If you are out to find out an electronics engineer to translate your idea into a working product, you need to ask a few things before hiring him. Sometimes the employer is non technical and just does not know what qualities his employee should have. Here is a brief list of things you should ask your engineer.
- Experience: For how many years he has been in this field. What part of his work he has spent on hand-on experience. What skills he possesses and what is the level of expertise related to those skills. You may also ask his qualifications.
- Design Methodology: You may need to know what design methodology the engineer follows. There are some smart ways to develop product quickly.
- Portfolio: You may ask to present some example projects to see their quality and level of complexity.
- Technologies: What technologies he is familiar with? If your product needs wireless communication and needs to talk to other nodes in the same environment, is he familiar with Zigbee or other wireless technology. If your product needs to do some sort of user authentication, is he familiar with magstripe, RFID or biometric technology?
- Industries: Has the developer some experience of the industry in which you are working? For example the access control industry needs to special knowledge of copyrights which need the person be aware of the industry.
- Hourly rates: The rate per hour. Also how many hours can he give to your project weekly?
- Work efficiency: How much time he took or takes to do a certain job. This is very important to know because it gives you an estimate of time required to complete your job. Also the estimated cost may be calculated.
- Long term commitment: An electronic product development is lengthy procedure and takes many steps to come up with something which can be marketed. Your engineer must be with you to help out in detailed technical aspects. Also the basic idea of a product takes several revisions to reach the actual shape of product to be marketed. So you will need several software and/or hardware revisions to come up to the customer expectations.
- Other skills: Protocols, languages, processor cores, tools, software etc. are all those things which you may go through to further consolidate your trust on the newly hired engineer.
In a nutshell, finding the right electronics engineer which can meet most of your requirements is very important for your product to succeed. So hire wisely!
