resetting a filter

Water under the bridge, but a good example as to why it's a real advantage to have the information you need in order to tailor a CV to the position being offered. Not everyone has imagination, and I would say that the gatekeepers tend to have the least imagination-- and you have to get through those to get to the technical folks.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

This is one area where head hunters actually help. It's in their interest to put their clients in front of the person hiring. They can also help with the droids in HR (who aren't so interested in reading resumes). An added feature is that the good ones know the employer well and can help the applicant get around some of the obstacles.

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What the hell is wrong with you? I have employees. All of them are highly valued in today's market, and they could get other jobs pretty much instantly, and they know it. They stay with us (we have very low turnover) because we pay them well, and treat them very well, and give them fun, major league stuff to learn and do.

Lair? Is that what you call electronic design/manufacturing companies?

Small companies are more fun to work for. They don't have HR departments and usually don't use head hunters. You're likely to interview with the president or chief engineer, first thing. The last two or three engineers that I hired didn't submit resumes... maybe they didn't even have them.

Having worked for both, that can go either way. Many small companies are run by megalomaniacs and treat their employees like crap. Large companies, IME, not so much because everyone is an employee.

Not true at all. My PPoE had an HR department and certainly did use head hunters (they paid about $40K to one when I was hired).

Sure, but that's not just true of small companies. My direct boss is the Chief Engineer.

That's not the usual mode. Often it's just paperwork but the resume is usually required.

There's no reason to tolerate that. Quit.

Large companies, IME,

Must have been a bigger small company.

I don't require one. I do like to see someone's schematics or code.

In this economy, it isn't always easy. I'll take at least a $75K bath on my house and I expect it will take a year to sell it at that. I know a few others who simply can't afford to, so are stuck living in hell. I work with a guy who just escaped such a place (and I can back up his assertions because I interviewed for his old job ;-).

Just under 100 employees. At about 50, such things become a requirement.

You're unusual. Refreshing, but unusual.

I'd got through to the technical folk, and as far as I could see they were happy that I could do the job. Apparently Philips didn't have enough sense to realise that the HR people shouldn't be allowed to over-ride the technical folk.

My father wouldn't even allow the HR folk to talk to graduate hires until they'd signed the contract - it was difficult enough to get graduate to come and work in Burnie (population 16,000, and a long way from anywhere) without some clown in HR getting pompous about stuff he knew nothing about.

The first job I got after graduating - with Plessey Pacific - provided a classic example of the kind of problem that could come up. I'd talked to their personnel guy at the university six months earlier, during the annual milk round, and he'd tried to read me the Plessey graduate flyer, which I'd already got and read - when I pointed out to him that I'd already read the flyer and that I'd like to talk to him about specific jobs they might have, he got shirty, and ended the interview. The job interview with the technical folk went rather better - they'd asked me if I knew how a Xerox machine worked, and I told them how I thought it worked, and got close enough that my eventual boss - a nice guy - promptly said "you've got the job" which turned out to be true.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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All true. Bigger companies need a personnel department to look after the guys on the shop floor, and it's almost always managed by a power- hungry idiot who insists that personnel has the right to reject "obviously unsuitable" candidates.

When I got hired by Cambridge Instruments, the personnel department was run by a very nice - and very competent - woman who was apparently the managing director's mistress. When the guy that owned the company decided to mess the place up to make it's shares more valuable, that managing director resigned in disgust.

About a year later, the owner's messing about meant that she'd have to fire about a hundred people, and she resigned instead. Her replacement was an absolutely standard power-hungry clown, who repeatedly binned the CV of a marvellous Chinese mechanical engineer whose CV eventually got through to engineering because his wife played badminton with one of the junior engineers wives - that junior engineer later became one of the co-authors on my Peltier junction paper, but I got the story from my boss, who spread it around a bit.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Companies go through phase changes. On is around 15-20 FTEs, where you start to have factions. At 50-100, you start to have sometimes-senseless bureaucracies and useless managers.

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Fun, major league stuff that you can turn around in two weeks?

Try to be a little more plausible. You may do major leagues stuff from time to time, but most of your guys are going to be spending most of their time on minor modifications and adaptions. How long since you ripped up a design that was working and in production and started over?

-- Bill Sloman. Nijmegen

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In the UK Eurotherm and Racal apparently worked on the principle that any unit had to be kept under 250 people so that it could be run without a personnel department - the senior managers' secretaries dealt with the administrative detail (and were usually smarter than their bosses).

I worked for Chessell Recorders - part of the Eurotherm group - for five months in 1979 and got to see more of how that worked in practice than would normally have happened. Five of us resigned in the same week, and all got to talk to the Eurotherm Group's managing director, who was interested in what was actually going on, and tidied up the company a bit in consequence.

I hadn't had a clue that anything much was actually going on - I'd resigned because I'd got an unexpected better offer elsewhere.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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We've finished two butterfly laser drivers in the last few months, I have another out for PCB fab, and two more are on the way. We knew nothing about laser drivers until recently, and we're still learning. And that's a minor part of our business, maybe a less minor part in the future.

A big design may take months, like 6 or more, from concept to working first article, and might involve 5 or 6 boards in a box, FPGA designs, uP code, test code, manuals. Some little pulser or fiberoptic thing might be weeks from idea to a sellable board.

I never claimed anything else. Some stuff is really new, but sometimes we do a power supply, or a front panel interface board, or a test board that's not too exciting. But we do lots of designs, roughly a new PCB every couple of weeks. I do some layouts myself, mostly smaller high-speed stuff. I don't have the attention span for connecting a thousand or so BGA balls to one another.

but most of your guys are going to be spending most of

That is not so. I'd estimate that over 90% of our design time is for genuinely new products, or just experiments.

How long since you

To get the same functionality, practically never. It's not worth re-engineering existing products unless we really have to, like a serious problem or a part going obsolete.

Engineering is best spent on next-generation products, stuff that keeps us ahead of the competition or, better, stuff that opens entirely new markets.

Actually, we mostly design for fun, so we avoid revisiting old products or tweaking old circuits. Money is just a desirable by-product.

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Sure, there are inflection points that tend to do in companies. Some simple ones, where a "lunch" room is needed and of course, at some point you need meetings. "Factions" have never been an issue, AFAIC. If they are, management should be fired. If you've ever heard Dave Ramsey, he's got some pretty interesting business (and, of course, financial) advice.

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That's where auto-routing comes into its own. At about the time I left Cambridge Instruments - in 1991 - the printed circuit layout draftsmen were getting enthusiastic about the auto-routing software they were getting. Even back then it had gotten good enough that it was quicker than manual layout for complex digital boards, and reliable enough that it rarely did anything stupid.

I doubt if it can yet be relied on to pull tricks like compensating for the capacitance of a gate by narrowing a trace from 50R to 75R for a few cm, but I've been out of touch with that area for a while.

That would be high, if you've got it right.

And pigs have wings. I'm sure that you concentrate your efforts on stuff that is both innovative and likely to sell, but you wouldn't still be in business if the money aspect was secondary.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Aren't lairs supposed to be dark and gloomy? Ours is mostly glass on both ends, with skylights in the middle. It's hard to photograph a scope screen, what with all the reflections. I have one of my slaves hold up a black blanket behind me sometimes.

Nostalgia - does anybody else actually photograph a scope screen any more?.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen