Why a systems Level perspective is important in EE recruiting

It truly annoys me how some new grad EEs simply cannot zoom out and see the big picture of a design. Everyone wants the nice sounding title of “designer” but frankly your design does absolutely no good if the integration with the big picture is not studied. Frankly this is like doing design while blind, and I’ve been seeing it more and more often.

Here’s something that I see. Someone proudly tells me their amplifier meets gain, bandwidth, noise, all the check boxes in sim, but they can’t tell me where the return current flows on the PCB, or if there’s a shared power plane underneath the board, or whether switching noise is going to impact RF components.

Wow congrats on designing something that probably only works within a vacuum. We can have esoteric conversations about amplifier datasheets, but frankly I think that’s really missing the point once again.

This starts with recruiters. Far too much emphasis on circuit level design is the first thing. Draw me this random circuit using an LDO or draw me an active filter with a cutoff frequency of XYZ. These things are still great, but let’s please zoom out and discuss how design changes can impact large scale systems.

People need to be drawing more block diagrams. Candidates need to be asking more probing questions. Recruiters and interviewers need to be asking about troubleshooting, noise, power distribution, and even manufacturing.

Candidates, we need to be better. I see posts on Reddit asking for interview advice, but I think some creativity is in order. Even if you’ve never interviewed before, get some mock interview reps. This has never been easier hardware interview forums, grind Voltage Learning prompts, Hacker Rank problem sets, Exponent, there are so many tools out there.

Or be creative, read datasheets, app notes, or even the job description. Again, nothing groundbreaking.

Ok guys rant over. Frankly, I always thought that I was most system level gifted, even more that circuit level. Please let me know, does anyone here feel the same way?