Don Romano (alt)
On Friday, the boss brought me into a meeting as a bullshit detector in a job interview he was having with some guy that our project manager had met on the train, because the guy claimed to know electronics.
It was fairly hilarious.
The first thing he suggested was that he knew something about high speed PCBs.
The second thing he mentioned was that he liked to draw his designs on paper, but was wanting to learn Altium Designer.
Don Romano (alt)
As the interview went on, it became apparent that he mostly just gave drawings to an actual electrical engineer and they did the actual board.
He was also unfamiliar with very common chips and industry standard buses.
The conclusion was that he was smart, but also came off as suspiciously slick. He also had a rather sketchy resume, and that must mean something, because my resume isn't a pretty thing either, and my boss still hired me.
Don Romano (alt)
He told a story of approaching a large electronics dealer with a product, and they said "Great idea! We'll go to China and buy it for ourselves."
He then mentioned going to the next largest dealer and actually getting the product sold there.
I think he wasn't lying when he said he went to China to get products, and that he did manage to sell them, but his main strength seems to be salesmanship, not engineering.
Don Romano (alt)
Suave and confident guys like that would be extremely useful to someone like me, who wants to make and sell things, if it weren't for the fact that you can't trust them one bit.
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