Xilinx courses

Part of the problem is that they hire technical presenters that may or may not have strong design experience. Obviously, if the presenter hasn't wrestled with the tools on a real design, he is likely not going to be able to go too much beyond what is on the slides. There is a good chance that the person teaching the class learned the tools on the course materials and practiced with some canned labs. I would want to know who the seminar presenter is and exactly what his qualifications are before signing up for the course.

Also, Xilinx's idea of advanced design and a true expert's notion of the same are quite different. Unfortunately much of the expertise carried by the guru is the result of years of gruelling experience. While that experience can be highlighted, there is not really any easy way to transfer such depth of knowledge in a 2 day presentation. Xilinx used to use some of their "Xperts" to teach these classes, and you got the luck of the draw. Some of these guys are really good at teaching, some simply aren't. I don't know if they are still using their XPERTs partners to teach or not, I suspect not since I have not heard any requests to teach a seminar recently.

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--Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.

401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email snipped-for-privacy@andraka.com

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759

Part of the problem is that they (not just Xilinx) hire technical presenters that may or may not have strong design experience or a strong teaching background. Obviously, if the presenter hasn't wrestled with the tools on a real design, he is likely not going to be able to go too much beyond what is on the slides. There is a good chance that the person teaching the class learned the tools on the course materials and practiced with some canned labs. I would want to know who the seminar presenter is and exactly what his qualifications are before signing up for the course.

Unfortunately much of the expertise carried by the guru is the result of years of gruelling experience with real designs. While that experience can be highlighted, there is not really any easy way to transfer such depth of knowledge in a 2 day presentation. It is also difficult to capture that experience and distill it into a set of tips and rules that can be addressed in just two days. The presentation material is generally not prepared by the presenter in most cases either: it is a company wide presentation used by a number of presenters. Unfortunately, it has to be that way in order to provide a standard course and still meet the fairly high demand for the course. The problem of course, is that the material does not necessarily match the presenter's experience. Some of the things in it will invariably be new or done in a different way than the way the presenter handles that problem, and some of the material will be perceived as the wrong way to do things by some presenters. Hopefully the slides and any accompanying material provide enough material to add value to the presentation, otherwise I doubt there would be enough depth to have more than a feel-good value that would soon evaporate after the class. The bottom line is that these 2 day wonder seminars can really only serve to make you aware that there are techniques out there, and hopefully give you guidance to find the information you need.

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Mike Treseler wrote:

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--Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.

401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email snipped-for-privacy@andraka.com

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759

That's true Hal, sometimes the problem is we have gaps in our knowledge that we don't realise...

...or we don't even know where to start.

In which case asking the instructor questions ahead of time won't be too helpful, except maybe a good instructor will be able to guage where a student needs help by the types of questions they ask.

What's so special about FPGAs?

Is there any 2-day course that makes:

a law student into a crack lawyer a fresh doctor into an expert surgeon, a newly-married into a gourmet cook (note, I am p.c. and gender-neutral!) a high-school student into a fluent French speaker ( if not French-born) an engineer into a good presenter (or writer) a hardware-guy into a VHDL expert (I wish there was...)

Of course there is not. Learning takes time, effort, patience, and disappointing detours.

Why does anybody expect to get a chance to soak up relevant wisdom eight hours a day? What is a revelation to one student is old hat to another and irrelevant to a third.

Peter Alfke

Yeah the answer you want can be buried under tons of other answers in the documentation, and worse yet it might be broken up into pieces and scattered about. Documentation these days include search functions, but nothing beats an experienced human who can understand what a person wants even if they can't articulate it well.

As trainers, we have to deal with this fact every working day.

As you hinted, Peter, there is as much specialist expertise in being a good trainer as there is in being a good engineer. We try very hard indeed to give each course delegate a happy and valuable experience; that means carefully tweaking what we say and how we act, in response to the needs of individuals. That's why real warm pinkware trainers will go on being valuable for a while yet, despite distance-learning and web-accessed courses. It also means that we must continually take active steps to keep up-to-date and technically aware ourselves.

Our clients (or, at least, their employers) are paying us money for courses, and expect results. If they're reasonable people, they don't expect to get *everything* they need to know from a training course. But they reasonably expect to get enough new expertise, and enough help in steering around the topic's worst pitfalls, that when they return to work they will be able to save at least as much as the course has cost them. Here's my spin on it - your mileage may vary, but the conclusions are inescapable:

cost of a course: around $300-$600 per day travel and out-of-pocket expenses for the trainee: around $200/day total cost to the employer of losing an engineer from his/her desk: around $300-$500/day (in the US or Europe, anyways)

sheesh... that's big $$$ for a 3 or 5 day course. But wait a moment... if the course can give the engineer new expertise that prevents an error, and that error would have cost a few days to find, and a few days of time-to-market, and a few days of several other engineers' wasted time hanging around... perhaps the course isn't such bad value after all. And that's even before you start to count the downstream benefits of improved techniques finding their way into your normal working practices, and the time that other engineers would have wasted helping you to get up to speed.

The challenge for trainers is to understand what trainees need, and continually to improve what we deliver to meet that need better. I'm sad that someone as expert as Mike Treseler (a couple of posts back, in this sub-thread) has had such consistently negative experiences. All I can say is that I hope he fed back his criticisms to the trainers, and that I hope my outfit's batting average is rather better.

-- Jonathan Bromley, Consultant

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