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GPS

ciechanow.ski

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Re: GPS

#81

Post by daenz »

gsibble wrote: post #75

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.

Re: GPS

#82

Post by pauldavis »

mavci wrote: post #79

As someone who learned about GPS and was impressed by its structure, I used to tell my friends around me, whenever I had the opportunity, how great GPS was. Now I saw this article and I got goosebumps, well done, thank you very much! It's really fantastic. From today it will be enough for me to just share this article with my friends, or I will tell along with this article.

What a debt your friends have to OP! :)

Re: GPS

#84

Post by teraflop »

throwaway110535 wrote: post #77
gsibble wrote: post #75

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.

Unless you're hiring them to work in that domain, I don't understand why you'd ask that question.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of things it tests for:

* Ability to reflect on and critique their own ideas, using technical common-sense. If someone has never had a reason to research or think too hard about how GPS works, then it might be reasonable to initially assume that it sends a signal to a satellite. But hopefully, when prompted to think about it a bit more, they would realize: "Hey, if that's true, then somehow these satellites that were launched in the 80's and 90's were able to scale up their capacity and handle orders of magnitude more demand, now that everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. Maybe that's not how it works?"

* General curiosity and interest in areas outside their field of specialty. This might not be strictly necessary to get a job done, but it probably has some correlation with other measures of technical aptitude that are hard to probe directly.

Re: GPS

#85

Post by goodpoint »

jason0597 wrote: post #76
gsibble wrote: post #75

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.

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.

Some are silly, some are effective ways to measure curiosity and ability to think through an abstract problem.

Re: GPS

#86

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway110535 wrote: post #77
gsibble wrote: post #75

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.

Unless you're hiring them to work in that domain, I don't understand why you'd ask that question.

[deleted]

Re: GPS

#87

Post by withinboredom »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #46

One of the things I love about GPS is: Since you know your exact position, you can pick a good GPS satellite (one of the satellite's you're using to calculate your position), look at the timestamp from that satellite, and use it as a highly-accurate time source! Purpose-built GPS time servers (like those from Meinberg) give you an option to enter the length of the coax cable connecting the receiver and the antenna, s…

Then you’d have a Stratum 0 source for a stratum 1 NTP server!

Re: GPS

#88

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

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!

Re: GPS

#89

Post by hwers »

hwers wrote: post #11

This person deserves to get filthy rich off of their patreon.

@dang Why was this suddenly pushed to the bottom of the comments? (After being second in rank.) Possibly a bot detection false positive. Hope this is fixed so the author gets the reward he deserves for this amazing work

Re: GPS

#90

Post by u385639 »

gsibble wrote: post #75

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.

Not sure why you're getting flack it's a great question and you can learn a lot about your candidate as you work through it.
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