AutoCAD employed or NOT

[rKeyTek]

Based on a post by "Chicopee", I'm curious what screening process do people implement to hire AutoCAD draftsmen.

Here we implement a "Spanish Inquistion".
Guy/ girl comes in and we ask ...

What are defpoints?
What specail about it?

How many grips on a line versus a pline?

What's the command to draw a filled circle for a terminator?

Are blocks drawn on ZERO or whatever?
Explain the benefits of one over the other?

Explain drawing a viewport in Paper Space.
Now explain the zoom factor for that viewport.

Explain one benefit over Overlay versus Attached in XREFing.

After all that and some more questions ....
Show us your portfolio.

And let's discuss graphic line weight ....

And this pretty much has allowed us to get savy users.
But it's not fool proof...

 

[CADaver]

Only if his copies of AutoCAD and 3DStudio are legit. If he steals from them, he'll steal from you.

 

[Sparweb]

Don't be so eager to hire just any CAD operator who's a wizz at the computer stuff. Make him draw something with just a pencil and a ruler. You'll learn a lot about how he lays out construction lines (if at all) and if can dimension in a sensible manner. Drawing skills were honed very quickly in the old days when excessive wordiness, re-drawing, and too many dimensions made your wrist hurt. Nowadays you can type and click all day, but that doesn't mean that the drawing is any better.
Perhaps better than giving the interviewee a drawing or a sketch to reproduce, give him the real part and a caliper/ruler/micrometer. Now you'll know how well he can relate the REAL THING to the piece of paper.
Too many technical schools (I've been to two) focus greatly on the software side because that's what's "in demand from industry", and the result is that the draftsmen they produce don't know how things are made, can't understand tolerances, can't even fold an E-size plot!
I was lucky to have received nearly a hundred hours of instruction on board drafting, and since I left, that's fallen by the wayside at my old school.


STF