Aromasin

I work as an application engineer in the semiconductor industry; basically tech support for engineers. I get customers from "We're going to build a product" to "Design is finished and we're ready to sell our system". As such, I work daily with the field team who are out there winning business. I can say without a doubt that whatever a buyer's perception of their sales rep, that person is the best internal advocate they're ever going to get.

The salesperson has a vested interest in getting the customer everything they need to win business so they get their commission. A good one is an utter pain in the ass internally because servicing them and the customer is quite often at the expense of everything else. 1:1 sales tactics don't scale unless the customer is huge. It's a classic 80:20 rule - 20% of customers normally drive 80% of revenue, so it's only sensible to focus on certain customers and ignore others - but obviously that only makes sense in a vacuum where businesses don't rise and fall, and suppliers alongside them, so you need to toe the value threshold when it comes to exposing customers to engineering - which is where a good salesperson is gold.

Product designers, developers, executives, and support staff - all of them have better things to do than service a single customer most of the time. Building features, marketing, hiring staff, documentation, validation, and making new products. All these things are 1:N activities. If they're sucked up talking to one customer, they're not doing 1:N. It quite often feels like the salesperson works for the customer, not us, because it's clear to everyone that the demands are hurting the product in the long run by sapping everyone's time doing servicing when the opportunity:cost ratio isn't there.

To your point, it feels great when a customer follows the expected flow. Planning/marketing/engineering/executives can be brought in as and when needed, rather than when they're demanded of. Almost all customers demand the time and attention of everyone but the sales team, but I've often found that the ones who provide all the info and jump through all the hoops get what they want much faster.

For those who aren't aware it's a 25% tarrif, so most manufacturers don't bother even trying to sell in the US. That's why almost all European/Japanese brand cars are 30+ years old over there.

I find it entertaining when my US colleague come visit and are amazed at all the options. I drive a new Toyota Hilux, and they weren't even aware they made them anymore. For a country that once prided itself on being the land of the free market capitalist, it's a shame the decision makers are so scared now of competition.

The thing is, compared to an ASIC you've got a commodity product that doesn't become completely redundant if you mess something up. With ASICs, you need another tape out. FPGAs you can just recompile and reprogram the device. I've had customer spot a bug on their code and stream an update through to a satellite in orbit; can't don't that with an ASIC.

The ability to buy them off the shelf and build something with them right away, testing in hardware rather than simulation, is something that's massively undersold too I think.

Not in this instance no. ZBB is a pretty common budgeting method I think. All the corporations I've worked at have used in in some regard.

Sorry less, I mean 4 days in the office, 1 from home.

Apologies yes, I mean 4 days in the office and 1 work from home - not a 4 day work week.

It does feel that way. They are an ex-division executive. If anything, I feel like this could be a case of them getting nicely managed out while building out that CEO experience before they go off and retire successfully into the sunset after making a shit tonne through an IPO, ignoring the gutting of the company they've done to make sure the short term balance sheet looks good; while the long term viability of it is in shambles.

I should note that we've had a huge amount of redundancies on top of people leaving for other opportunities. My guess is they want a very low-cost business that looks good in terms of its balance sheet so when it goes to IPO everything looks to investors.

My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job).

Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.

It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.

I wasn't the one to downvote you for reference, but to be clear, moving out and abandoning my partner and country so I can put together a half-baked MVP and give away equity for that hard work isn't what I, nor anyone else on this forum I suspect, would consider a good trade. I assume others are downvoting you because your comment sounds like you're running a scam operation.

If you want to conflate running away from responsibilities and joining a frat house as something that helps entrepreneurs, then you do. I would suggest looking at actual start-up incubators' work (Entrepreneur First and the like). Paying salaries and covering start-up costs, not just providing basic living expenses. What you're describing might as well be indentured servitude.

When I say I'm an electrical engineer, people often think I make a shit load of cash and barely work. Then I need to clarify I'm not an electrician.

I said computer to specify on-chip design, not hardware as in PCB/electronics work. I worked initially on CPU integration for industrial computers, which was that lower figure. I pivoted to FPGA design a couple of years ago and make a bit more now, but it's still pittance compared to my colleagues in other countries.

There's a bit more money to be made up in Cambridge with Arm and Qualcomm as you mentioned, but my take home would be less when adjusted for local housing costs. As for HFT, its an end goal if only to escape the cycle of poverty, but not something I want to do out of passion for the craft.

I'm in the same boat. I've been chasing my tail for the last 6 years, just trying to keep my head above water financially. I'm a computer hardware engineer so the pickings are slim to none outside of the military-industrial complex, which pays shit outside of sales and executive management. Ended up at one of the big US semiconductor companies where I got paid 1/3rd of what my peers in the US earn, with similar expenditures. A starting salary of £26k... Barely broke £34k, plus a couple of grand in stock each year during my time there, while my US colleagues doing the same job get paid $120k+. That's with a good master's degree from Bristol, which is relatively prestigious.

I'm sure if I moved to London and focused on software engineering I could make more, but that shouldn't be the only route to wealth in this country.

I've spent so long trying to build out a minimum viable product in my spare time, so I can make my start-up dream a reality, but going through integration hell needs to take up all of your time, every day, for a long time, to get through the hurdles in any meaningful time frame. Every time I go back to it, I feel like I'm back at square one. 6 years of saving and I have zero runway to take this full-time to give it the time it needs.

What's embarrassing is that I discussed this with my colleagues, and they didn't quite fathom how fucked it is for young engineers in this country until I had the conversation with them. I was getting the same salary now as my mentor did when he was my age; in the early '90s. Wages haven't just stagnated. When adjusted for inflation, they shrank massively. That's not even considering the £60k of student loan debt I get hammered by every month.

I live in Europe so most of my customers don't have English as a first language. Any questions are generally in pretty broken English. Honestly, reading through and making sense of what they're trying to say is a real mental challenge at times. I use LLMs to reformat and structure their message/ticket, which I paste into my notes. The accuracy is pretty good - certainly as good as me, although I do proof-read. I then ask it to pull out the pertinent information and bullet point it. I can turn those bullets into action items for me to investigate or respond to. It saves me about 15 minutes on each case, meaning I save maybe an hour every day in translating.

The next is for writing up beauracratic nonsense my organisation asks me to do. Monthly status reports, bandwidth allocation, deal-win summaries and the like. I write down what I've done at the end of each day, so I just feed that into an LLM and ask it to summarise the bulk bullet points into prose. It saves me god knows how many hour refactoring documents. I modify the prose when it's done, to match my personal style and storytelling methodology, but it gets me the barebones draft which is the most time consuming part.

I love LLMs personally, and am embracing them primarily as a scribe and editor.

I'd argue that thinking solely in terms of potential investment opportunity isn't capturing the whole value of trading on your local country's stock exchange. It's more money and a larger investor pool today, but less choice and power over one's destiny tomorrow. These sorts of economic micro-decisions accumulate. Where to put a company HQ, what stock exchange to trade on, hiring locally or abroad, selling up to foreign equity funds. As individual business decisions, the leaders might think it's an insignificant drop in the pond and simply the most important thing is making revenue tick up, but there are consequences to that being your only metric of success. It's jumping ship while the rest of the crew is trying to plug holes and bail it out. You've successfully escaped the sinking ship but are now in deep, shark-infested waters.

Perhaps I've just been reading too much on geopolitical power dynamics lately, but as a British person, I fear our economy is suffering from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts from seemingly "insignificant" decisions that pass on tiny parts of our sovereignty to other countries. In the case of companies trading on other exchanges, we're leaving ourselves more open to the whims of the investors on that exchange whose priorities and sentiments don't match the spirit of the country of origin.

I gave up on my Hotmail completely quite recently for the same reason. It seemed to just stop filtering altogether. I'd recieve somewhere on the order of 50 spam emails to my main inbox a day. If anything, it filtered more email I did want than those I didn't. I haven't had the same issue with gmail.

I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech. I think I remember them losing 30 £100M+ companies to the US exchange last year including some big really big names. I know this phenomenon isn't isolated to the UK either. With all the issues in Hong Kong over the last few years, companies have fled there too.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.

It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.

You absolutely can and many do. The issue is GPUs are a commodity product that get most of the way there in terms of performance without rewriting a whole software stack, and have huge economies of scale. You just buy millions of pre-existing products that do the job well enough, and dont become obselete when the new hot stuff of the year comes around because theyre generalised parallel processing units. As the industry become more mature we'll see more targetted inference/training engines come to the market, but the semiconductor industry works in decades not years.

The reason FPGAs work as an in-between product is because they are also a commodity product. All you need is a team to program the device. You can buy a million of them off the shelf right now, and there's a hundred other applications they're good for so you're not restricted when the time comes that your ASIC is no longer needed for whatever task it's explicitly designed for.

There's a good podcast called Acquired. Highly recommend it. They're private equity guys who cover the history of companies and what made them great, and cover the topic very well.

For IBM and AT&T, from what I gather it seems like they missed out on multiple waves of new technologies because there wasn't a market for it, or the revenue was so low it wasn't worth their time. They were market maintainers, not makers. They also rested on the fact that they were the incumbents, so made the incorrect assumption that people would always default to them out of convenience.

Your second question basically falls back to whether FAANG make the same mistake; resting on their laurels while some small fry breaks into a market they deemed too small to serve.

Check out the Agilex-M device: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/fpg...

Up to 38 TFLOPs of FP16 performance, up to 116 Gbps transceiver rates, and up to 3.9M logical elements (LE).

Memory bandwidth of over 1TBps using the NoC, using in-package HBM2E (up to 32GB capacity) and hardened DDR5/LPDDR5 memory controller (supporting 5,600 Mbps).

Maybe doesn't come into the power envelope (Agilex 5 is looking good on that front) of a low-power device, but it's an awesome chip. About £8k for a DevKit though.

They'll do what every vendor does; find that one workload that it's better at, and play that off as if it's that performant at every workload. Bad at 3DMark? Try Cinebench, Superposition, PCMark, Geekbench, SiSoftware Sandra, or even some other customer benchmarking software no one else uses.

I just want to reiterate the comment you're replying to; in mine and I safely assumed until now everyone else's mind, hardware means electronics/electrical. When I job hunt for a computer engineer role, I often use "hardware engineer" as a prompt and I've never seen it return a mech eng or robotics one. Hardware just seems the wrong word to use in your case.

Even Sanderson's "adult" fiction can read as incredibly immature at times. Every character seems to have a caricature of a mental illness. Every thought and feeling they experience seems to tie back to it, and it derails the story while taking away from the excellent world-building. I loved the Stormlight Archives to start with, but they became more and more "woke" (as much as I despise using that word) as time went on.

If you're interested in returning to fiction but through the lens of an adult - a little grittier - I'd recommend Joe Abercrombie, Pierce Brown, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dan Abnett, and Andrzej Sapkowski.

I love to see infrastructure jobs like this that don't interfere with people's daily lives. A similar feeling when I watch the Japanese build a subway in just 3 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BYW4YYqG5A

Meanwhile, just down the road from me, we've had a major bridge closed since April of last year, and is due to reopen October 2024....

Videos like this should be a lesson to Civic planners everywhere.

Did we read different articles? Did you just fixate on that line and not read the rest? She was the one doing the examination and verbalising her concerns. The AI disseminated that information the doctor provided and reformatted it into bureaucratic prose just like doctors scribes have been doing for the last few centuries. I don't see the issue here in the slightest. None of the "doctoring" has been outsourced, just the scribe work.

Reframe it in your mind. "Getting into FPGAs" needs to be broken down. There are so many subsets of skills within the field that you need to level expectations. No one expects a software engineer to jump into things by building a full computer from first principles, writing an instruction set architecture, understanding machine code, converting that to assembly, and then developing a programming language so that they can write a bit of Python code to build an application. You start from the top and work your way down the stack.

If you abstract away the complexities and focus on building a system using some pre-built IP, FPGA design is pretty easy. I always point people to something like MATLAB, so they can create some initial applications using HDL Coder on a DevKit with a Reference design. Otherwise, there's the massive overhead of learning digital computing architecture, Verilog, timing, transceivers/IO, pin planning, Quartus/Vivado, simulation/verification, embedded systems, etc.

In short, start with some system-level design. Take some plug-and-play IP, learn how to hook together at the top level, and insert that module into a prebuilt reference design. Eventually, peel back the layers to reveal the complexity underneath.

Very responsive; can't say the same for most browser games so well done.

I managed to complete it in one shot. The old dog still has it :)

I work at one of the big 3 FPGA companies, so I can give you an idea of where our teams spend most of their time, and you can translate that into a hobbyist project as you will.

1. Video and Broadcast. Lots of things to be done here. New protocols are being introduced every year by IEEE for sending video between systems. Most cutting-edge cameras have some sort of FPGA inside doing niche image processing. You can get a sensor and build yourself your own Camera-on-Chip. It's a fantastic way to lose a year or two (I can attest to that). Some good material on the matter here: https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/fpga-image-processing.ht...

2. Compute Acceleration. This is more data centre-specific. SmartNICs, IPUs and the like. Hard to make a dent unless you want to spend 200k on a DevKit, but you could prototype one on a small scale. Some sort of smart FPGA switch that redirects Ethernet traffic between a bunch of Raspberry Pis dependent on one factor or another. One company that comes to mind is Napatech. They make a bunch of really interesting FPGA servers systems: https://www.napatech.com/products/nt200a02-smartnic-capture/

3. Robotics and Computer Vision. Plenty of low-hanging fruit to be plucked here. A rediculous amount of IO, all needed to work in near realtime. Hardware acceleration kernels on top of open standards like ROS 2. I always point people in the direction of Acceleration Robotics' startup in Barcelona for this. They're epic: https://github.com/ros-acceleration

4. Telecomunications. This is a bit of a dark art area for me, where the RF engineers get involved. From what my colleagues tell me, FPGAs are good for this because any other device doesn't service the massive MIMO antenna arrays besides building custom ASICs, and the rate of innovation in this area means an ASIC made one year is redundant the next. Software-defined radios are the current trend. You could have fun making your own radio using an FPGA: https://github.com/dawsonjon/FPGA-radio

The full final report is well worth a read for those with time on their hands: https://www.futureofhumanityinstitute.org/s/FHI-Final-Report...

You raise another good point; is all monetization of a hobby the same? No, of course not. It's such a blanket statement to say "Save the money-making schemes for work".

Plenty of people have collecting hobbies that almost go hand-in-hand with monetization. Stamp or coin collecting comes to the top of my mind. Value is discussed almost constantly in those communities, and people are forever uptrading their collection to become more valuable over time; it's an investment as much as anything else, and while you will seldom make money there's always an element of minimizing loss. Same with cars, video games, cards, records, and comic books. We collect them because we think they hold value, join communities that also think they hold value, and use money as a scale to judge what value it holds.