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I personally find whiteboarding / diagram drawing very irritating, for the same issue as most physics exercise: given a complex problem and you have to discard
by aries1980 7y ago
I personally find whiteboarding / diagram drawing very irritating, for the same issue as most physics exercise: given a complex problem and you have to discard 95% of the problem to come up with a result that the teacher might thought.
The same with diagram drawing, 10 boxes and arrows, but missing most aspects of the architecture that actually matter. As a hiring manager I much more prefer to talk through the problem to see if the candidate can ask the right questions, thinks about NFRs, can suggest alternative solutions in light of new information.
- OkayPhysicist 7y agoUnderstanding models at several levels is a crucial skill to possess in engineering. It's not that you're "discarding 95%" it's that you are adding only as much as you need. In a problem about a block on a spring, for instance, you might start with a system that's just a point mass on a spring. Then maybe you need to account for friction losses, so you crudely model friction as a constant term. Then maybe air resistance is significant, so you model that as a function of velocity. As you keep adding to the model if your model is a good one, your predicted results should asymptotically approach the physical ones. Problem solving on a whiteboard is the same process. You start with the simplest model, and add complexity.