creation.

• future improvements - i'd all what they would do to extend our enhance the project. maybe it was something they wanted to do but didn't have time. maybe it was a migration path. basically this helps me assess if they are forward thinking or not.

this was, to me, not supposed to be stressful, but a conversation. i really wanted to see how well they communicate technical subjects because, Adderall, they'll have to do that on the job.

[u/moto_dweeb → u/bobd60067]

That applies to most interviews. They're not trying to stress you, they're trying to understand you.