FAANG Analog Interviews Are Hiring the Wrong Skills

I think this needs to stop. These FAANG analog and hardware engineering roles need to stop hiring someone to recite op-amp topologies like some dumb parrot. I think universities are feeding into this trap and it’s truly disappointing since the quality of candidates has declined.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in a windowless lab, I want to bring up real skills in analog engineering: reading datasheets, hitting spec, and debugging complex systems. I can honestly keep going.

I hear candidates talk about adding gain, adding a cap, increasing bias, all these academic types of skills. However, the production reality is that you just bought yourself worse phase margin, more start-up risk, and a power budget someone will absolutely slash the week before your manufacturing deadline—leaving you as the poor bag holder that you are.

If a candidate can’t talk about loop stability, slew rate, or even something basic like lab test bench setup, what even happens when your capacitor isn’t ideal anymore? It’s disappointing that candidates don’t seem to be ready for these real-world situations.

We need to nip this in the bud, and it doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel here. The FAANG analog screen should be simple. Let’s not even start drawing resistors. Please just hand them a block and simply ask for all the different ways things can break.

And candidates, there’s literally no excuse for mediocrity. You know that creativity is required in your job, so why are we not doing the same in our prep. Getting reps is the easiest thing in the world: CMOS Circuit Design (Baker), grind Voltage Learning prompts, hardware-interview forums, Leetcode problem sets, look at datasheets and app notes (which let’s not forget, engineers also read).

Like these Reddit posts on “oh I have XYZ interview please give me answers” need to stop.

Did we not learn anything in school? Did we not learn anything from our daily lives? We focus so little on how to fix something that is broken—troubleshooting—or how to deal with real life engineering situations, and we focus on “design”.

Everyone wants to be a designer, everyone wants to build. But let’s not forget, fixing stuff might not be the sexiest thing in the world, but personally is something that is more important for an analog engineer.