Age and employment in the Netherlands

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After I retired, before going back to work for a living, I contracted a year. It was only $75 an hour but the 60-70 hour weeks (averaged >60hrs/wk the last seven months I was there) got a bit much. I decided to retire from retiring. ;-)

I will be 60 this month. As I indicated above, some intermediate-sized companies dropped me like a dead fish when they figured out that I'd been around 30+ years. Others were quite the opposite. Both of my last employers wanted someone who'd been around the block a few times. The contract job needed a head that spoke VHDL.

I've found that a chunk of code or a few pages of a schematic work wonders. Another thing I found that works is to tell them about EMI test successes, even those that passed on the first try. ;-) It reminds them that kids do the dumbest things.

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About the size of New York state, and four times the population of Oregon. I suppose there aren't any engineering jobs there, either.

ASML is huge, and is surely surrounded by support and suppliers. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung have made gigabuck investments in ASML recently. We sell to ASML, too.

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I really would have liked to work at ASML, and got a job interview there early on, more than ten years ago. It wasn't quite the right job and I wasn't surprised - or unhappy - that I didn't get it. When a much more suitable job came up a few months later, and the personnel department rejected me without interview, I was a bit surprised and decidedly irritated, and and went behind their backs to the engineer who had interviewed me, which vastly irritated the personnel department. I kept on applying for jobs there whenever something suitable came up, but never got another interview.

One of their engineers/trouble-shooters plays field-hockey with my hockey team, and I know him well enough to have told him the story - their personnel department is at least as stupid as most others, and he wasn't surprised.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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impossible

Yeah, I don't care about resumes as much as seeing schematics or C or VHDL. What's fun is to get their schematic and start asking questions about it, to see if they really understand it, and if it's actually their design. Lots of people will claim that everything they have ever done is NDAd so they can't show you anything. Best to not hire them.

I hired one guy, with a very limited resume, that I met here on s.e.d. The interview was a half-day whiteboard session, designing an actual product.

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Indeed. That is the situation today. Good HW guys have the phone ringing all the time. No matter what turf protectionists might say, we have a real shortage. There is still a good pool in countries like Russia but that will eventually also dry up.

Web/script folks are constantly pounding on doors, I get requests to please hand them a wee contract to create a web page almost daily.

Then you'll miss out on a lot of people. I am in that situation, everything (literally) what I do right now or have done in the last years is under strict confidentiality clauses. So no, I would not know which schematics I could possibly present in an interview if I ever needed one. Even if there wasn't an conf clause, I would not present schematics I did for clients.

But you mentioned the solution right here:

That is the way to go. All one has to do is put a module or circuit on the table. "This is one of the units where where have some serious EMI issues with. How would you start tackling that?", and then listen for the questions the candidate fires off. In one "email interview" for a consulting assignment they sent me a circuit to look at, in order to see what my EMC strategy would be, mostly to hear whether I'd feel confident doing it. So I told them, and added a question about whether they had watched the SOA of that big FET in the upper right corner. "Why, that's just ... ahm ... oh s..t!"

I knew a guy (a CEO) who was full of spunk all the way into his 80's. The only thing that stopped him from constantly coming up with ideas was terminal pancreatic cancer :-(

Marriage issues are the other. I have met several folks in the high 70's and 80's. After getting to know them or realizing that the question wouldn't be offensive to them I asked why they were still working. "My wife told me it's either that or a divorce". Mostly folks who were married for 50 years or so.

"at the top"

impossible

Why not? How would it harm a client if you showed someone a sheet of a schematic, or a couple pages of code, during an interview? A strict reading of most NDAs wouldn't make this illegal or unethical.

If you agree, in your consulting contracts, that the client owns everything that you do, and you can't reveal it to anyone, then you can never use any circuit or idea more than once.

Some companies try to force an NDA that says "everything you do belongs to us." I've always refused to sign such nonsense, and in fact usually reverse it: you can't use my technology except in this specific case. I won't reveal any of *their* proprietary IP, but a sheet or two of my schematic generally doesn't.

When we do take NRE to design a custom product, we always pitch the money as being used "to customize our proprietary technology to this specific use", so that we still own it. You may not get away with that in a consulting contract.

I tried to license my electrical metering algorithms to Metricom, for about a tenth of what it would save them. They said "no, but how would you like a consulting contract?" I laughed at them. They are out of business, and I'm not.

Coming up on 53 years, I've worked at home since ~1973, nary a problem. Maybe it was all those extra "nooners" that kept us together ;-) ...Jim Thompson

"at the top"

impossible

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Of course I don't do that, but at the same time I promise them that I won't be showing it to anyone "as is". For example, the trick I am trying to pull of with a switcher today is something that will put this client at a serious competitive advantage. They would not appreciate if I'd plop that down onto a conference table elsewhere. I can speak about it in generic terms but without their DSP code the whole concept would not be very useful. And that code is theirs.

So I can sketch up ideas like that in more general terms but I can't show you schematics and code. Then it would be up to you to believe that I actually dunnit.

That is exactly how I handle it. One company this year didn't want to agree to that. They will not become my client for that reason until they have a change of heart on that topic. Which they usually do, after something really hits the fan :-)

In my cases the clients own the IP for their market and I am not allowed to show actual schematics and stuff. But I can use the trick in other situations. When it comes to consulting to two very similar businesses that would technically be allowed but to me it's a matter of ethics. I normally decline, citing conflict of interest. Only in one case did I take on the 2nd assigment but only after my first client said it's ok.

Yeah, some folks don't get it. I've had cases where they thought consultants are too expensive. None of them is in business anymore, and in one clearly avoidable financial meltdown of a company the taxpayers lost a ton as well.

"at the top"

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It doesn't matter in practice, but that's not how lawyers think.

Not true. They own the implementations, not the principles underlying them.

-- Les Cargill

Exactamente. As an interviewer one would typically want to know how an engineer goes about things when being presented with a problem in layman's terms. A request brought to them by, say, a guy from Marketing. "We have this super-gizmo-calumbulator and now we'd like it to calumbulate at 70% of the usual power consumption". Presenting that whole story "as is" with the developed solution and schematics at an interview in another company would put a consultant straight into a court of law, and rightfully so. We just can't do that.

Oh come on, showing someone a couple of sheets of schematic is going to get you sued?

What harm would be done? A lawsuit requires harm.

Who would ever know?

If word gets you, yes, it can get you sued.

No danger in your case because you are an honest guy. But that story can be very different if you are interviewing for something in the same field.

Classic case: FAE gets wind of a particular solution. Has high-roller customer who is stuck, sales folks pressure FAE to get things going, prontissimo, there is risk of losing the deal, FAE remembers having seen "the" solution to the problem on a schematic a few weeks ago, and then ...

More than once has it happened that I met someone (not at a client company) and during the casual conversation I mentioned "So how the XYZ stuff going that you guys are working on" ... "HOW do you know about this?!". I simply heard about it at conferences, from folks who probably should not have talked about it. The info is safe with me but that's not guaranteed with other listeners.

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I'd never send a schematic out in place of a resume. I have shown a page or two of a schematic or a VHDL module during an interview, though.

That's the way to do an interview but it doesn't show anything about the candidate's organization or documentation.

"First, define 'calumbulate'." "Could you use that in a sentence, please?"

That's really not the point - I said I wouldn't do it, and I won't. Now we're in Horton the Elephant territory - "I said what I said, and I meant what I meant, an elephant's faithful, one hundred percent."

the ability of humans to estimate harm has been shown to be greatly out of calibration...

I would. The purpose of an interview is not *specific* things, it's vague generalities. If you want me to whiteboard some code or a small schem, then great. I can't code on a whiteboard worth sour apples, and you'll know that soon enough.

I will even say "we used technique A" if it's a common enough practice or if I can explain it in rough-sketch terms. But you won't get anything that was a specific deliverable.

This works both ways - I got an IP agreement in an interview that I *KNEW* was out of bounds for the state I was working in. I said "I won't sign it." and didn't. If you can't get *that* right and a blipping engineer can call you on it...

The function of interviews isn't to get the job; it's for you to screen out people you don't wanna work for...

-- Les Cargill

It means "walk around and take temperature measurements in random locations."

"at the top"

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Last fall, when interviewing at one company, I took in my Rainbow Color Reader, both a finished unit and an assembled PCB. I could thereby demonstrate my skills in design and layout. They later brought in a board that they were having problems with. I asked a few questions about it, suggested some avenues of approach to troubleshooting the problems, and walked away with a job offer. Too bad we couldn't agree on some things, like the reporting schedule and the NDA...

Charlie