topic Re: proficiency in BreakPoint

proficiency

jcarmody — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 16:24:39 GMT

pro·fi·cient/prəˈfiSHənt/

adjective

competent or skilled in doing or using something.

noun

a person who is proficient.

I've interviewed two engineering candidates in the past month that claimed LabVIEW proficiency on their resumes. Never mind that neither capitalized LabVIEW properly. One had a college course involving LabVIEW and wrote a few VIs that included instrument communication, the other downloaded a driver and read a waveform from an oscilloscope. Maybe they've Acquired-Analyzed-Presented, but they've certainly not done anything like a full application, which would be required (IMO) to demonstrate proficiency. Am I crazy/arrogant? I think that I'm going to make the next ones show me their code.

What do you consider necessary to claim to be proficient? Certifications are nice.

Re: proficiency

crossrulz — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 16:22:42 GMT

I'm with you. I have seen college students claim they know LabVIEW and then I am spending weeks undoing the mess they made because they had no clue what they were doing.

Certifications do help a little. I tend to just scoff over the CLAD. That just means you know how to read LabVIEW. We have hired a couple of CLADs and they had little to no clue how to actually write a program. A CLD actually means something.

What I really want to implement here (and have actually seen with some companies) is give canidates a test as part of the interview. "Make me a program that reads from a serial port and logs the data to a text file" or something like that. That is when you will learn if they are proficient. And for many, I would not be looking to see if they actually know the best way to do it, but I am looking for the thought process they are going through. If they can think and come up with a process to get to the goal, that would usually be good enough for me.

Re: proficiency

Intaris — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 16:35:51 GMT

I had to code some test algorithms during my interview for my current job. I also was placed in front of an oscilloscope and told to try to find out what the signal was (turned out it was a mix of two different frequencies which I was able to find out).

In all I was at my current employer for a total of 9 hours over two interviews.

They also made sure to test me on topics which were outside of my comfort zone to see how I could improvise. I must have done something right because I've been here nearly 3 years now.

Another company offered me a job based on little more than being familiar with my avatar on the forums. Seriously. I was flattered.

Re: proficiency

altenbach — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:01:11 GMT

@Intaris wrote:

Another company offered me a job based on little more than being familiar with my avatar on the forums. Seriously. I was flattered.

Well, you avatar shows your proficiency with one of the most efficient debugging tools 😄

Re: proficiency

Hooovahh — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:13:49 GMT

I was at a company where elegantly a candidate put LabVIEW experience on his resume. When he came in they asked him about it and his answer was that he used a program written with LabVIEW, that someone else wrote. In that case I have C experience because I use Windows.

One thing I've heard used as a quick test, is to ask someone to explain what reentrancy means in LabVIEW, and when it is used. It is a non-OO question, that show knowledge of LabVIEW beyond scratching the surface. From the sounds of it, the two you interviewed would not have a clear answer.

By the way I have heard of the scope test, and asking someone to code a simple DAQ program, during an interview.

Re: proficiency

JÞB — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 18:37:10 GMT

One of the best interviews I had was a an Alliance Partner location (should I name names? - lets not for now) In the entranceway there was a wall of NI Certificates.

I was given a writen and practical exam. I though both were well thought out to determine proficientcy.

(How did I do You ask?) well, I corrected their answer key (Related to ignore errors inside property node) I Was told that I could use any resouce in the cube so I confirmed my recalection of the feature with the LabVIEW help file. The proctor shook his head when I admitted it saying he wished anyone had thought to do that before.

Then turned in a BD that would fit on a business card (Power ball generator) Apparently no other candidate had used Riffle.vi and thanked me for the comments that explained the methodology to them. They deemed me proficient. I wound up accepting a different offer though.

Another interview encluded writing a Pseudo LabVIEW BD on a Whiteboard while clarifying the requirements with the interview team. Interactive as all getout! I did take that gig and when I finished took the advice of the chief engineer and printed business cards on frige magnets

Re: proficiency

Former NI Employee MS — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 11:15:15 GMT

Having someone explain dataflow properly is a good filter

"How do you handle errors?" would also be part of my questions.

That's the most basic points to me: you cannot be proficient without those two

I'm quite sure they would filter most of the so-called proficient people

Re: proficiency

Hooovahh — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 11:43:00 GMT

By the way this reminded me of a thread several years ago on LAVA about interview questions.

https://lavag.org/topic/8275-interview-questions/

Re: proficiency

thoult — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 21:06:15 GMT

I remember stating on my CV that I was experienced in designing and implementing control and data acquisition systems via LabVIEW. It certainly wasn't my lead claim on it, and I was open during my interview that my experience was limited to single loop state machine type stuff. But if you're an isolated LabVIEW user who doesn't meet others in the industry, it's very easy to see the single VI application that you've written to do something smart, that works, as proof that you're proficient.

I got the job because first and foremost I'm a multi-disciplinary engineer. I showed the right approach to problems during my interview and was offered the role. They were happy to take me on because I was Mr Right, not Mr Right Now. I've since gone from the single-loop creature that I was to a CLD, and most likely sitting the CLA this summer if I can find the time for practice. I put a big chunk of that down to having a good, receptive CLA to work with.

Proficiency...well, if I were claiming proficiency, I'd expect to come armed with a portfolio of work. Understandably, I'll never be able to show anyone outside my employer what I work on now, but I'd expect to create demo applications that show some facet of my skills. Because I was interviewed as a mechanical engineer, that's what I brought to demonstrate - examples of the projects I'd worked on that I was allowed to share.

Edit - should probably mention, although I'm sure we're all aware, half-assed recruitment agents will often just search by keyword and forward matching CVs without checking what they contain!

Re: proficiency

nyc_(is_out_of_here) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:12:31 GMT

If you are lucky to be able to program in LabVIEW and not have to do programming in any other language,

you are very lucky. Then maybe you will have the time to develop proficiency.

I have had more employers since 2000 then most people here.

Let's just say I would need both hands to count them.

I have been required to support LabVIEW, Visual Basic 6, VB.NET, ANSI C, and VBA and now possibly C#.

Re: proficiency

VItan — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 18:17:10 GMT

I think that a good very early question may be what they believe the advantages to programming in LabVIEW to be / why they choose LabVIEW (or if they say that they really like LabVIEW, why that is).

I would find an answer such as, "Well, it's a graphical language, so almost anyone can read it, it is easy to learn, and intuitive and self-documenting," very weak.

I would find an answer such as, "I like it / choose it for these applications because it is a dataflow language with inherent high-level parallelism, which makes it better suited for many of these instrument control / automation / data acquisition / etc. tasks than procedural languages," to be stronger.

This question does not actually establish a level of proficiency, but I think that it would give you an idea early on where a candidate is on the spectrum between "someone who uses LabVIEW itself as a reconfigurable tool" and "a professional software engineer who views LabVIEW as an IDE to the G programming language."

Afterwards, the best thing that I can think of would be a practical exam, which has been mentioned already. I have seen several positions with notes like, "CLD-level proficiency is required. Any otherwise acceptable candidate who is not a CLD will be required to take an exam in the same format as the CLD exam, which will be evaluated by the hiring personnel."

Re: proficiency

tst — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 07:39:39 GMT

@VItan wrote:

I think that a good very early question may be what they believe the advantages to programming in LabVIEW to be / why they choose LabVIEW (or if they say that they really like LabVIEW, why that is).

I would find an answer such as, "I like it / choose it for these applications because it is a dataflow language with inherent high-level parallelism, which makes it better suited for many of these instrument control / automation / data acquisition / etc. tasks than procedural languages," to be stronger.

While I don't think the question is necessarily bad, I don't think I would ask it and if someone gave me an answer like I would probably be suspicious that that they were just quoting some material they at best had rolling around in their heads and at worst just learned from NI marketing in one way or another. I certainly can't make such a claim and I doubt anyone who hasn't tried to write these types of systems in both types of languages can.

What I really want from my programmers is the ability to honestly and accurately assess things, and for that, I want them to be able to give down to earth answers. To see if someone knows LV reasonably well, I would probably ask some practical question about LV code and I might ask the reverse question of what you're asking - what are some disadvatages or shortcomings of LV. This should allow me to see how they look at a system.

That said, this is fairly theoretical because we don't interview many people and of those hardly any have had LV experience. We had to train people here.

Jim, my experience with CVs is limited, but I'm guessing most people think of it as just a way to get your foot in the door, so they put on there anything that could get them into the hiring process. I wouldn't attach too much importance to what's written there.

Re: proficiency

jcarmody — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 07:55:08 GMT

@VItan wrote:

I think that a good very early question may be what they believe the advantages to programming in LabVIEW to be / why they choose LabVIEW (or if they say that they really like LabVIEW, why that is).

[...]

LabVIEW was chosen for me when I needed to leave a company and had an opportunity with an NI Alliance partner. I was able to get my current job because of my LabVIEW experience gained at the first. I'd answer your question that way and follow-up with something about how easy it has been to write moderately complex applications in LabVIEW. I've been programming forever and nothing else has allowed me to do so much. I'd probably try to explain a difficult PLC solution I developed and compare it with my first large LabVIEW project and say "I could never have done that in ladder logic".

One thing I ask interviewees, after suspecting that they aren't proficient in LabVIEW, is how long they've been programming other languages. I believe that, although LabVIEW is unique (data-flow, visual, easy parallelism, ...), learning another language is often much easier than learning to program the first one.

I'm glad I'm not being interviewed.

Re: proficiency

PaulG. — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 13:32:03 GMT

Two of the better jobs I had were preceded by a simple programming test. They sent me the task, I wrote the code and sent it back.

This is interesting and topic related.

Re: proficiency

BowenM — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 13:32:44 GMT

@jcarmody wrote:

Never mind that neither capitalized LabVIEW properly.

We just went through the hiring process, and it was odd how good of an indicator of skill this was. Them putting "Lab View" or "Labview" on their resume without fail meant the applicant had almost no LabVIEW skill.

As for questions, I cheated by using a CLD type question. "If you were going to write a program to run a car wash, what basic architecture would you use?"

Re: proficiency

jcarmody — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:37:28 GMT

@jcarmody wrote:

I've interviewed two engineering candidates in the past month that claimed LabVIEW proficiency on their resumes. [...]

Number three with the same issue, this morning!

One thing that's becoming clear is that some people associate being good at running a program written in the lab view with proficiency in Labview itself. That feels like me saying: "Hey! I use the NI LabVIEW fora A LOT, so I'm proficient with Lithium."

Re: proficiency

crossrulz — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:43:33 GMT

@jcarmody wrote:

@jcarmody wrote:

I've interviewed two engineering candidates in the past month that claimed LabVIEW proficiency on their resumes. [...]

Number three with the same issue, this morning!

One thing that's becoming clear is that some people associate being good at running a program written in the lab view with proficiency in Labview itself. That feels like me saying: "Hey! I use the NI LabVIEW fora A LOT, so I'm proficient with Lithium."

Hey, I am very proficient in HTML and Java because I use a web browser all the time! Nevermind the fact that I haven't touched any HTML or Java code since my college days, and even that was very limited.

Re: proficiency

Hooovahh — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:52:33 GMT

"Yeah so I've been driving to and from work for years, I figure I can rebuild an engine by now."

"Oh I've been walking everywhere for my whole life, figure I can run a marathon."

"I've been spending money all my life, if you need a financial adviser I'm sure I'd be great, or an accountant."

"Yeah I've had a smart phone for years now, I consider myself a expert on small electronics."

"I've been putting on a seat belt since I've started driving so I'm a safety audit expert."

"I've turned up my furnace every winter since I bought my house, I bet I can install a furnace and HVAC system."

"I put some IKEA furniture together, so I'm pretty sure I can do your kitchen cabinets."

Re: proficiency

jcarmody — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 15:27:32 GMT

I guess I made my point. 😄

Re: proficiency

PaulG. — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 15:45:26 GMT

@jcarmody wrote:

... "Hey! I use the NI LabVIEW fora A LOT, so I'm proficient with Lithium."

"... I took the initiative in creating the Internet."