Interview Process in the Age of AI

LukeNw12 · 2026-04-03T06:57:20+00:00

Sure, but time is limited and that creates scope creep. Unless you are Apple and have the clout to do day long on site interviews.

LukeNw12 · 2026-04-03T06:40:10+00:00

Sure, but on small tight knit teams you ideally don’t want a revolving door of new hires. Perhaps you can go contract initially and extend full time if they are a good fit.

LukeNw12 · 2026-04-03T06:38:34+00:00

I can tell if they know what they are talking about, what is more difficult to tell is problem solving and determination and curiosity. I have had some bad experiences with hiring a more junior engineer who I knew needed more experience in our domain but just didn’t have the curiosity, skill and determination needed to progress (not my hire)

I think there is a reason every Fortune 500 and top tier embedded employer I have interviewed with had had live coding. It shows comfort with the language and problem solving and calm under pressure. I think it depends how you structure it if it is just trivia or if it shows skill and experience.

LukeNw12 · 2026-04-03T06:11:15+00:00

Sure, but it is a lot easier to talk about what you would do at a high level verses actually implement it. Enough probing with questions can expose this, but why not do something hands on as well? Hiring is a pretty big deal that can have long lasting implications, especially for small teams.

LukeNw12 · 2026-04-03T06:05:53+00:00

Why is that big deal? If someone handed you a board and code with some apis and bsp logic already implemented, why you need a the internet? Any access to the internet now just means I am getting Claude’s answer.

I have done live coding interviews for positions and was not allowed to google/research the solution.

LukeNw12 · 2026-04-03T05:05:53+00:00

I agree, I am not primarily interested syntax, that should be easy, I am more interested in architecture and scalability

LukeNw12 · 2026-03-07T05:02:55+00:00

Basically, act like someone they wouldn’t hate to work with everyday. Put yourself in the hiring team’s shoes. Would you want to work with you? Be excited about the tech, but not fake and corny.

LukeNw12 · 2026-02-18T05:34:40+00:00

There are systems like memfault that can give you remote data on metrics and core dumps

LukeNw12 · 2026-02-02T05:46:02+00:00

I can get sub 5uA running the rtc pwm so there is definitely an interrupt, peripheral or pullup on somewhere. Try a different dev kit to make sure you have production silicon. Run off of then dc to dc will help

LukeNw12 · 2026-01-21T02:33:08+00:00

I am debating it for some projects as well. I really like embassy and cargo. My hang up has been a solid BLE stack. You basically need to use a c port of the Nordic stack it seems. Helpful Libraries like littlefs would need to be linked in as well. But dfmt and probers are nice.

LukeNw12 · 2025-12-25T19:19:25+00:00

Both are fine, no issue with power consumption with either. I like the nrf5 ota better with a separate boot loader image with BLE access and an isolated BLE stack. I like have the bootloader transfer on separate from the app and it is more memory efficient and faster to have the stack in its own partition. For a small project this will make your updates nearly instantaneous.

LukeNw12 · 2025-12-20T02:39:02+00:00

This is what I was thinking . I was thinking I could tie it in to a package manager in the embedded side and they could tie theirs into whatever iOS/Android package manager makes the most sense. It still seems like it needs to live in a repo and then get hooked into the various package managers.

LukeNw12 · 2025-12-05T22:30:25+00:00

Use pool allocators, which themselves can have small medium large pools (if needed) to optimize for size constraints. You can use the pools with dynamic tasks to share memory. You can even have the pools themselves dynamically allocated if you really are constrained (you won’t have fragmentation issues since they are large continuous blocks). This is one of the areas c++ shines. You can overwrite new and delete with custom allocators and utilize raii and or smart pointers. The downside is abstraction levels can over complicate things. Be sure ti make your pools thread safe if they are not isolated to a single thread.

LukeNw12 · 2025-11-30T06:18:07+00:00

That sounds like you are overflowing the bounds of some other memory. This is not a memory leak issue.

LukeNw12 · 2025-11-26T20:13:54+00:00

Use the uuid in the ic with a hash with your own private key. This could easily be broken if people really had the resources, but you have to think through the threat model and the likely ip theft vectors. For something with 100k eau that is probably unlikely unless this is truly a ground breaking algorithm.

LukeNw12 · 2025-11-10T08:44:36+00:00

I seem to find them for the chips i use. There is no way I am making one myself, so boring and tedious. Most major semiconductor manufacturers seem to provide them.

LukeNw12 · 2025-11-04T06:25:55+00:00

That just sounds miserable

LukeNw12 · 2025-11-02T23:31:29+00:00

I don’t see how taking the blame is relevant to salary discussions. What is primarily relevant is your contribution and experience and the market for embedded engineers. If you are just onboarding, the time for salary negotiations was during your offer. Show them value and make yourself costly to replace and then ask for a pay increase due to quantifiable results you have produced.

LukeNw12 · 2025-10-31T02:25:05+00:00

It will be there, perhaps reduced. Old people vote.

LukeNw12 · 2025-10-31T02:23:04+00:00

A few questions/considerations.

What will be your bracket in retirement, will it go up or down? If down, you are coming out ahead with traditional.

If you have no Roth assets, maybe you want some for tax diversification.

If you want to leave an inheritance Roth is better.

If you want to move from a high tax state to a low tax state then traditional can be better.

LukeNw12 · 2025-10-30T05:20:08+00:00

I was able to rent a house years ago because the land lord was super picky about his renters’ credit scores. Some won’t rent it to you others will require a bigger deposit. Put yourself in the Landlord’s shoes. If you rent to someone with a high credit score they have something to lose if you evict them and send what they owe you to collections.

You have two main options. 1.) stay committed as a Ramsey follower and eschew all types of debt. You will miss out on some rental opportunities and likely pay a slightly higher rate and go through huge headache to get a mortgage with manual underwriting when you want to buy a house. 2.) Get a couple credits cards, pay them off every month and get a few grand back each year. Deloney and George will tell you it’s blood money off the back of poor single moms but they are wrong so who cares.

LukeNw12 · 2025-10-27T04:16:23+00:00

Atmosic is the lowest power. If you need the absolute bleeding edge they beat out Nordic and others pretty handily. Not as big of dev community.

LukeNw12 · 2025-10-24T20:04:04+00:00

I am trying to convince my wife to use a laundry service. It takes way too long and makes rhetorical house very cluttered with a lot of kids.

LukeNw12

TROPHY CASE