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I have a hard time imagining engineers in any other field (e.g a structural engineer) would be getting asked questions about GPS as a proxy for general engineering knowhow.
Do you have experience interviewing or seeing interview questions in those fields?
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> random piece of tech IDK. GPS is probably one of the most prevalent technologies used today besides the Internet itself.
Chip manufacturing is even more prevalent. Why not ask a candidate about how silicon wafers are made?
Asking how GPS works (in general terms) is more like asking how the Internet works. Anyone who has "engineer" attached to their job title should at have a general understanding of this, or at least be able to work through it using common sense on the spot. I know we covered it early on in college (maybe in Physics, I forget).
Again, I'm not talking about low level details here. Something like "your phone measures the time it takes the signals to arrive and calculates a distance" indicates some understanding. From there, most people can figure out how that information could be used to calculate a 3d position.
There's a lot of really great info in here. One random things I learned from this: > As that angle increases, the signal from a satellite travels more sideways and its larger portion gets affected by the atmosphere. To account for this, GPS receivers ignore ranges measured from satellites at very low elevation angles. ... atmospheric effects are primary source of GPS inaccuracies. (I know GPS has inaccuracies, but I…
One of my favorite engineering tech interview questions is asking an engineer how they think GPS works. You won't believe how many people start with: "Well, your cell phone sends a signal to the satellite......." Amazing that even engineers don't understand that GPS receivers don't talk to the satellites.
This is going to come across as harsh, but if that is your favorite interviewing question, and you are not hiring GPS engineers, then it is a ridiculous question to ask and serves no purpose but to "haze" candidates.
How feasible is it to speed up the bitrate used by GPS? This really helped explain why it takes so long to get a position based on how slowly these satellites are sending information.
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Chip manufacturing is even more prevalent. Why not ask a candidate about how silicon wafers are made?
Because that's a lot more obscure. A better example might be asking something like "what's the difference between cache and RAM" or "what is a CPU register", which I'm starting to think will still catch objections from some people on the grounds of it not being relevant to Javascript. Asking how GPS works (in general terms) is more like asking how the Internet works. Anyone who has "engineer" attached to their job ti…
The fact that the interviewer finds so many candidates who don't answer the GPS question to their satisfaction, while companies complain about difficulty finding software engineers, should tell you all that you need to know about the question's relevancy as well as the bizarre assumptions that some interviews hold.
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I don't quite understand how such questions help in the hiring process? It reminds me of the famous "why are pothole covers round" question, still not sure what it achieves.
Actually this is a very good question for engineers , as the (wrong) idea that a smartphone regularly sends data to a satellite shows fundamental lack of knowledge in some very basic physical understanding. The basic understanding should be: transmitting/sending = emitting energy (costly if a device runs on batteries), receiving/listening for a signal = almost for free nowadays. I also like the question because even…
What kind of engineers are you interviewing?
> I also like the question because even if you have no idea how GPS actually works, you could quickly come up with the rough idea yourself given that you have a bunch of satellites that can emit arbitrary signals.
I find this really doubtful. Someone who doesn’t already understand how GPS works is unlikely to derive it from first principals in a brief interview.
I never understood what motivates these people to spend so much time and effort making such an amazing blog to educate so many people in such a nice way....It's incredible!
Organization and presenting information in a uniquely useful way can cement your life as having a major impact on the memetic evolution of human colossus, to a much greater degree than making babies ever will in most cases, even if no one ever knows or remembers your name.
There's a certain satisfaction in knowing that you've made an impact on millions of minds and that that impact will ripple into the future for as long as the light of consciousness burns.
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Yes, but how many of them are relevant to determining if a particular candidate is a good fit for a programming position?
Engineers, not programmers.
GPS applies the theory of relativity directly to your everyday life... pretty cool!
GPS is great because it has to take into account both special and general relativity. Very few consumer goods can make this claim.