Tales from the Career Trenches If you are like me, you probably learn your lessons best when put in a story form. The person telling the story may not know the rest of your history, or the lesson you'll draw from his story.
But the stories are useful to us none-the-less.

Some folks are better at telling Stories than others. I happen to think that Charlie Stross is pretty good. And right now he is telling the story of his Career in his blog series "How I got Here in the End". Useful stuff that. He occasionally takes a humorous look at the future too.

Enjoy.

If you are finding that fun, and you EVER think those Marketing shlubs have it easy, read Steve Blank.

Don't put your career on autopilot when the road is rough!  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 12:30 AM
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  So you got an offer you think. you hope.
and then you get a call from another company.
Do you tell them "No thanks"?

I've known a couple of folks in the industry who've have offers "rescinded" recently.
Nick the Headhunter tells it decently: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/hadeadly2.htm  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 8:08 PM
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  I'm an analog, now what? I had an interesting discussion about Analog IC design career strategies this morning:

1. Specialize in a crucial IP block - ie Gigabit Serdes / Pipeline ADCs - then consult around the industry to help people implement these into their designs. This works for up to 10 years before enough others understand your trick well enough to do it themselves.
   
2. Specialize in tool use and Optimization and general design, then work at companies where the above IP blocks are already in place, and you make changes and redesigns to reduce cost, power and increase performance and yield. This works for a while as long as you keep up with tools, process nodes and keep learning new tricks from the guys doing the first route.
   
3. Start a company. You many find design takes a second seat to finding customers.
   
4. Or join a startup, Its not that you don't do design, but you may also have to do CAD, IT, software, firmware, and test program development.
   
5. do hard IP macros.
   
6. go into management: which is just a variation on
   
7. go into real estate/ venture capital / get your mba / join an MLM -- in other words change careers.
   

Like the EDA industry the IC industry is hard put to collect on the value created by the end applications.. unless your devices are the crucial part of the end product (CPU / memory/ cellular radio).
Its my opinion, that we are now at the point of incremental growth in value in end user hardware..
phones with better screens, text input, battery time and connections (eg wifi + bt + ir + evdo + gsm + wimax + tv + gps)
---
but the real growth in the end user value is in the software available on the desktop, laptop, netbook, and phone.. or whats available on the network.

I hope this helps you in thinking about your career.

Jonathan  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 7:53 PM
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  Breaking into Analog IC Recently a friend who was one of my industry contacts when I was an undergrad (many many years ago between the invention of the PC and the invention of the internet) who is considering getting into analog design asked for some ideas on how to get a job in this arena.

While of course the key, as in any job situation, is to be seen as a reliable, competent engineer with enough experience in the field.
And Analog IC design may not be the future hot spot of design that he was hoping.

To be considered as reliable you probably need to be referred as a Friend of a Friend. Really.

To be seen as competent, it helps if people can see examples of your work. A Paper, A Patent. A successful chip project they've heard of. Your Thesis, a Circuit you designed and Fabricated in school.

Of course since he was at the end of his Ph.D, It was too late to suggest the best course of action (if you REALLY want to do analog design) : Get the MSEE/Ph.D under a well respected analog Prof. - Which of course is one route to building that network. After all you can be the greated Analog designer since Bob Widlar, but if no one else knows this, it won't help your salary.


Here is my answer: In case it helps you think of some ideas for your situation.

1. Write a paper on one of the Analog Circuits you developed as a part of your PhD research. Get that published. Give a talk on that. IE whats tricks did you have to play to get the Speed up to what was needed? to get good Yield?
(ie present at xxxx(local) SSCS chapter?)

2 Read: JSSC aka the Red Rag. pub cycle for that is prob 6 months if you can get in. only ~50% of submissions accepted.
Also Transactions on VLSI.

3. Books: Johns and Martin, Grey [lewis, Hurst] & Meyer. Razavi.

4. Conferences: ISSCC is premier. Other good ones are CICC (visit us here in SJC!)
RFIC. - best ones are the SSCS sponsored conferences.
for modeling and simulation, BMAS (right after CICC )is great, but much smaller.

Tools: With your device/process background, Verilog-A is a sure thing.. its the new "compact model" language. Verilog-AMS is even better. - but modeling is becoming a subskill to verification.
Know how to run analog sims.. and RF analyses too..
most analog designers work in the Cadence Analog Design Environment..
the rest live with spice netlists and run Hspice.. Nanosim, Hsim, etc..


I hope these ideas help.

Labels: analog, career

  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 7:08 PM
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  The white house embraces web 2.0 ? If you have not yet joined the revolution that Dave Winer and others started when they created RSS,
now the White House has an RSS feed.
--
Leverage your curiosity (its a core value!!) find yourself a feed reader, ( I use google reader)
and start subscribing.

Happy Feeding!  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 11:24 PM
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  values on which our success depends

"But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old.
Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States"

David Brin notes the curious presence of Curiosity as a core American value in his blog post today.

I think its time for Americans, and especially engineers to get re-involved with our government.
This is a perfect time. While a number of us have been laid off in recent months, and more will doubtless be affected as our companies adjust to new economic realities, The engineering approach has much to offer the challenges we face.

Have you been affected? Penelope Trunk recently posted about the benefits of working to your strengths.

"Because positive psychology coach Senia Maymin has spent hours on the phone explaining to me that if you just start living a conscious life, you can start meeting lots of disparate goals, not particularly related to the area you focus on for raising your own level of consciousness."

Don't focus on a weakness, focus on a strength. Your improvement and mastery there, will help you overcome the challenges of your weakness(es) .

Get ready to work. Get ready to serve. The call will come.

Happy new administration, and quote our new president:

"God bless you all, God bless America"

  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 10:42 PM
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  Are We behaving Well? Why Women leave STEM at 40. thanks to David Brin (the SCIENCE fiction author, and a champion for civilization) I'm made aware of a study that finds that nearly half of the women that START a career in the STEM arenas the IEEE tries to encourage (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Leave the field between the ages of 35-40. And the top reason is apparently related to gender discrimination and sexual harassment. The study found that 63% of these women had experience sexual harassment in the work place.

The IEEE ethics statement points 8 and 9 can be interpreted to addresses this.

• to treat fairly all persons regardless of such factors as race, religion, gender, disability, age, or national origin;
  
• to avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action;
  

As IEEE volunteers we ALSO need to be extremely careful in our behavior towards other volunteers. What would you consider to be "bad behavior" on the part of IEEE volunteers?

Labels: career, IEEE, women_in_engineering

  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 11:34 AM
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  Pace Project Call for and some Approvals I've been told that my prior declaration that I prefer to see projects that

• Benefit careers of current members
• leverage multiple sources of funds
• feed output back for other section's benefit - and build one

made it sound like sections should not submit projects that relate to K-12 outreach.

Wrong. Every potential geek kid deserves to find the joy of innovation and "creation" that we get every day as Engineers. I don't want to discourage outreach to the kids.

I want to encourage outreach, training and programs for our members as well.

today I forwarded approvals for the Montana section's Robotics project for middle school outreach, and Orange County's project for an FE exam review course for engineers that want to get started on the road to Professional Registration as an Engineer.

Next month I will open up a funding requests for sections that already have one approved. If you don't want your first project competing with other sections second projects, down load the project forms and get them over to me. some information is available in the Region 6 community and the forms are also available on the IEEEUSA pace projects forms page
If you want suggestions or examples of similar projects, please ask me!.

Please help us spend this money! and spend it in ways that truely benefit the EE community!
Jonathan


  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 1:51 AM
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  Ft Huachuca Section wins First Expense Report Submitted (R6) Award Following IEEEUSA Meeting Keith from the FortHuachuca section has submitted the First Expense Report I've gotten!
Thats pretty fast. He printed, signed and scanned his expense report back to a PDF and emailed it to me.. so even if someone Mailed it before they left Indy, Keith's is the first one I got.
Thanks..
By the way, it seems my Estimate of the taxed on the hotel were a little off, so I am Raising the allowance per section to $702.48 (unless there was a higher allowance.) as it will not cause us to exceed the limits on the funding allocated for this purpose!

Congratulations Keith
Jonathan  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 2:46 PM
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  Understanding How a Coach might help you By way of Greg Wilson I ran across a few of the Google Tech Talk "Coaching" series.
Among the many benefits Google offers it's employees (free lunches, fun work etc) is access to "career coaches" to help employee's reach the next level. So what you say.. how does this help me? Well as part of their program they invited several of their coaches to give presentations - which like most "tech talks" are recorded and made available to the rest of us.. (thanks Google!)
to see this series go to the tech talks page and add "coaching" to the list of search terms..
I've not watched all of these yet, but I CAN recommend a couple..
Coaching Series: Leading from Strength: Making a Difference
Coaching Series: Accomplishing More By Doing Less
and there is one presentation that will Help YOU improve your ability to communicate with those you interact with, the core of the coaching (and influencing) process.
Coaching Series: Impactful Communication
-- Which video do you like the best?
should we have a presentation like that for one of our meetings?
Have you worked with a coach before ? Can you tell us how that did or did not work?
Jonathan

Labels: career, employment, PACE

  ¶ Permanent Link to This Post 12:31 PM
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