interviews

I don't have any pots, but if it tagged to be in real time mode, setting a component value will immediately send that new value to the running engine. It needs to be in marching waveform mode to see the effect!. I don't actually push that feature, it still keeps writing to disk, so nasty things happen if it runs too long...

In my Analog ic day job, I use Cadence. If you buy the licences you can have have it run on 1000s of CPU cores simultaneously. Its written to do that correctly. Unfortunately, the company I work for is too poor, but still, running on 8 cores is pretty nifty.

BDA (Berkeley Design Automation) have a vastly faster Spice, that can run analog with millions of components.

Summary, in my day job simulating top level, its never fast enough.

However... in my own hobby time hours, speed is not an issue. It was 15 years ago, but CPUs have really come along.

I think what slows down LTSpice, is its shit GUI :-)

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

Correct, if it were me, it would be 10 times :-)

So, what part of (the right) did you miss ?

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

I have LTspice running on 16 cores. (150 Gflops peak). Runs fine.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's weird. I had a final project for a design course. (~30 years ago.) and I can still recall the general outline... and all the stupid mistakes I made. (the worst was that it had an oscillator, made from a 555, and carbon comp resistors... their tempco made it drifty.)

George H.

Then hire the one that can!

The last time I was involved in student hires every one of the people that made it past the phone interview had a vivid recollection of their student projects, which they were able to discuss cognizantly.

Email me if you're serious -- I know a guy who's good at delivering up a candidate who you're likely to hire, not just someone randomly selected from the mush. The last time I looked he was still freelancing.

Hiring a good candidate is a lot of work. I hope things work out for you.

ly, and that's not a big burden. It's interesting to meet people and see wh at's out there anyhow. Our preferred "test" is to whiteboard some circuits with them, including things that they put on their resume. If they can't ev en remember or understand their own projects, we don't want them.

how they work.

I made. (the worst was that it had an oscillator, made from a 555, and ca rbon comp resistors... their tempco made it drifty.)

I did a project on making a very stable silicon-based oscillator back in 19

2. Even with metal film resistors on the outside the 555 is decidedly drifty. The diffused resistors inside the package mess it up. The LM322 did better, by virtue of a built in voltage regulator that meant that the diffused sil icon resistors were at least working at a constant voltage.

It still wasn't much good. An emitter-coupled multi-vibrator did a lot bett er, but the temperature dependence of the Early voltage was still too high to let us meet the - unreasonable - specification, so we gave up at that po int.

John Larkin may be looking for the wrong skills by insisting that students recall details of their final-year projects. You want people who can be rel ied on to document what they've done, rather than having the kind of memory that can substitute for careful documentation.

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

In school, I went to several job fairs and applied to the "biggest and brightest" (read: most capable of advertising themselves) companies in the area. Nada.

All the professors clammer on about teamwork, team projects, emphasizing social and emotional rather than technical achievements on ones' resume.

These companies literally, and actively, do not want people like me (us?). They just want peons that they can pour into a neatly molded job without whining too much or achieving anything.

And, as college becomes ever more mass-produced (like the primary schools), they're more than willing and able to provide that kind of product.

UW Milw. area, so, Rockwell, Johnson Controls, GE Medical... big places, global, 10^4+ employees, top heavy management, big and slow. No surprise there.

Tim

We interviewed a guy today, who had a PLL project prominent on is resume. So we ask him about PLLs. He didn't remember much. He drew the phase detector as a circle with an X inside, but clearly didn't know that a multiplier is a common phase detector.

He's also doing VHDL FPGA design, so we drew a d-flop divide-by-two. He didn't get that, either.

Really, if they put it on their resume, they should show up prepared to talk about it. That's looking like the best interview test: go to the whiteboard and tell us about that thing on your resume.

Probably correctly. The first barrier is the personnel department, and they know nothing about engineering or engineering skills, but do have to clean up after social and emotional disasters.

If they knew what the "neatly moulded" jobs looked like, there would be som e substance to your complaint. They do just want to hire people who functio n in the relevant slots without making waves, but they haven't got a clue a bout what an engineer's function actually is, or how engineers achieve anyt hing.

The universities have equally little idea of what an engineer's function ac tually is or how engineers achieve useful stuff in the real world.

I've just bought - and am reading - "Social Physics" by Alex Pentland who w orks at MIT (and thus relies on external funding for a fair bit of his sala ry). The ISDN is 978-1-922070-89-0.

So far, I've got a third of the way through. The most interesting message i s from Bell Labs, that star performers spent a lot of time talking to their peers, swapping and exploring new ideas - much more time than was spent by less productive employees. Creativity isn't so much about individual brill iance as about bright people bouncing ideas off one another.

The one practical message that comes out is that teams should drink their c offee (or tea) together. Everything really should stop for morning and afte rnoon tea (or coffee) - not because the team needs the caffeine, but becaus e they should all be in the same room for about twenty minutes twice a day to let them swap ideas.

My father thought that this was a good idea in his research lab in Tasmania , Max Perutz thought that this was a good idea at the laboratory of Molecul ar Biology at Cambridge, UK (and drafted in his wife to make sure that it w orked) and it seemed to work well at EMI Central Research when I was workin g there.

Pentland's example is more mundane - Bank of America telephone-call answeri ng teams. Getting them to drink coffee together, rather than staggering the ir coffee-breaks, substantially reduced the average call handle time, presu mably because they swapped ideas about sorting out customer problems faster .

I suspect that academics go to conferences for exactly the same reason. Thi rty years ago Tom Peters thought that successful firms maximised contact be tween customers and engineers to create the same effect. Since one of his e xamples of a successful firm was IBM he seems to have missed the two-way as pect of the interaction.

My last three employers (one was a contract job) used head hunters to do the leg work. It wasn't cheap, though. The one that I know of paid a good chunk of a year's salary to save the work.

My current employer seems to do a pretty good job but again, they use a head hunter, rather then their HR department) to do the search.

Sounds interesting.

It certainly helps ideas have sex (someone else's turn of phrase).

Then again, one must be careful not to get too involved in such matters. There's no shortage of journals to keep up with and write replies or papers for. The example comes to mind, Richard Feynman talked about having a real low spell at some point, then realized he needed to ignore the academic buzzards, shut himself in a room, and play with something interesting. Like liquid helium. I think that was the example and end result, anyway. (Which as we know, didn't end up fantastically useful, but superfluidity is hardly a fantastically simple phenomenon.)

The most offensive trend today is "open spaces". Give me a corner office with a solid core door any day.

Tim

his

This isn't the same thing at all. Face-to-face interactions at work and at conferences (and this kind of rapid-fire digital exchange) is relatively ra pid.

Journal articles take months - often a year or so - to make it into print, and the reactions/citations are equally slow. My 1996 paper on a Peltier-ba sed thermostat first got cited in 1999, and has been cited roughly once a year since then. There was a bit of a peak around 2006, 2007 and 2008, when there were two citations a year, and there hasn't been anything since 2009 .

I did the work described in the paper in 1993 and the crucial papers I cite d were published between 1968 and 1983.

Sure. But Pentland makes the point that our built-in strategy seems to be t o get 90% of our personal innovations by borrowing and 10% by thinking our own thoughts. Feynman's own thoughts were more interesting than most, but h e was also very skilled in telling other people about them - I heard him gi ve a public lecture at Cambridge once.

I've worked in both environments. It doesn't make a lot of difference to me . I've always spent a lot of time away from my desk, sometimes "managing by walking about" and tended to work slightly odd hours to get undisturbed ti me at the desk (open plan or behind a closed door).

SNIP!

Here's another idea, kinda from left field: If you run a pop-up ad, consider using one or more of those photos you posted here of circuit boards. A kid saw the pcb photo on my screen and said, "Wow, Navajo rug!"

In any case, the pattern has visual "grab" effect, and, hey, "here's what you will help build if you work with us!" Cuts through a lot of abstraction and uncertainty, imo.

"Find your path with us," etc. I am not a circuit designer (wish I was), but as an outsider I suspect that this breed is a type of autism. I don't take terms like that seriously, mind you...I remember an essay by Bernie Gordon in Jim William's book, entitled, "Become the Machine."

An idea rattling around in my head is Aristotle's system for influencing and communicating with people. He divided up the modes into ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos = your credibility, logos = your logic, pathos = your 'emotional' appeal.

Now,I don't think he meant by pathos a bunch of guys drunk on beer crying over each other. :) In the write-up I saw, it is just the emotional relevance of what you do or who you are or associated... For example, the pcb pattern has pathos since it has a certain amount of attraction and "gee whiz." It also looks cool as a pattern.

I don't know. But the writer pointed out that pathos is 2/3 of the game in getting across to people. And it's a factor that tech guys tend to overlook. (1)

OTOH: "The Hollywood joke: "Sincerity and honesty are everything. Once you get those down, there's no stopping you!"

1. It could also include the struggle to gt a product out...

Some PCBs are beautiful structures to me. We sometimes plot them on big paper and frame them, and put them up in corridors. The physical boards, with bussed traces into FPGAs, can have beautiful butterfly-wing patterns that shimmer as you view them in different lighting. Plus, they work, which is more than most "art" does.

Some PCBs are butt ugly, too.

There is a lot of asperger type syndromes among techies. Overdevelopment of one part of the brain, or the sort of compulsive concentration needed to do intense design, takes a toll on other parts. My hearing is fine but my auditory/speech processing is very poor (as my wife, a speech pathologist, likes to note)... I can't learn languages and have a very hard time with accents, and I don't like music. I don't have the normal "cocktail effect" ability to separate multiple conversations. Lots of engineers and programmers are much farther out on the spectrum, and tend to have problems like stuttering and social-skill issues, terrible writing/reading skills, stuff like that.

My wife is getting referrals from the medical staff at google. That could be big business!

The complexity level of some designs is astounding. It takes 150% of ones concentration to keep the structures organized in your head. That can crowd other other stuff out for the duration. And make people unappreciative of distractions, which can look anti-social.

He needs to download SuperSpice and run the examples :-)

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

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Autism/Asperger's is a rather more specific problem than most of the ones y ou described.

Most of the problems you list sound more like localised failures in brain d evelopment, which is very different.

I know one psycholinguist who doesn't do face recognition, which is claimed to take up about 30% of the normal brain. I don't seem to do office politi cs - I do know who likes me and who doesn't, but the finer alliances pass m e by.

be big business!

That wouldn't surprise me. Google concentrates on recruiting people who ar e exceptional in their narrow fields, and if that capability is based on re cruiting bits of the brain which would ordinarily be used for other work, y ou may find minor deficits elsewhere. Not appreciating music strikes me as major deficit, but it's not going to mess up your life.

snip

snip

Getting down to business, though, I was trying to suggest you use that pattern in ads for employees/work.

Here's a "guerilla marketing" idea. Take that image, or another like it, and print 300 or so at Kinkos. "We do these" type of text with it. Its much stickier fly-paper than the print flyers - attracts more attention. "Guerilla Marketing" was popularized by Michael Porter at Harvard BS. As I understand it, it is mainly a way to get free advertising. A poster with that pcb would attract attention...

As far as becoming immersed in a particular area - ordinary advice is to balance your life by doing other things of a fun and different nature. I used to go down to that beach at Fort Funston - I trust it's still there. Or the ferry to Larkspur and back. Using etoh not a good idea for this. That park near Google a good bike ride.

jb

WELL, at 5+ percent dividend rate the income is a hell of a lot better than CDs or bank "savings"..

nt

Bearing mind that quite a few of the widows and orphans wouldn't have been windows and orphans if their husband or fathers hadn't been heavy smokers.

han CDs or bank "savings"..

The Mafia gets even better returns on their investments. Philip Morris and the rest of tobacco industry were never an unusually good investment - onc e they started spending as much on lawyers and denialist propaganda as they did on regular advertising, the writing was definitely on the wall.