Archive for October, 2009

Harry Gries is an experienced ASIC designer, applications engineer and consultant who writes the popular EDA blog Harry the ASIC Guy. At DAC this summer, Harry hosted three highly informative sessions at Synopsys Conversation Central focused on how to use social media to find a new job in the EDA industry. The sessions were called “Job Search: How Social Media Can Help Job Seekers and Employers,” and Harry summarizes some of the key content in the following interview.

Rick: During your sessions at Synopsys’ Conversation Central, you presented a unique mnemonic phrase: GLACNJBP. Please unpack what that means.

Harry: The first letters of that mnemonic spell out the expression “Good Leaders Are Creating New Jobs. Be Prepared.” First off, I do think that good leaders, those who are not panicking and who are instead treating this downturn as an opportunity, are indeed looking to create new jobs because there are so many experienced and talented people out there and  available. So there are and will be opportunities, but there will also be fierce competition for those opportunities.

The first letters of the mnemonic also stand for some of the approaches you can take for using social media to help you find that position:

G is for Google. One of the first things that I or a prospective employer will do to learn a bit about you is to Google your name. Have you tried doing this yourself? Will prospective employers find pictures of you drinking in college? Or find a paper you wrote for a conference? Depending on what’s there to find, you may need to clean up your online rep.

L is for LinkedIn. I have spoken to many hiring managers and recruiters and all of them say that LinkedIn is the new resume, the first place they go to find out who you are and who you know so they can “check you out.” You should cultivate your LinkedIn profile like a resume. As a general rule, an experienced professional with 10 years experience should have 100+ connections, be members of at least half a dozen LinkedIn groups, and have at least one recommendation per position you had.

A is for Announce. Losing your job can be embarrassing, but its not the time to be proud. It’s important to announce your status if you’re between jobs. How else would your networks know that you’re available? You can update your status on LinkedIn, update Facebook, use Twitter, and even good old fashioned email and phone calls.

C is for Community. There are technical and personal communities everywhere in which you can find and interact with others that share common interests. They cover a variety of disciplines, from verification to low-power to embedded processing and more. Join them. Participate in them. Comment on blogs. Contribute to forums. Being seen as someone who’s interesting and willing to help is never a bad thing.

N is for Network. Possibly the most traditional, networking is still extremely valuable. And keeping in touch with colleagues has never been easier than with tools like LinkedIn and Facebook. You can use LinkedIn to identify people you know at a company that you are targeting. From them you can find out more about the position and even get your resume on the hiring managers desk with a personal recommendation. Of course, networks, like plants, are healthiest when fed constantly so hopefully you’ve been nurturing your network before you need it.

J is for Job Boards. They’re helpful to both employers and job seekers. Monster and HotJobs are well-known names and Ive also heard good things about Dice, Indeed and Simplyhired.com — and even Craigslist. Most of these are free so expect a lot of people to be using these sites and any position to get a lot of applicants. Good time to invoke your network and see if you can get in behind the firewall.

B is for Blog. If you like to write and have something interesting to say, blogging is definitely worth a try. Sharing your expertise and showing your personality on a blog is a way to bring credibility to yourself. If starting or maintaining a blog is overwhelming, try posting comments on other people’s blogs. You can always contact me for advice on this.

P is for Prepare Your Skills. It’s important to keep up your skills especially when you are out of work. There are so many free online webinars and other learning opportunities today that there is no excuse for not brushing up and enhancing your skills. And at least one EDA company is offering free customer training to unemployed engineers on a space-available basis, so take advantage if you can.

Rick: As an electrical engineer and early blogger in the EDA space, why did you originally start blogging and what motivates you to continue?

Harry: I’ve spent a lot of my career learning how to communicate effectively and always enjoyed writing. I also felt like I had a lot of insights that I wanted to share with people. I was discussing this with a friend of mine, Ron Ploof, and he said “You should start a blog.” I thought about it and decided to go ahead. I guess its a way to express my opinions to a larger audience and have some influence in the industry.

As an independent consultant, it was also a way to establish and enhance my reputation and get more exposure. Previously, I was pretty much anonymous in the industry except among those with whom I’d worked. This year at DAC, most of the people I met for the first time said something like, “Oh, youre the ASIC guy,” so it seems to have worked.

What keeps me going is that there is so much to write about and so much changing in the industry. Some want to declare EDA to be dead but I disagree. If anything, EDA is more critical than ever because these massively complex chips would be absolutely impossible to design without these tools. Also, on my blog Ive become one the main advocates for cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service for EDA tools which I believe will transform the industry and enable smaller companies to be more effective. That cause keeps me motivated as well.

Rick: From your perspective as a new media-savvy EE, do you see any unique opportunities or concerns within engineering communities that influence their adoption and use of social media?

Harry: Yes. I see both concerns and opportunities and it depends on what you call “new media.” Most people define new media as those technologies popularized in the last 3-4 years: blogs, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and so on. At this point, Id estimate that 90 percent of those in EE using new media for professional purposes are in marketing, sales, public relations, and other roles where they interact with people from other companies and the industry on a daily basis. I have not seen as much of the hands-on engineer adopting social media… yet.

There are concerns about social media being a distraction and waste of time, of the ability of engineers to communicate, of potential proprietary information leaking out, of security and bandwidth, and also whether the content is really relevant to an engineers daily work. These concerns are not unlike the early 90s when companies expressed concern over their engineers wasting time on the Internet. I think a similar process will occur as companies allow — and then encourage — more social media over time.

Although engineers may be late to the new media party, they have had their own party which is the old fashioned bulletin boards and online forums where they have been interacting, sharing, and collaborating for some time. I think engineers will actually get more benefit out of the collaboration enabled by social media. This is already happening within some companies internally using tools like Wikis for collaboration and blogs and micro-blogs for internal communication. As an industry I think there is an even greater opportunity for collaboration between and amongst companies, as long as we can get past the felt need to consider everything as proprietary. For instance, if I have a script that integrates two tools, that script could be shared open source with other engineers in the industry and wed all not have to re-invent the wheel. Right now, however, most employers would consider that script as a competitive advantage and want to keep it internal. We need to figure out as an industry how to collaborate on tools like these and focus on keeping the real family jewels locked up.

Rick: What are some of the projects you are involved with these days.

Harry: Im doing technical consulting work most of the time and that is important for me to stay close to the technology and tools and what is going on. Ive recently started working part-time with Xuropa, a company that shares my vision of putting EDA tools on “the cloud” to make them more accessible to engineers and to help EDA companies do more with less. Ive also got my hands in a few other things: doing some research for one company, working with a company that does consulting to consulting companies to help them be more effective.

Ive informally advised some companies on new media, and Ive been asked to develop a few webinars which Im trying to find the time for. None of these opportunities would have likely been there had it not been for the blog, so it really has helped me to get more involved in the industry. Ive learned through this downturn that engineers dont have guaranteed jobs and need to have their hands in a lot of different areas because they never know how or when the economy will turn. You always need options and its nice to have them.

I’m also helping my wife with her business that develops child safety products. Your readers can find out more about this on a recent blog post of mine at http://theasicguy.com/2009/10/22/honey-i-tattooed-the-kids/.

As a consultant with Verilab in Austin, Texas, JL Gray consults and presents workshops around the world on verification methodology and planning. He has also worked extensively on the application of social media to the EDA industry as a means of fostering collaboration in the wider engineering community. JL is well known as the author of Cool Verification, a blog about hardware verification from a consultant’s perspective.

Recently at DAC, JL hosted three sessions for Synopsys’ Conversation Central titled “So You Want to Be a Blogger?” In the following interview, we had a chance to chat about some of the highlights from those conversations.

Rick: What were the key takeaways from your “So You Want to Be a Blogger?” sessions at DAC?

JL: The main takeaway for me is that there is a lot of interest from the EDA marketing, PR, and journalism communities in understanding what it takes to communicate with bloggers. Many of those individuals also want to know how to start blogs themselves.

There was less interest than I expected from practicing engineers, and more interest than I’d expected from folks who are currently unemployed. The funny thing is, I contend it’s much better to start a blog *before* you’re unemployed than after.  Though you have much more time afterwards, you don’t want to have to wait several months while the blog is gaining traction while your savings dwindle. Plus, I think it looks a bit opportunistic. If I was looking at hiring someone who was unemployed, and they have a blog that started around the time of their last paycheck, I’m going to wonder…

Another takeaway for me was the general acceptance of blogging as a worthwhile endeavor by the “establishment.”  At the DAC Birds of a Feather session in 2008 there was a lot of hostility between the traditional press and bloggers, but that has diminished quite a bit in the last year. Now I think it’s generally accepted that it is possible for bloggers to write well-researched and thoughtful content.

Rick: As one of the first EEs to start a blog in the EDA space, why did you originally start blogging?

JL: I started thinking about blogging somewhere around May-June of 2005. At the time I was just starting what was supposed to be a 9-month contract in Dallas.  I had an apartment locally where I stayed during the week, and ended up with time to kill in the evenings. I started thinking about what it would take for me to have more control over the projects I worked on, and even the general path my career would take.

I also had a lot of pent-up opinions about verification. It occurred to me that if I could build an audience interested in what I had to say, I would have a lot more leverage to choose the types of projects I was going to be involved with in the future.  I’d also have an ability to do something that, at the time, was not possible for me:  be a relevant participant in the group of individuals shaping the direction of the industry as a whole.  I’m involved in activities today that have much broader industry impact than anything I was doing back in 2005, and that, to a significant extent, is attributable to my work on Cool Verification.

Rick: You have worked extensively on the application of social media as a means of fostering and enhancing collaboration. Do you see any unique considerations (advantages and/or barriers) within engineering communities that influence their adoption and use of social media?

JL: There are definitely considerations for engineers considering taking the plunge into social media. One of the biggest is the policies of many companies with respect to who can discuss company business in a public forum.  I used to work at Intel, and I was often afraid to share even the most inane piece of information with vendors who had NDAs in place so as to avoid ruffling my boss’s feathers.  Also, people in the corporate engineering environment are often judged based on the work they contribute to the project at hand, and have little motivation to become known outside of that localized sphere of influence.

You can see something similar on the conference circuit. Some companies work hard to publish their results at conferences like DVCon, DATE, and DAC, while others provide little support to their engineers (i.e. they won’t pay for conference registration fees or travel). I actually see this lack of support for collaboration between companies (irrespective of social media) as one of the biggest roadblocks to industry advancement. As a consultant I see companies reinventing the wheel all the time. If engineers were let “out of the box” as it were, companies would be far better off.

Rick: One of the Conversation Central discussions explored the topic “Who owns your blog?” What is your view of this topic as it relates to corporate bloggers?

JL: This is an interesting topic that I feel even some of the world’s top bloggers have failed to adequately consider.  I consider my blog to be an extension of my professional persona… it’s an online extension of who I am, just like my Twitter and Facebook feeds (for example).  If I was an engineering blogger working within the structure of a corporate website, I would question how this activity was worth my time and trouble if I did not, in the end, “own” the blog and associated content (since I am potentially not getting anything extra in return from the company for my effort).  For marketing and PR folks there may be different considerations because it is part of their jobs to write public-facing content.

Rick: Thanks, JL, for your opinions and insights. See you online at Cool Verification,