For those of you who do not get the embedded muse.....
A Story For April Fool's Day
----------------------------
The blue light of the TV flickered on the blank wall, but it went
unnoticed by me as I slumped in my old armchair.
It had been a bad week. She left on Monday, screaming that she
couldn't take all of the equipment piled everywhere. Me, I thought
that old Tek 545 was a collector's item, an antique. Sure, the dust
was pretty bad, but you can bet we were the only couple in town with
a living room populated by old scopes and CP/M machines.
Women - I'll never understand them. Like, that time my homebrew
furnace controller burped and drove the house to 115 degrees when we
were gone for the weekend. Hey, I never liked those pets anyway, and
the smell did eventually come out of the carpets. Pretty much. I
mean, it was just a little software bug; we all have those!
And she never forgave me for the fire. Yeah, next time I'll put a
bigger heat sink on the power supply. I admit it - I learned a
lesson. The scorch marks on her dresses don't really look all that
bad. Jeez, you'd think she'd be a bit more understanding!
I reached for another bag of chips as the chair groaned a bit more.
One of these days I'm gonna have to work off some of the excess
pounds. A decade spent in the lab drinking Jolt and munching fries
had taken its toll. Despite the flab I still know calculus and can
program in C; surely a dream dude for any discerning woman. I bet I
could wow them at the local watering hole with my great stories about TCP/IP!
Well, this is Silicon Valley after all, where relationships, jobs and
careers are measured in milliseconds and loyalty doled out by the
microgram. Electronics is a dog-eat-dog business and I'm an old hand
at crawling out from the wreckage. Like that last startup I worked
for. I told 'em we'd get that product out the door, eventually
anyway. We woulda survived if that idiot president just got another
couple of mil of venture capital. For a while at least.
Ya know, maybe it was losing that job that ticked her off. I figure,
what's the big deal? She should be used to this by now. Check out my
resume - it shows lots of experience at lots of places. No one can beat this!
I picked up the phone but heard only the accusing silence of a
non-payment disconnection. No matter. Time to find another company
looking for my embedded expertise. There's a startup a minute here,
pigeons ripe for picking.
I clumped out of the trailer's front door and found Big Al, the usual
wild look in his eyes, mouth working hard on this morning's sugar
raised, the white powder spotting his beard. "Al, buddy, you're outa
work too, huh? How's the wife and kids?"
"Kids? Kids? Yeah, come to think of it I did notice some little
people living with me. I wonder where they came from? Check this
out." With that he shoved a coffee-stained fragment of the San Jose
Mercury News into my hands. I quickly took in the circled want ad.
"ENGINEERs - microprocessor savvy designers and programmers needed.
C, FPGAs, PLDs, assembly a plus. Exciting opportunity for a motivated
developers in a new high-growth company."
A slow smile spread across my face. Here was our pigeon; I was
already mentally spending the signing bonus.
That afternoon, T-shirts cleaned and pressed, with most of the donut
detritus wiped from Al's beard, we met with the president of Galaxar
Enterprises. Yep, just as usual, this man was the typical harried
executive desperate for people, so desperate he had neither the time
nor resources to do much of a background check. Not that my
background is so terrible; it's just that there's so much of it.
"You know C? Schematic capture? What's the last project you worked
on?" he mumbled, looking at his watch while the beeper pinged an urgent tune.
"We did that Internet Cappuccino maker for Kitchen Services; you must
have read about it in the press. Yep, that puppy had a MIPs based
coffee engine with 64 megs of RAM."
"Didn't they go Chapter 7?", he interrupted, interested now.
"Trust me on this. The boss was an idiot. He just didn't understand
how much compute power we needed to blend the perfect cuppa joe. That
sucker could crank some coffee, believe me. If they hadn't been so
stuck on the cost of goods we coulda cleaned up the Cappuccino
market. We were practically done with development when the SEC raided us."
"OK, OK, look, when can you start? Now? Don't you guys ever shave?
Heck, just sit here and Bob will tell you what to do."
Bob, engineering VP, was one of those snotty-nosed brats with a
degree and an attitude. "We're building a new marine VHF radio for
the recreational boating market. That means there are three main
design parameters. First, the unit must be totally sealed to insure
it's waterproof. Second, the sell price can't exceed $250. And
obviously the unit must be simple enough that even the most casual
boater can use it."
He went on to tell us how we were going to design the product. Us!
Can you imagine? As if I don't understand project planning,
structured design, discipline design, and all of that utter crap. Me,
I prefer to skip all of that non-productive nonsense and just bang it out.
I zoned out, the drone of Bob's voice barely noticeable, nodding at
the right time while planning my next move. Clearly it was time for
the old end-run. Saturday night Al and I marched into the president's
office. "Herb," I started, "we know you're running out of venture
money and an IPO is at least a year away. Bob's planning to spend
another three months just doing preliminary design. Whatdoya want, a
design or a product? Trust me on this - we can pound out a design in
a week, max, and then get the radio done in no time."
Herb's eyes gleamed. It seems that he, too, was frustrated by Bob's
methodical approach to engineering. This valley is the land of Steve
Jobs, where unbridled passion and hope fuels the dream of tomorrow's
big score. Discipline? Bah. Just lemme at a problem and I'll get it
done. With a bit more prodding Herb agreed that this project was so
important he'd give it skunk-works treatment, get Bob off of our
backs, and let us report directly to his president's office.
The week sped by like a read from cache memory. Al slouched into my
cubicle, let out a long, satisfying-sounding belch, and asked "didn't
we promise Herb a spec or something?" Right! Never let the boss,
down, that's my motto. Unless there's a good reason, of course.
"Sure, look, just grab those header files we've been working on and
edit a bit of descriptive stuff at the beginning. They'll never read
it all anyway. If he complains we'll tell 'em not only is the spec
done, we've incorporated it into the firmware. How can he get upset
if he sees we're already coding?"
Herb swallowed our header files hook, line and sinker. He's thrilled
that we're already cranking out software, and giddily reported our
progress to the venture capitalists. I think they're already mentally
spending their IPO profits. Bob is muttering vague threats, but he's
been squeezed into the user-interface group. He wants Al and me to
take on that new college grad, Marty. We're supposed to show him how
to get projects done. It's not all bad; the kid has a car so can get
us beers and carry-out.
The secret to success in this business is to look busy, keep a
prototype in a state that looks like it has some level of
functionality, and always agree with the boss. And you can't act
like you have a personal life when battling a schedule! Heck, after
just three days on the job Marty asked if he could leave at 5 to
celebrate his first anniversary. I straightened him out. "Kid, trust
me on this. We all go through one or two starter marriages, you know,
no kids, no property, no regrets. Don't take it too seriously. Now
let's order a pizza and get back to work." It was probably a good
thing that I turned off the switchboard that night, so he wouldn't
get distracted by all of those frantic calls from home.
And that kid did need some attention. I caught him late one night
doing a spell check on his comments! Somehow he missed the fact that
a ship date loomed; comments are always the first thing to go. "Kid,
trust me on this. Never include a comment that will help someone else
understand your code. If they understand it, they don't need you." I
think he gets the picture now.
As time moved on we started having trouble fitting the binary image
into the CPU's 64k address space. "This always happens", I reassured
Herb, "them 8 bitters just can't handle the sort of code we're
cranking out for you. Look, we'll just stuff a bigger part in there
this afternoon. No problemo; I've done this a million times."
Big Al's eyes lit up when I suggested we look into a 32 bit
processor. "I've got just the ticket. There's one I've been itching
to try; it's totally reconfigurable, you can even define your own
instruction set. Man, this is gonna look great on my resume!"
Ah, resume fodder, the grease of the industry. Herb didn't seem to
concerned about the increased cost of goods - at least he wasn't
asking any questions - so I set out trying to find some way to cool
the sucker. With luck a big old heat sink and decent-sized fan might
be adequate. Jeez, maybe I'll use the next size up; those burnt
dresses still haunt me at times.
We optimized the instruction set on the CPU to play DoomStar III at
awesome speeds. The best part of using a custom architecture was that
I got to port the entire GNU toolchain to our chip. That compiler
sure is tricky! First time I'd ever fiddled with a code generator, so
it naturally took a bit longer than planned to get working - mostly - tools.
As the weeks passed Herb got noticeably more antsy, checking on our
progress on a daily, and then hourly, basis. This always happens, and
is a sign that the old cash reserve is evaporating. I started running
to the bank the minute paychecks came out. No one's gonna stick me
with bouncing paper! Been there, done that.
Bob - remember Bob? - strolled into the lab one afternoon to check on
our progress. It seems the fool had actually invested his own money
into the company! He's correspondingly annoying about what we do,
even though my end-run had gotten him off the project months before.
Oddly, he seemed upset about the cooling fan. "This thing has got to
be totally sealed, so no water gets in!" he whined.
"Yeah, yeah, just mount it in a dry place or something", I replied.
"I can't be bothered with that sort of stuff. You know how much power
this sucker uses?" These company men are all stress puppies. Not me;
I'll be going strong when he suffers his first mid-30s myocardial infarction.
Christmas rolled around - or was it Easter? I dunno, we were plenty
busy chasing down bugs and making feature changes. Bob's paycheck
bounced. I knew that Herb had been doing some fancy footwork to keep
things afloat, but when everyone in accounting quit, complaining
about insolvency or something, the standard exodus began. As usual,
engineering remained untouched by the various rounds of layoffs. They
needed the products we make to survive. I love this field!
This seemed like a great time for a two week vacation, though Marty
seemed almost hysterical that I'd take off now. "Kid, trust me on
this. Never complete a project on time. If you do, they will think it
was easy and anyone can do it and they don't need you. Now I'm outa
here for a while. Look busy and we'll sort it all out when I get back."
I got back, more or less sober but feeling great, to find the front
door padlocked and a sheriff standing guard. Marty, skulking in a
dark corner, grabbed my arm and moaned that he couldn't build the
code at all while I was away. It seems he had trouble locating all of
the source.
"Kid, trust me on this. Never archive all the sources necessary to
build a binary. Always hide a few on your own disk. If they can build
your binary, they don't need you. What do they teach you in college, anyway?"
He said the creditors got fed up and were demanding their money. Half
the employees were suing because their paychecks bounced. A satisfied
grin spread across my face as I recalled beating the rest of those
idiots to the bank.
Marty shrieked that Herb was suing all of us in engineering for not
meeting promised dates, specs, or features. "Kid, trust me on this.
They always sue. That's why I own nothing. What do they think they'll
get, my trailer? The bank owns that!"
Well, it seems my two week holiday might extend itself a bit. No
worries there! After such a tough project I needed a break. It's time
to sleep in for a while, build up those reserves.
Days later an awful booming interrupted my sleep. "My god, it's not
even noon!" I shouted, "Go away". The door banged open and Big Al
loomed over me. "Check this out." He unwrapped the newspaper from
around his BLT and handed me a section from the want ads. Yep, old Al
was right on top of things again. Another startup, as usual desperate
for a pair of gurus like us, no doubt willing to hire at any price.
A harried president briefly interviewed the two of us, asking lots of
questions about our most recent experience. We gave them the scoop on
the VHF radio, but had to parry his request for references. "Sorry -
they went out of business. Shame, that. There's no one there you can
call. But we built a heck of a radio for those guys. It's too bad
management was so screwed up they folded. Hey, it happens all the
time in this industry."
"But trust me on this - you need a graybeard like me to mentor your
young engineers, and to get this project out now! I'm ready to start
coding today. What is it we're building?"
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