Power Supply Engineer - National Instruments - Austin, Texas

--
The move from Nijmegen, where you were being stifled, to Sydney, where 
the air is exciting, should do you good. 

Good on you!

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We were sold the machine as a pre-production prototype, and the deeper we dug into it, the more obvious it became that it was a proof-of- principle machine. Nothing that they'd designed was remotely capable of fabricating the kinds of chips our customers were making at the time - let alone what they'd want to be making after a few more years of Moore's Law.

My job - as the hardware system designer - turned into throwing out what they had and specifying the much more complicated stuff that would do what our customers were going to want. It kept me very busy for a couple of years.

Their data buffer used off-the shelf memory cards plugged into an S-100 bus - already obsolete at the time. This is what we thought we'd need to develop to do the job properly

It was going to include error-detection and correction hardware. This wasn't unrepresentative. We wrote it up because marketing wanted something in the technical literature that they could talk about, and triple-extended Eurocards and a balanced ECL-backplane looked kind of dramatic.

At the time, popular UK wisdom amongst engineers was that if you bought anything from the French you'd find that it was a lot older and crummier than you'd been lead to believe.

I was part of the team that was asked to assess the machine - but not for it's performance as such, merely to check that it worked as well as Thompson-CSF said it did. Management weren't quite well-informed enough to realise that this was not nearly well enough.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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I suppose it may look like that to you. It certainly doesn't to me.

You keep forgetting that there was time when I did do stuff.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Then the screw-up appears to have happened at the due diligence phase, or maybe the lack thereof. It is usually smart to check this stuff before signing on the dotted line of a contract, not wait until an "Oh s..t!" kind of afterthough overcomes the whole project.

I am not going to plunk down 40 bucks just to have the grand privilege of reading it.

Meaning the due diligence check of the contract itself was wrong or didn't happen?

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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I certainly wouldn't bother. The next paragraph told you all you needed to know.

I wouldn't know. I might have been part of the team doing the due diligence, but I've no detailed idea what Cambridge Instruments thought they were buying or what Thompson-CSF claimed to be selling.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

A claim that isn't supported by his posting habits. He likes to boast about his electronics. Talking about other peoples electronics isn't really his thing.

We fail to admire John's electronics as enthusiastically as he does.

Ways that strike John as reasonable. Anybody who doesn't share his point of view is guilty of "whining" or worse.

We hope.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I love to see and talk about other peoples' circuits. But so few people are willing to post anything real. You certainly aren't.

We do get a lot of vague, underspecified problem statements. Most such posters won't get specific when asked.

Only a few per cent of your posts relate to electronics. Lots of politics, AGW, economics, all fuzzy stuff.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

- incremental success - ALL development is incremental. Just how big the increment and how likely the success is usually the matter of judgement.

- design by committee - isn't really possible, but multiple concurrent design tasks might be made more practical if the multiple designers concur. Two sets of eyes are always better than one, when it comes to simple checking and cross-discipline overlap.

- collected data...to be supported - beats guessing every time. The important part of the 'It can't be done...' statement is the 'because....' part of the complete statement. You'd be best advised to keep your ears open for the full reasoning, or to force the completion of the statement to obtain the reasoning behind it. The reasoning can be discounted or stand, based on the collected (and analysed) data.

This knot can have little to do with actual anticipated technological leap.

Everyone likes to think of themselves as pulling their own weight - some can only really be happy to think of themselves as something of a hero. Unless you're self assessing yourself at close to 150% of your 'fair share' of the weight, it's unlikely you're close to pulling a full share. If all you really need is a medal to keep you happy, they're easy and cheap enough to produce, so long as you're not making a mess in the sand-box.

RL

My time at EMI Central Research was remarkably productive. I was part of a remarkably productive group of engineers - and I'm still in contact with many of them.

At the time we designed stuff onto big sheets of drafting film that would sit on a drawing board for a couple of weeks.

At coffee time we'd look at each other's work, and talk about what we were doing and why. There were times when the lab got littered with lots of cups of half-drunk cold coffee, when we'd got into a really interesting discussion.

It wasn't design by committee - we were all personally responsible for what we did - but we did exploit our various different fields of expertise, not to mention our resident genius's capacity to pull ideas out of left field.

Software walk-throughs seem to capture some of the same advantage.

True. The English version of "it can't be done" was "are you sure that this is going to work?"

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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I hope to publish the only vaguely real thing that I'm working on at the moment - which means that I can't publish it here. There's been the odd LTSpice simulation, but they aren't real.

It could be that low, but I'm no more likely to plow through it to get hard numbers than you are, and even less likely to try and dignify my gut feel by sticking a random number on it.

Politics and economics is often fuzzy. AGW isn't, but you want to believe that it is, and don't know enough to realise that this demonstrates persistent ignorance rather than scepticism.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

You've got to be pretty vacuous to be able to watch "Cheers". Even Michael Terrell should be able to find something better to do with his time.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

My experience has been varied and includes many contra-indicative examples, for reasons that are just as varied. Nothing is as straight forward as you'd like it to be.

Consider - 8 developers in one lab, where only 2 produced shippable product for two years (before dissolution). Strangely, the developers who shipped were assigned the least resources and were not included in the design or peer review of non-shippable output.

Consider - a large firm with many departmentalized responsibilities, each of which is represented in many-hours-long reviews by either bored and disconnected 'subordinates' or harried and resentful department heads; the most useful input actually coming from managers,subordinates, peers or consultants not in attendance; the most damaging decisions being made and delays being created by similar characters also not in attendance.

It's not always just the committee.

Or the obverse - a petulant 'tell me why I can't do it' - this being the first actual question to follow a long line of naive assertions and maybe the smartest thing being said. If only there was only a catchy acronym.

Issues have to be identified, if they're to be overcome.

.....and no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

RL

If you were part of the due diligence team you would have had a very serious need to know that. Every time I am doing DD I ask for a lot of background info and I get everything I ask for.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

That is probably *why* they shipped.

Governance is hard. You have to, IMO, identify the customers and do what they need done.

--
Les Cargill

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Only to the extent that they don't pose a threat to you, by being too 
clever, and that you can discount them as being unimportant while you 
exalt your own "achievements".

That's silly. I like circuits. They aren't threats, they're fun.

He's been working on that oscillator for years, and probably will work on it for years more. That gets old after a while.

My on-topic ratio is above 50%, higher if you count electronics-related stuff like documentation and business issues. His, and yours, are in single digits. Low single digits.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

--
Even when they point out your foibles?

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n't.

I've bought all the bits I need to put together a real-life example, and got the inductor and the transformer wound (which cost a couple of hundred dollars on its own). At the moment they are all on a boat which will get to Sydney early next month.

This isn't actually quite the same as the circuit that I'd been working on for year - I had a moment of insight in February this year and came up with something that looked distinctly more interesting, and - after running quite a lot of simulations and exchanging any number of e-mails with my clever friend in London - we came up with a version of that circuit that did seem to be worth the trouble of building.

I may well post as much off-topic content as John Larkin does, but a lot of it is reacting to nonsense that people like John Larkin and James Arthur post. I'd argue that I post a lower proportion of nonsense than they do, but you do have got to have a reasonably good grasp of the subjects under discussion to appreciate this.

True. but they are not always correct, and the threads involved can get tediously long.

Bill Sloman, Sydney

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True. But British management doesn't see it that way. They like their specialists to be on tap rather than on top, and certainly regarded the actual wording of the contract as commercially sensitive data to be held in strict confidence.

But you are doing it as a consultant, rather than an employee. If I'd felt the need to dig in my heels on the issue, they'd have transferred the task to another engineer.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney