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: ??