The Valentine's day of a DFT engineer

He woke up on Tuesday morning and checked the date. It was the 17th of February. "Ah, Saturday was Valentine's day", he said to himself. He decided that he would call his girlfriend and wish her a belated Valentine's day and probably ask her for coffee during his fifteen minute break at 3pm.

His last relationship had ended in a disaster, He was sitting in front of the computer, staring at the screen, which was RED everywhere. "Why is my simulation failing? I did DFT insertion as per the recommended flow" he asked himself. His ex-girlfriend walked into his office and told him that she was dumping him. He was too engrossed in the waveforms to listen to her. "Sure honey, whatever you say" he replied. He cried during his fifteen minute break.

He was a romantic guy, but his manager's nagging had turned him into an insensitive prick. He still made an effort to remember his girlfriend's birthday and their anniversary. He even set up an outlook calendar alert.

He walked up to her and gave her a Valentine's day card. It was the same card his ex-girlfriend had given him, the previous year. He dug it out of his office locker just before his break started. "Good thing she didn't sign it", he said to himself. They were sitting in the mall next to his office, she drove fifteen kilometers to meet him. "Honey, this can't go on like this", she said. "Yes, We cannot complete DFT insertion in half a day", he replied. "Not that, I'm talking about us.. Actually, it is just me, you were never there. I cannot go on like this, I think we need to go different ways". She walked back to her car and left immediately.

He cried for the remaining six minutes of his fifteen minute break

Janitor

This interesting strip reminded me of an incident in my team. There is this senior guy in my team who was in a call with the customer

Customer: So, did you do the DFT insertion for this design

Guy: No, I was pulled in after it turned into a mess

Customer: Do you follow the mess, or mess follows you

Guy: My designation is DFT Engineer, but my job description is that of a janitor. I clean up others mess.

Ever since then, that guy is called the DFT janitor.

Ebay

I had the weirdest dream the other day.

I woke up and I found myself in a vehicle of some kind.
Me: Where the hell am I?
my sister is sitting next to me

sis: You are in an ambulance. You just came out of surgery.

me: I went into surgery! Why?

sis: You just donated your kidney you Dummy..

me: I donated my kidney! Who did I donate it to?

sis: Nobody... It is up for sale on ebay

me: It is up for Sale on ebay!

Now people who know me, know that I have a tendency to pick up accents. When I listen to somebody speak, I pick up their accent. That night, I watched "The hottie and the nottie", before going to bed, So I had an American accent, and not just any accent I was talking like Paris Hilton.

I was screaming "My kidney's on ebay, my kidney's on ebay".

Then we reach home, and for some strange reason, this was my old house in Hyderabad. There I saw my childhood crush standing in front of my house. She was wearing a Saadi and looking beautiful.

Girl: So, rich boy... ready to get married

me: Did I say I'll get married?

Girl: Yes you did. Before you went into surgery

me: How come I don't remember any of this?

Girl: So, ready to get married?

me: Yes, but I'm not sure if I can indulge in a lot of post marital activites.. I'm not sure how much physical activity I'm allowed to take part in, with just one kidney.

Girl: It doesn't matter, as long as you are rich, I can find my source elsewhere.

me: You will be screwing around with my money! I think i need to wake up.

When I woke up I checked my back for surgical scars.. Just in case you know..

Damn these weird dreams

Important lessons

I have talked about manager lingo, layoffs and MTBF so far, but today I'm going to tell people a very important fact of life...

"All Managers and Professors are Idiots"..... There I have said it. I have all the evidence to prove it as well.

Here are a few examples from my life.

A chip that we designed was consuming an outrageously high amount of power and generating lots of heat. As a matter of fact, we even considered designing room heaters with this chip instead of cell phones. A task force with a few hundred managers, two design engineers and a few product engineers was formed immediately to debug what was happening. The product engineer couldn't get any debug done, because the tester fuse would burn out the as soon as they turned the device on. He somehow managed to run the tests on the samples bypassing some logic and doing some magic. He represented all the test results on a matrix with sample id on one axis and test name on the other. He used a "1" to represent a failed test and a "0" to represent a passed test.

They put up the results on the screen and the first reaction from the managers was

"Wow, Everything passed, that's good news".

The product engineer spent some time trying to explain to the managers that a "1" was a fail and only one test passed. The response was

"No No, I think this is a bad representation. It is misleading. A 1 is more positive than a 0 and should be used to represent a pass".

Then they spent two hours explaining this point.. They never really got to the silicon debug. They scheduled another meeting to discuss the silicon issues, once these data errors were "fixed".

3400 "non performing" employees were laid off and these idiots are still here.


A guy i know submitted his dissertation to his professor last week. He had to defend his thesis and the questions were

Prof: How many lines of code did you write?

Guy: Actually it is a new BIST architecture. I have the RTL of the module, if it is of any interest to you. It is a few hundred lines of code

Prof: Just hundreds... Students of this university write thousands of lines of code. What language is it coded in

Guy: Verilog...

Prof: Why verilog, why not some other language?

Guy: ??

Layoffs

My company laid off 3400 people this week, and claimed that this move was absolutely necessary to survive, what they believe is the most painful recession most of us would see in our professional lives. Then they used the money to renovate our cafeteria.

On a completely different note, I have been really jobless these days. Apparently, my manager was asked not to assign any new work to me, until my role was aligned with upper management. I remembered this Dilbert strip immediately. Soon after that, I found this and this.

My conversations with my managers and managers of other teams have been rather gloomy.

Me: So, Can i help you with something
Manager1 : Depends, How jobless are you?
Me: I have re-written all the release notes for correctness and completeness...
Manager1: Hang in there man, the recession won't last long......

Me: Why the long face?
Manager2: Let me guess, you haven't been to the glass room yet?
(The glass room, is the place where people have their one on ones with the big boss)
Me: Don't scare me like that man... Is it that bad?
Manager2: Why do people fear change so much? It is up to us to make change look like a good thing. Let us approach things with a positive attitude and solve our customers problems..
Me: ROTFL
Manager2: There, I have done my job..... If the big boss asks you... please tell her you bought that BS. If you ask me, if I believe that crap, I'll say, I'm not paid to think otherwise...