Hi all,
I was called for a job interview this weekend, in reponse to my application for the post of an '8051 programmer'. Mostly out of curiosity, actually to see how I would do. Since I have no professional experience, I knew my chance were slim anyway...I was suprised I was even called.

I underwent 2 interviews. The first was pure algorithms- and coding-oriented, where I was asked to explain and draw flowcharts for the projects I had worked on, and various methods, such as interrupt-driven debouncing, simple Hex-to-Ascii, etc. The toughest was a Moving Average calculation, and I came up with an optimized, efficient solution (using the movc instructions) which clearly impressed the interviewer.

But I bombed big time in the next one, where I was asked all sorts of practical problems such as brownouts, noise and specifications... which I hadn't touched in over a year. I could come up with some basic answers (thanks to this forum!) but no details. Further, the company worked mostly in Annunciators, so the questions did not move into the more general regions that I could talk about, such as control systems, DSP, motors or drives. The 2nd interviewer said that they needed a 'ready-made' guy who could work at the hardware level on their products, not somebody who 'wanted to learn to do so' as I put it to him :-))

Right now I have well-paid software job, but someday (maybe after completing Masters) I want to follow my interests and move into the embedded stream full-time (hopefully working on a variety of projects, not just a single product). How would you all advise me to prepare for such job interviews (if I am lucky enough to get any)? I must have indepth knowledge to compensate for my lack of experience, that much is clear, but what sort? What sort of generic questions are most often asked?

My search on previous post discussed jobs in general and finding them, but nothing specific to the interview. Most posts I found elsewhere talked about RTOS and applications and higher-level stuff, but I don't think that is the always the case. I had also read a post on how someone interviewed a candidate, but there were no specifics. I am sure many people, especially students and those without prior experience, would like to know the answers to this.

Kundi