Scenario questions test judgement under load: five things break at once, or four owners want the same margin, and the candidate must order the work. Each drill runs as a dated timeline with decision points, and every decision gets a strong answer and a weak answer with the lesson named. The storms below are built from real integration failure modes and NanoSoC's own bugs, so every symptom has a mechanism and every fix has a check.
Lesson | After it you can... |
|---|---|
Triage five simultaneous first-weeks failures in order and say what each one proves. | |
Settle area, power, timing and bandwidth colliding across owners with a ledger, not opinions. | |
Tell a scored answer from a comforting one on any scenario, and name the lesson each failure teaches. |
Suggested order: top to bottom. Survive the storm first, because triage order is the skill; then the budget war, which is slower and more political; then the answer-critique lesson, which generalises both into habits. For debug-interview technique see Mock Debug Interview; for a tapeout-pressure scenario see Scenario: RDC Waiver Under Tapeout Pressure.
Because order is the answer: what you check first, what you defer, and what decision each check buys. A symptom list invites guessing; a timeline forces sequencing, which is what the rubric scores.