The Firmware Engineer

Where do you naturally sit?

How many different technologies or platforms are you comfortable being thrown into on short notice?

How much of your ideal week is spent personally writing/reviewing/debugging the code that ships?

Roughly what share of your time this past year was (or would be) spent hands-on-keyboard writing production code?

How do you feel about hard physical limits (power, memory, real-time deadlines) as pass/fail constraints rather than nice-to-haves?

Have you used tools like an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, or JTAG debugger as a normal part of your work?

How much hands-on experience do you have building, training, or deploying machine learning systems?

How much hands-on experience do you have building native or cross-platform mobile apps (iOS/Android)?

How much hands-on experience do you have building or operating data pipelines or warehouse infrastructure?

How much hands-on experience do you have building or operating cloud infrastructure or CI/CD systems?

Your manager says: “We think there's an opportunity here, but we don't have a clear spec — go figure out what we should build.” How do you honestly feel?

Your team's goal for a project is described only as “make customers happier,” with no agreed metric for what that means. Honest reaction?

It's 10am and you had two hours blocked for deep work, but three “quick question” Slack messages come in. What do you do?

Which describes your ideal workday cadence best?

Your phone buzzes at 2am: production is down. How do you feel about that possibility being a real part of your job?

A serious incident happens on a system you're responsible for, outside work hours. Your gut reaction?

When something breaks and the cause isn't obvious, which describes you best?

Think of the hardest bug you've personally solved. Which is closest to what happened?

How would you describe the systems you've designed?

When you design something, how far ahead do you typically think?

You're reviewing a new feature before launch. What's your first instinct?

How often do you find yourself thinking about how a system could be attacked, not just how it could fail by accident?

Which is closer to your actual work history, not just how you'd like to see yourself?

You're in a room with a skeptical senior engineer, a procurement person, and an exec — all at once, and you need all three to trust you. Reaction?

Someone from another team (or a client) treats you like a vendor they need convincing to use. Honest reaction?

You've just solved a tricky problem. Someone asks you to turn it into a tutorial for people who've never seen it before. Reaction?

A customer doesn't understand something you explained clearly to a peer five minutes ago. What now?

Someone suggests you give a talk about your work at a public meetup or conference. Honest reaction?

Which sounds more like you?

Your manager can give you one deep engagement to own for months, or a rotating set of 5-6 smaller ones at once. Which do you pick?

How do you feel about picking up “whoever's next in the queue,” with no history or context?

A client or account you worked with wraps up, and you're told you probably won't work with them again. Reaction?

Imagine your performance review next year is based entirely on your team's retention, morale, and growth — not anything you personally built. Reaction?

A teammate is underperforming and it's affecting the team's mood. Handling this kind of situation, honestly:

A metric you're responsible for goes bad, partly due to factors outside your control. How do you feel about being the named owner of that?

What matters more to you, day to day?

You're offered a role where a meaningful slice of your target pay is OTE — On-Target Earnings tied to hitting a quota or deal number you don't fully control. Reaction?

How do you feel about your income varying meaningfully quarter to quarter based on performance?

How do you feel about travel for work?

Picture being physically embedded at a client's office for weeks at a time. Reaction?