The FPGA Designer Who Didn't Get the Job
zipcpu.com
zipcpu.com
Maybe he should ask his client how much they are offering first before complaining about the South Asian labour supply. Post the total compensation offered at the start of the blog post. I am sure there are plenty of talent from IIT who will be more than qualified if his client is willing to pay well. Ask his clients to price match the hire's salary with his own Gisselquist Technology per-hour consulting fees.
The client, if they had to ask an outside consultant to vet a candidate for them, must be a small business. They do not have enough work 5 full-time employees, one of whom works on design. The designer is the verification engineer and the project manager and the customer support person. I don't mean the person works 100 hour weeks. They will work the normal 40, but there won't be enough design work to do 40 hours of it per week.
If the candidate wanted to do one thing and one thing only, they won't find it in any small business. They should focus on applying to large companies. And the client should find someone who is fine with being a "full-stack" hardware engineer, instead of a hyper-focused professional.
Big banks do this to the juniors: pay them tons of money and work them to death. They have no problem finding talent. But I prefer companies find ways to make their employees lives not miserable instead of saying "here's some money for your misery, you may want to spend some of it on a good psychologist".
I am saying this as someone who has seen what working in oilsands does to people. Some people enjoy it, but some only stay for the money. They are extremely well-paid, extremely miserable, and never quit.
However I suspect we aren't talking about FAANG/unicorn-capable top talent here, hence the candidate applied to this job in the first place. I'd also be suspicious the candidate is ducking questions because they can't answer them. Unless it's just interview practice for them and a waste of time for the company anyway.
The problem is that EE/FPGA jobs have to compete with FAANGs.
However, hardware, by and large, isn't VC funded. Hardware also has a fairly objective criterion for success.
So, you're not going to get offered $200K unless you actually know what you're doing and bring direct business value. And, if you don't know what you're doing, that's going to be apparent real quick.
As for the ZipCPU author:
1) I don't have to make interviewees go through projects. A simple state machine is enough to separate the wheat from the chaff in Verilog. Practically every online tutorial gets non-blocking and blocking assignment wrong--so interviewees who get that right have demonstrated that they have been bitten by real experience.
2) Quoting Bible verses is a GIGANTIC red flag for me, personally. All the businesses I have dealt with that have done this have been owned by absolutely terrible people with only a single exception to the contrary.
Too bad. That is the free market. The market is not obligated to provide companies with labour, just like companies are not obligated to provide people with jobs.
But the flip side is that I'm also not required to hire someone either.
However, programmers don't get to complain that the FAANGs are gatekeeping/discriminating/etc. when the programmers decided that FAANG jobs are the only ones paying salaries they're willing to work for.
The problem with FPGAs is that they're only really useful in very narrow niche applications--generally with hard real-time constraints. So ... motor controllers, high-speed ADC/DAC interfacing (think software defined radio), weird processing algorithms that don't work well on a DSP, safety interlocks, etc.
Most people are far better off learning a microcontroller family in depth (think: STMF32 series, for example). You can really bend the functional units of a microcontroller a long way from their intended usages in order to abuse them to do what you need under most circumstances.
I don't reach for FPGAs much anymore as an embedded engineer. Normally I trawl through the various microcontrollers to see if I can make something do what I need. If those don't work, the next layer is to look at SoCs like the AM3359 from the BeagleBone Series which have stronger processors to run Linux (Linux provides larger storage, CPU, and lots more communication options) but have hard real-time units (the PRUs).
Finally, if even those don't work, then I'll start thinking about a cheap FPGA in concert with an external microcontroller.
One unusual thing is that I'm an absolute bigot about not putting microcontrollers inside my FPGA (neither soft nor hard cores). Even the worst microcontroller toolchain is better than the best FPGA toolchain so I am adamant about external microcontrollers.
This shouldn't have been too shocking. In the digital design industry, design engineers and verification engineers really are different positions. They require different skills, and though there are people who can do both well, they haven't been interchangeable for a few decades. I'm not surprised that an applicant for a design position would decline a verification job, especially if they're not just looking for an entry point at some prestigious team like Apple's CPU group.
The strange thing is that finding a bug and "fixing a broken design" is a design task, not a verification task. The verification engineer creates the simulation testbench and the tests to expose bugs. The design engineer uses these to find and fix the bugs. I doubt that most design applicants would balk at being asked to find and fix a bug in an existing design. So I'm not really sure exactly what he asked the interviewee that got the response he claims.
> One of the realities ingrained in the history and culture of Gisselquist Technology is that simulations rarely find the critical bugs.
This statement is so wrong that I think the author must have decided to redefine "critical bug" as any bug that simulation doesn't catch. In reality, there are critical bugs found at multiple steps -- design review, simulation, prototyping, ... not to mention critical bugs found in backend "verification" (timing analysis, equivalence checking, ...). The author pushes formal verification but it's not an alternative to simulation; it's a complementary strategy.
I'd also balk at that for an interview take-home test.
I was an Indian QE guy looking for a dev job once. I was that guy whose job was to write tests for someone else, which wasn't fun at all.
If I had interviewed somewhere and I felt the conversation was going towards "how good are you at writing tests, write some", I'd have noped out of it immediately.
Specifically because testing was being offshored (think of the early 2000s) and development work was being held at HQ at my then employer.
I would expect that this work would be my day-to-day based on that interview.
That sort of "stale smell" around the job of writing tests for someone else's code stinks to say the least.
Right now I'm on the other side of the hill, I'd consider it a red-flag if someone interviews me for a day without asking me "review this code" or "analyze this design", but merely whiteboard a bunch of algorithmic C++ code without any tests.
The client trusts him, not a theoretical average engineer but the exact specific engineer who has been successfully delivering results. The client wants another one of those HDL engineers who handles verification. The candidates rejection is indeed an impasse, such happens. Doesn't mean the candidate was wise.
The only value created by the interview is the possible hiring of the candidate themselves. There is no room for profitability interviewing candidates "on the cheap".
> I bit my tongue on my first response.
> My next response would’ve been a simple, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
I must be missing something. After the candidate rejected the job he was going to tell him "Thanks, but no thanks." Is this like "you can't fire me because I quit", except for the hiring party?
It's the same with testing: it's in huge need but few want to do it, and similar traps are laid there: "come work for us, you can do what you want, but first let's do not what you want".
"This server will talk to that server" is great, until your designer specifies you're going to use passive FTPS and forgets that the particular FTPS server you're talking to has no mechanism to restrict its ephemeral port range, and your customer isn't down for opening ports 1024-65535. "It's just FTP, we'll just open the FTP port".
I am miserable because of it. I want a say in what I build, I was promised a say in what I build, and I have no say in what I build.
- Bringing over and over again that "he was an official of the US army"
- the "you didnt reject me, I reject you" spiel, although this part was hilarious to be fair,for being so childish.
- The part when "he bit his tongue" before answering to the kid. What does he think he had to answer?
- The "one person Christian company" thing
And I got bored, he sounds like a "Prima-Donna" too. The post is an exquisite example of projecting in action.
He did make an unnecessarily-specific statement about being a lt. colonel at one point, but I don't know that it's a hard rank to get to. I though it was more the point at which career officers got stuck.
I would imagine that there are potential communication obstacles to overcome for anyone choosing to work with him.
This is probably the most important line of the post for context. The latter 70% is a copy/paste of an email response he sent to a job applicant who said he wanted to do design, not verification. Presumably this copy/paste is almost the entirety of his response because the post ends the way you would expect an email to end, with a signature.
I don't know the full situation, but I'm imagining the candidate said "not quite what I'm looking for" and got this guys life story in response, along with insinuations that he's a Prima Donna, and judgments like "If you are a design engineer who can’t humble himself enough to verify a broken design that’s been given to you, then I foresee that you will also be difficult to manage."
He might be a nice guy, I don't know. But from what I see of this interaction, he was acting like an asshole.
> On another team I worked with, I was asked to call a man by female pronouns. This one brings me more grief, as I enjoyed working with the individual in question. He wanted to declare himself to be a woman. He changed his name, his clothing, his looks, his dress, you name it. While I might disagree with his decisions, who made me a judge? However, for me to call a man a “she” would make me a liar. This I refused to do.
> My Christian beliefs are centered around a literal interpretation of the Bible. This includes a belief in a 6-day creation that took place roughly six-thousand years ago, a belief that God will cause the end of this world rather than any man-induced climate change, a firm belief that a free people should be an armed people, and more.
Ouch.
Why did the deity put the fossils there? In order to confuse us? In order to challenge the faithful? It defies reason. You can only put it as a mystery of faith. But it needn't be.
If you are going to create a planet (or universe) from scratch to be the home of an intelligent species, including a realistic history is critical to give that species sufficient historical context to learn about how things work.
Understanding evolution and biology is a lot harder if you have no fossil record. Understanding plate tectonics is a lot harder if you don't have a consitent geologix record. Understanding physics is a lot harder if you don't have a light coming in from events that predates the creation of the universe.
Thus if you grant that the universe was created 7000 years ago with a huge, detailed and consistent history, the clear implication to me is that we are intended to study that history to understand the universe in which we exist.
Went into a creationist museum once (real thing). And the literal answer to your question was ”Yes, Satan put the fossils there to temp us away”.
I can’t attribute that to all creationist, but it was the case for the few I interacted with.
He changed the subject and never brought it back up to me again.
In Heinleins “Book of Job,” this is suggested as the answer in one scene. A grand book
Furthermore, when can we tax religion in the USA and weaken its power over the population?
I am all for anyone who wants to live a Christian life in accordance with the Bible. Good luck to them. 99% of modern American protestant Christians are frankly full of shit. I sadly was one for many years until I started reading the book I was espousing.
It seems silly to take those words and interpret them in a way that means you should not defend yourself.
The real answer is that the Bible was written by people who like it or not had agendas themselves. What was King Jame’s word, and why was it so important he had his own version of the Bible?
Christianity like most other religions has plenty of examples of righteous self-defense.
> But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
So, assuming Jesus was speaking literally, the only possible interpretation I can think of is that Jesus wanted you to buy a sword, but not use it against others. Why he wanted you to buy a sword, I don't know. Maybe he had a friend blacksmith.
From Arm 2:9-21,
> And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulapas. And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'
Now I understand.
The consensus on this may seem confusing because other English speaking countries have not necessarily adopted this clear separation, within trans communities or areas willing to be inclusive.
So on the internet, a lot of discussion on these topics gets mixed up with exclusionary as well as simply Commonwealth residents versions of how to be inclusive.
The general recognition is that people are able to be productive members of society by simply saying their desired pronouns. Even when “they” adds an additional context as a singular form which didnt exist prior, or when “xie” didnt previously exist as an English word. It is such a simple ask with massive productivity leverage that people are willing to do it. It would not be a lie, when separating sex from gender.
Not that anyone but your doctor should care.
There is no consensus either, outside of a small minority. Prior to 2012, custom pronouns would have had you laughed out of the room. You don’t get to redefine language and force your linguistic preferences on others. That’s not how language works.
In fact I think it actually does. In the last century this kind of thing has happened many times. One phenomenon is the way we refer to people who have intellectual disabilities. Sometimes it's called the Euphemism treadmill - as clinical names are created to describe a problem, they get used as a pejorative and the clinical name is now associated with the pejorative use. New clinical names are created without this association and on it goes - idiot, moron, retarded, slow, special needs, etc.
Also, minorities have sought to redefine how they're described. Negro, black, African American. Oriental, Asian.
Natural languages reflect their usage. So it's normal for popular usage of language to change how we speak. Some of those changes are incidental and some are deliberate - the result of a social campaign.
you literally do and that’s literally how language works. You are free to disagree with these new definitions, and in turn people are free to show you the door, just like what occurred in the post above.
(What’s the alternative? Words are given a fixed definition at their conception? Who gives these definitions?)
this is all unfortunately very far from the original argument, which is that it takes no effort to just use whatever pronoun is asked for. It’s no different than when someone named Thomas says “please call me Tom.” Do you jump up on the table and start citing Bible verses about the perils of falsehoods, or do you just fucking call the guy Tom?
I don't particularly care about rehashing the ethics of preferred pronouns right now, but what you've described is exactly how language works. You might look into why standard practice moved away from capitalizing nouns in the 19th century.
I can't find any reason on google. Got a link?
English is like easy mode for inclusion.