4 ms·

As a manager, there are several qualities that I value highly in an engineer, and they all happen to begin with the letter C: Competent, Consistent, Curious, Ca

by jawns 4mo ago

As a manager, there are several qualities that I value highly in an engineer, and they all happen to begin with the letter C: Competent, Consistent, Curious, Caring, and Clear Communicators. While SAT scores might act as a proxy for competency and possibly curiosity, they're not going to tell you much about whether the person is consistently reliable, whether they care about others and cooperate well, or whether their vocabulary or literary analysis skills have any correlation with their ability to read the room and tailor their communication to their audience. If I were giving these job posters the benefit of the doubt, I would guess they're including this requirement for the same reason that musicians request particular colors of M&Ms in their riders. They want to weed out people (or bots) who aren't paying attention. Nevertheless, there are better ways to do that than demanding (and presumably filtering by) teenage performance metrics.

analog31 4mo ago
C = Competitiveness. I met an HR manager who had worked for a local but well known company with a reputation for caring about things like GPA and SAT scores. She told me that remembering your SAT scores after college was a sign of a competitive attitude.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  In the same sense that the high school quarterback continues to talk about the Big Game now that he’s an overweight retail employee making minimum wage years later.
WalterBright 4mo ago
I've seen what happens in engineering with those with low SAT math scores. They need others to do the math for them, or they just wing it. I remember one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic amplifier. He spent days trying random things. Another engineer asked what he was doing, did a quick calculation, and put in an RC circuit that solved the problem.
- boring_twenties 4mo ago
  The problem here seems to be that the person was unwilling or unable to ask for help when they needed it, not that they don't know math per se. I don't know how to do that either, but "winging it" is not something that would occur to me. First I'd Google it and try to figure it out. If it turns out to be nontrivial, I would just ask for help. And I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. After all, those same highly educated folks need my help with e.g. git a lot more often than most software needs serious math :)
  - WalterBright 4mo ago
    The problem was the "engineer" did not know how to design an RC circuit, one of the simplest electronic circuits, in Electronics 101. Would you rather pay an engineer days to fail to solve a basic problem, or pay a real engineer 15 minutes to solve it?
    - boring_twenties 4mo ago
      No, that's not the problem, as you yourself admit in the false dichotomy you constructed in the second line of your post. The problem is that, in your own words, they took days to fail to solve the problem. If they Googled the solution, and so it took them 30 or even 60 minutes to solve it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If they asked their colleagues for help right away, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unless this particular role is going to be predominantly circuit design -- in which case I do have to wonder how this person got hired in the first place -- this is simply a stupid criterion to select on. I would rather pay the engineer who knows how to solve problems even when they don't already know the answer, first and foremost. Beyond that, I would much rather pay the engineer who has practical, hands-on knowledge, that they don't teach in school. How to use git effectively, as already mentioned. How to debug production issues. What actions are and aren't safe to perform on a production server. What facilities the OS offers to get information about one's own process and the system itself. How different valid-on-paper approaches might actually play out in real life. When it's worth pursuing an exciting new technology, and when it probably won't be. Oh and of course, what new and updated technologies exist since your guy graduated Electronics 101 a decade or two ago in the first place.
sinuhe69 4mo ago
You forgot that the SAT requirement is not exclusive but an additional data point. While I agree that it could narrow the path for truly good employees, I’d argue that an additional data point like SAT (+ GPA) could tell the employer a lot about consistency of the applicants. Or at least an interesting talking point (“I see you got a very high SAT score but your GPA was lower, what happened?”), if they care. I think it could serve the purposes of hiring fresh/young graduates. However, it’s still weird if they requested it for people already 5-10 years or more in the industry.

by jawns 4mo ago

analog31 4mo ago

C = Competitiveness. I met an HR manager who had worked for a local but well known company with a reputation for caring about things like GPA and SAT scores. She told me that remembering your SAT scores after college was a sign of a competitive attitude.

jimbokun 4mo ago
In the same sense that the high school quarterback continues to talk about the Big Game now that he’s an overweight retail employee making minimum wage years later.

WalterBright 4mo ago

I've seen what happens in engineering with those with low SAT math scores. They need others to do the math for them, or they just wing it. I remember one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic amplifier. He spent days trying random things. Another engineer asked what he was doing, did a quick calculation, and put in an RC circuit that solved the problem.

boring_twenties 4mo ago
The problem here seems to be that the person was unwilling or unable to ask for help when they needed it, not that they don't know math per se. I don't know how to do that either, but "winging it" is not something that would occur to me. First I'd Google it and try to figure it out. If it turns out to be nontrivial, I would just ask for help. And I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. After all, those same highly educated folks need my help with e.g. git a lot more often than most software needs serious math :)
- WalterBright 4mo ago
  The problem was the "engineer" did not know how to design an RC circuit, one of the simplest electronic circuits, in Electronics 101. Would you rather pay an engineer days to fail to solve a basic problem, or pay a real engineer 15 minutes to solve it?
  - boring_twenties 4mo ago
    No, that's not the problem, as you yourself admit in the false dichotomy you constructed in the second line of your post. The problem is that, in your own words, they took days to fail to solve the problem. If they Googled the solution, and so it took them 30 or even 60 minutes to solve it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If they asked their colleagues for help right away, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unless this particular role is going to be predominantly circuit design -- in which case I do have to wonder how this person got hired in the first place -- this is simply a stupid criterion to select on. I would rather pay the engineer who knows how to solve problems even when they don't already know the answer, first and foremost. Beyond that, I would much rather pay the engineer who has practical, hands-on knowledge, that they don't teach in school. How to use git effectively, as already mentioned. How to debug production issues. What actions are and aren't safe to perform on a production server. What facilities the OS offers to get information about one's own process and the system itself. How different valid-on-paper approaches might actually play out in real life. When it's worth pursuing an exciting new technology, and when it probably won't be. Oh and of course, what new and updated technologies exist since your guy graduated Electronics 101 a decade or two ago in the first place.

sinuhe69 4mo ago

You forgot that the SAT requirement is not exclusive but an additional data point. While I agree that it could narrow the path for truly good employees, I’d argue that an additional data point like SAT (+ GPA) could tell the employer a lot about consistency of the applicants. Or at least an interesting talking point (“I see you got a very high SAT score but your GPA was lower, what happened?”), if they care. I think it could serve the purposes of hiring fresh/young graduates. However, it’s still weird if they requested it for people already 5-10 years or more in the industry.