Oz bench techs are fine if you treat them a human beings. English engineers on secondment in Australia mostly seemed to think that they have to treat them in the same way they treated the erks in the U.K. - no "please", no "thank you", and no explanation of what you were asking them to do, or where it fitted in the whole project.
English bench techs respond well if you talk to them as if they wee human. I don't know if this approach would work if delivered in an upper- or middle-class English accent - I've got no empirical evidence on which to base and opinion.
The answer can be summed up in one single ASCII character: $
My first OrCad license cost $499 IIRC. Just for schematic because I don't do layouts myself. Latest I heard it's now above $1500. At Cadsoft you get the whole enchilada (schematic, layout and autorouter) for that money. I also like the support groups for Eagle where you receive answers almost immediately. Staff participates in the groups which unfortunately is very unusual in today's business world.
There are a few downsides: Hardly anyone on the west coast uses Eagle or even knows it exists. Cadsoft utterly lacks advertising out here. So the schematic often has to be re-drawn by hand before layout. Then Eagle has no hierarchical schematic structure. That is a serious shortcoming but heck, you can't have it all.
Actually I disagree, clearly employers prefer to hire engineers familiar with the tools already used in-house. I have yet to see Eagle listed in a job description. This is a valid question / consideration. However, familiarity with any EDA system is better than none, and as far as I know the $multi-thousand tools don't offer anything beyond 30-day eval versions.
Obviously something smartly designed in Eagle - which you learned on your own - will be more impressive than someone who knows (orcad,pcad,...) from a school class and didn't do much real work with it. IMHO anyway. In the long run (and a full-time salaried hire counts as this) smart go-getter people are the best employees to have.
Unless you're hiring someone specifically as a PCB layout guy (or schematic capture guy, although in my experience it's very uncommon for anyone other than the design engineer to perform schematic capture anymore), which particular EDA tool some guy I'm considering hiring has used in the past is pretty close to the bottom of my list of things I care about (somewhere in the same ballpark of how well they dress :-) ). EDA software is just a tool, and if it's clear you've already mastered one brand of hammer, it stands to reason you can readily do so with any other hammer as well. On resumes I've provided, I've always listed two sets of 'tools' experience I have -- one set is software I feel I have well-above-average to expert competency in, whereas the other set is stuff that, yeah, I've used it, but I'm no better than average (if that) due to a lack of experience with it. This was in direct response to my getting resumes from people where they listed every package they every double-clicked on regardless of their experience level with it, and my dismay at discovering this 5 minutes into an interview process. (I liked the guy who said he had FPGA experience with "Xylinx" -- yeah, sure he did...)
It's not particularly realistic to expect individuals to learn a full blown commercial EDA tool on their own given that the license costs are typically four digits if not five or even six. For instance, I've yet to meet anyone who's learned how to use analog IC layout tools outside of a commercial or (formal) educational setting.
In response to the original poster... OrCAD and PCAD are decent programs, but arguably both of them are so popular these days mainly due to being around a long time and being "good enough" -- not because, IMO, they're examples of really, really good pieces of software (particularly OrCAD, which Cadence is not even really actively developing anymore). Any employer who thinks that someone having done one or two school projects with OrCAD or PCAD is somehow a lot more qualified than someone using Eagle, is, IMO, an employer you should be very cautious with in thinking you want to work for them -- it suggests that they might be a little out of touch of what they really want in an engineer (or else that the company has very undemanding projects to work on).
Unless he or she is then using their CAD SW as a contractor. That can sometimes lead to trouble. Just had that, several library errors resulting in pinout errors on SOT23. IMHO there is no serious achievement in standardization in the EDA industry.
And then that other hammer flies off the handle :-)
It's sad but that's what I am seeing as well. My biz records are being kept in databases. They are compatible with the ones I used in the late
80's. The program used to fit into about 200k of memory. Now the software doing the very same thing eats oddles of megabytes with no significant upsides other than some glitz. Unless I elect to fire up the DOS program which is still happy with about 200k, way faster and the laptop fan never comes on.
The worst though are memory leaks. Even pretty good programs sometimes begin to bloat a little, using more memory than in the morning. Closing and restarting fixes that. Looks like lack of control in the design process.
Exactly. I've been studying "Thinking in C++", in an attempt to learn something, and the guy practically harps on memory leaks. "Watch out for this bug, because it will give you a memory leak..."
I had always kind of thought that the OS was responsible for allocating memory - what's the mechanism of a memory leak? Is it that the app will request memory from the OS and not return it? In other words, will the OS free all of the memory that the crappy app forgot to release, or is it gone until you reboot?
The OS can't possibly know the app is done with the memory it's allocated until the app releases it. If it doesn't, it's a memory leak. The memory *may* be returned to the pool when the program terminates, or maybe not.
I don't believe that's a memory "leak", per se. A "Memory leak" is where memory is claimed and not returned to the free pool, causing memory to be continually consumed. Sooner or later the system runs out of even virtual memory and the universe ends.
Yes and no. If I close all my open programs, Win-XP sometimes recovers, but not always; frequently a reboot is required. The operating system may indeed restore the lost memory if the application is terminated, but I know many applications are rarely or never terminated. Whatever the explanation, the painful scourge of memory leaks is alive and kicking.
Interesting factoid, my computer running Win-XP is far less stable than my computer running Win-2000. This wasn't true at first, but degradation of my Win-XP computer set in rapidly. BTW, it's treated with kid gloves, behind a firewall, doesn't even run an email program, full security progs.
Yep. Watching other's experiences with XP, I've stuck with Win2K.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I read in sci.electronics.design that Keith Williams wrote (in ) about 'best schematic capture/board editor program to learn for professional world?', on Tue, 13 Sep 2005:
I understand that apps can also leak into areas of memory that they have no business to be writing to.
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
When I last bought PC's, 3 last summer, they only offered XP. I chose NONE for OS, and put Win2K on all three ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
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