When you talk schematic capture/PCB layout (and FPGA design) you have a very different market. Here, you need software you can rely on to produce reliable output, everytime, that you can use across a business and with your vendors and suppliers. The free products aren't bad, but the inexpensive products like Orcad and Altium are very good, very robust, and have large communities of vendors, consultants, and other users to give a manager confidence. Also, when you are equipping a $60K engineer, a $4K package seems like a good investment!
But with spices, you don't buy a package for every engineer, maybe just a few for your analog guys, so the market isn't that big. Add in LTSpice, and you find that there isn't much demand at the moment.
Well, maybe they taught me the wrong terminology - in our Anoka, MN house in the 1950's, we had a septic tank, whose liquid output went to a leaky tank that everyone called the cesspool.
Maybe what we called a cesspool should have been called a "leach tank" or something.
Boy, do you live in a dream world. ;-) In my last job, I played hell getting a second monitor even though I was paid a few times your $60K. I was a contractor, which made it even stranger that they would tie my hands. I would have bought the damned thing if I thought I could take it with me (security and all).
Now, it would be easier asking for the moon than $4K for software. We use OrCAD and Allegro but I'm sure we wouldn't buy them now. I'd love to have a real ModelSim license. So far, freebie synthesis is good enough.
A lot of companies seem to have that problem -- entirely reasonble salaries that create a burn rate of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month is no problem, but someone wants to spend $100 that wasn't previously accounted for? Horrors! Or $4k for some software that will easily save, say, two weeks of engineering time? Nooooo! :-)
Mid '90's, job shopping at Honeywell Satellite Systems, I asked my supervisor for a double cubicle, because I needed room for a table big enough to spread out hybrid layouts.
He said fine. Regular employees with rank (unionized) had a cow... I didn't rank/rate a double cubicle.
I said, "Fine, I quit." Kept the big cubicle ;-) ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
You've got to wonder about people who would deny you your big table based on your rank or rate rather than the job you'd been tasked with performing. Sheesh!
IBM used to be *very* regimented. You could tell a person's level by the furniture. Wood grain table, with straight-backed chairs? Staff. Curved back chairs? Advisory. Wood desk? Senior. They dropped most of that in the early '90s, when everyone had to go dumpster diving to get whatever they could find.
When Microsim merged with Orcad, one point of contention was that EVERYONE at Microsim had an office. The only cubes were in the testing dept. to hold various test machines for quick use. At Orcad, though, there were very few offices, just for managers. We kept our offices. Microsim was also in a new, custom built building with plenty of space to grow, and warehouse space for product and manuals, etc. Orcad decides to move 'production' up to Oregon, lays off staff in Irvine, and then has to 'rehire' them all as their production facility is designed to be run by monkeys, but our production flow requires thinking beings.
Then, after they laid off the entire sales, accounting and production departments, they were concerned that the entire first floor was emply. All the engineering and support staff were upstairs, so they decide to 'move' us across the parking lot to a smaller building. But, they listen to us, and set up the entire new building as offices.
And then, Cadence comes in, and buys the whole shooting match!
Shortly after the buy, Cadence facilities guy comes in, and has a coniption when he sees all those offices. The new building had the walls laid out, but hadn't actually put them up yet. So, they stop the refit, redesign the space to be all cubicles with a few offices for managers, and we are left to either quit, or get cubes!
The fun part? First, the new, smaller building cost MORE to rent than the original bigger building. Even with the higher utilities, it would still have been cheaper to stay put.
Second, Cadence had an existing sales office in Irvine that they decided to move in with us. However, the space was now TOO SMALL to hold all the people, but they shoehorned everyone in! If they had kept the old building, there would have been more than enough space, and everyone would have had offices in the sales group!
Of course, Cadence had a solution to the overcrowding problem a year later when they laid off the entire PSpice development team. Then they were back to the too much unused space problem!
Last I heard, they had sub let out half the original space because they didn't need it.
At my last job, most techs had one 8' bench in a 8' * 8' area. I had four 8' benches and one 8' table, a couple sets of steel shelves full of databooks and three utility carts full of test equipment. This was scattered over a 15' * 35' area.
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You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.
wxWidgets corresponds to athena, GTK corresponds to Gnome. I currently use KDE3 instead of KDE4 because of stability and completeness issues. I figure when KDE4 gets to 4.7.12 it will be pretty good, just not as complete as KDE3 is at 3.5.10.
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