Entrepreneurs’ ages

Posted on September 28, 2009 by paulmcl

Entrepreneurs are all twenty-somethings straight out of college these days aren’t they? Not so fast, it turns out that this is an illusion. It’s probably true in some areas, such as social networking, where the young are the target audience too (at least initially).

But the Kauffman Foundation has done some research on the ages of entrepreneurs which they announced earlier this summer. Take a look at the chart below. First, I apologize for how hard it is to read, Edward Tufte would not be pleased (and if you don’t know who Edward Tufte is then rush and buy “The visual display of quantitative information” immediately, and then perhaps his other books too).

The chart shows how recently, if anything, older entrepreneurs have been increasing. But at the very least is shows that there are plenty of entrepreneurs at all ages.

Of course there are entrepreneurs who are even younger too. My son works for YouTube and the most popular channel there is an annoying teenage kid called Fred who speeds up his voice. He is on track to be the first YouTube millionaire and is currently making over $50,000/month by selling ads and merchandize. There are 1.5M people subscribed to his channel.

Talking of being entrepreneurial, here’s one of my ideas. Most sites on the internet are largely developed by people for people like themselves, at least initially. On this basis I think older retired people must be an underserved demographic. They are also the richest age-group (in most countries there is a vast transfer of money from young to old going on in ways that will not be sustainable for the current younger generation by the time they are old). And they have lots of time, which is a scarce commodity. And many of them, although not all, are online. So I haven’t managed to think of a great idea but I firmly believe that this is a great place to look for an opportunity.

So entrepreneurs come in all ages although the kids that make it big seem to get all the publicity.

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Friday puzzle: animals

Posted on September 25, 2009 by paulmcl

Today’s puzzle:  How many animals do I have if all but 3 are dogs, all but 3 are cats, all but 3 are pigs and all but 3 are cows?

Last week’s puzzle was getting U2 onto the stage in 17 minutes. The key insight is to realize that you have to get the two slowest people (Adam and Larry) to cross together, otherwise you haven’t a chance since the 10+5 minutes they use up separately doesn’t leave enough remaining time. But you can’t have them go first since there won’t be anyone to bring the flashlight back. Here’s the solution: Bono and Edge cross (2 minutes) and Bono returns (1 minute). Adam and Larry cross (10 minutes). Edge returns (2 minutes). Bono and Edge cross (2 minutes). Total 17 minutes.

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Silicon Valley RIP?

Posted on September 25, 2009 by paulmcl

Here’s a quote from Tom Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems that pioneered customer-relationship management before Salesforce.com started to eat their lunch and Oracle bought them.

“I think Silicon Valley has been toppled from its pedestal. I think information technology is much less important in the global picture today than it was even 10-20 years ago. … I think the areas where people will be making a difference and making important social and economic contributions will be in the area of energy and bio-engineering. While there will be contributions in bio-technology and bio-engineering and energy technology that will come out of the valley, I do not believe it will have the type of global leadership position in those areas that it did in information technology."

I’m not sure this is right. Firstly, I’m not sure information technology is less important than it used to be. Of course biotechnology and energy technology will become more important and so IT will decline relatively, but I doubt it will decline absolutely. I mean it’s not like the Internet is done innovating.

I’m a little skeptical about some of the energy technology. In the long term it will be very important. In the short term it is simply farming government subsidies which is not a recipe for creating game-changing technology. I’m with Vinhod Khosla that unless the technology makes sense in the context of China and India, then it is just feel-good technology akin to putting solar panels on the roof of the Moscone center in the world’s most famously foggy city.

 Biotechnology is clearly increasing in importance. But there seems to be plenty of it in Silicon Valley (which, of course, no longer produces any silicon directly since that is not the highest value part of the chain). Silicon Valley certainly knows how to do innovation, create companies, manage intellectual property, embrace change. Not attributes that are thick on the ground in, say, Detroit. Or Washington, although it is now a big hub for technology simply because of the vacuum sucking money up from all over the US and disbursing lots of it locally in DC. Interesting to note that Morgan Stanley held their big partner offsite in Washington, not New York, for the first time ever. In industry after industry, success is starting to come from getting the government to write the rules your way rather than outright competition (see automotive, pharmaceutical, banking, insurance, to go along with the long standing agriculture, energy).

So I think that Silicon Valley will do fine (depending on California’s state governance not getting into a tax/exodus death spiral as places like Detroit have done) although it is true that as technologies develop they also proliferate into other parts of the world. Silicon manufacturing was originated in Silicon Valley almost exactly 50 years ago; now it is mostly in Asia. A lot of the ideas in the PC (and Mac) originated in Silicon Valley at SRI and Xerox PARC (not to mention Berkeley and Stanford) but development is done everywhere. I’m sure other technologies will be the same.

I think Silicon Valley has two unique attributes. Firstly, in the same way as Hollywood is the easiest place (but not the cheapest) to make a movie since all the infrastructure is there, Silicon Valley has all the infrastructure for creating innovative companies. And secondly, Silicon Valley (and to a lesser extent other parts of the US) is good at sucking in the best talent from all over the world and integrating them into companies and making them productive. The company I (a Brit) ran last year was founded by an Israeli, had an Iranian CTO, a French lead engineer, Dutch and Russian engineers, Korean and a Columbian AEs to go with a couple of born in the US americans. The VC board members and investors were a Cypriot and a Vietnamese immigrant. Just look at the first two people there: an Israeli founder and an Iranian CTO. I don’t see that happening in Tel Aviv or Tehran. They had to come here to do that.

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Barriers to entry

Posted on September 24, 2009 by paulmcl

When I looked around at DAC last month (well, the month before last, what happened to August?) one thing that is in some ways surprising is that, given the poor growth prospects of the EDA industry, there are so many small EDA companies.

If you are a technologist of some sort then it seems like the challenge of getting an EDA company going is insurmountable. After all, there are probably only a couple of dozen people in the world who have deep enough knowledge of the esoteric area of design or semiconductor to be able to create an effective product. That seems like it should count as a high barrier.

But, in fact, technology is the lowest of barriers if you are in a market where technology counts for something. Designing and building chips is something that races along at such a breakneck pace that the whole design ecosystem is disrupted every few years and new technology is required. It has to come from somewhere. As a result, brand-name counts for very little and small companies with differentiated important technology can be successful very quickly.

Other industries are not like that nowhere else does technology move so fast. What was the last big innovation in automotive? Probably hybrid powertrains. Most cars still don’t have them and it is now ten year old technology.

Let’s think of an industry with just about the least amount of technology, so pretty much at the other end of the scale from EDA and semiconductor: bottled water. Do you think that your bottled water startup is going to do well because you have better water technology? Do you think that the customer who chose Perrier rather than Calistoga could actually taste the difference anyway? Bottled water is selling some sort of emotional aspirational dream.

You’ve obviously noticed that if you go to bar and get upscale water then you typically end up with something from Europe (San Pellegrino, Perrier, Evian) and not something from California (Crystal Geyser, Calistoga). It has to be bottled in Europe and shipped here. Why don’t they ship it in bulk and bottle it here? For the same reason as wine is bottled before it is shipped: nobody would trust what was in the bottle. One thing that surprised me when I was in Japan a couple of years ago is that the Crystal Geyser water we turn down as being insufficiently upscale is what they drink over there. It comes from California, the other side of the Pacific, how exotic is that? I don’t know if the third leg of the stool exists, people in Europe drinking water from Asia: bottled from a spring on Mount Fuji, how zen is that?.

In between are lots of companies and industries where there is obviously a technical component, and an emotional component. BMW may be the ultimate driving machine, but most people who buy one couldn’t tell you what a brake-horsepower is, even if they know how many their car has. And almost nobody actually uses all that horsepower, running their car at the redline on the tacho all the time. Yes, there’s technology but mostly it’s an emotional sell.

In the commercial world, think of Oracle. Do you think you are going to displace Oracle because you’re little startup has some superior relational database technology? No, there’s a whole ecosystem around Oracle, they largely sell to people who don’t understand technology (CFOs) and so brand-name counts for something. They are partially making an emotional decision and buying peace of mind.

Brand name still counts for a lot in the consumer market space, even if less than it used to. This is measured by the increase in price for the brand name that consumers will pay compared to the no-name. Many of the top brand names in the world (Coca-Cola, Kellogs, Colgate) are very old going back a century or so but the premium, especially in the current downturn, that people will pay to get a Sony rather than Best Buy own-brand is shrinking.

So brand name or ecosystem are really high barriers to entry. Technology not much. A few smart guys and a two or three years of writing code is a lot easier than recreating the ecosystem around ARM, never mind making your cola as well known as Coke.

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Software signoff again

Posted on September 23, 2009 by paulmcl

What do you think the dominant design paradigm for electronic systems is going to be going forward?

As I’ve said before, I believe that it is going to be taking software, probably written in C  and C++ , and synthesizing parts of it into FPGAs and compiling the rest into binary to run on processors in the FPGA. This is what I’ve been calling software signoff for a long time. It’s more than just the software necessary to run on the FPGA or SoC. It is signing off hardware that co-optimizes the software.  The idea that conceptually we need to get the software that specifies the system right, and then hardware design is just creating a silicon fabric (SoC or FPGA)  which is able to run the software high enough performance  and at low enough power (because otherwise why bother to do anything other than simply execute it). Power, performance and price, the 3Ps again. 

There are two key pieces of technology here. The first is high-level synthesis, which should be thought of as a type of compilation  of behavior  into hardware . In the end the system product delivers a behavior or application.  It is not as  simple as  some sort of productivity tool as RTL designers move up the next level. RTL designers will be bypassed not made more productive.

The other key technology is FPGA technology itself. Today FPGAs offer almost unlimited capacity and unlimited pins. FPGAs will become the default implementation medium. The classic argument for not using FPGAs used to be that you could reduce the cost enough to amortize the cost of designing a chip. But very few designs will run in high enough volume to amortize the cost of doing an SoC or ASIC in today’s most leading edge processes, and the cost and risk of dealing with the variability (in terms of simulating hundreds of “corners” and the difficulty of getting design closure) is rising fast.  FPGA takes a lot of the silicon risk out of the implementation.  

Did you know that FPGAs represent more than half the volume of leading edge process nodes at the big foundries like TSMC and Samsung? FPGAs  are the first logic in a new foundry process and  drive the semiconductor learning curve. This is due to FPGA structural regularity that is much like memories but in a standard  CMOS  logic process.

If you need to do a 45nm design then far and away the easiest approach is to go and talk to Xilinx or Altera. To design your own chip is a $50M investment minimum so you’d better be wanting tens of millions of them when you are done. Only the highest volume consumer markets, such as cell-phones, or the most cutting edge performance needs, such as graphics processors, can justify it.

The decline in the FPGA market in the current downturn conceals the fact that new designs in the largest and most complex devices is growing at over 30% CAGR. It may only be 12% of the market (which, by the way, is something over 15,000 designs per year) but it generates 40% of the FPGA revenue. These designs, and the methodology for creating them, will go mainstream until it represents the bulk of the market. Not just the FPGA market, the electronic system market. Designing your own chip will be an esoteric niche methodology akin to analog design today. Howeve these new high complexity FPGA require an ASIC-like design methodology, not just a bunch of low-end tools from the FPGA vendor.

The challenge for EDA in this new world is to transition their technology base to take account of this new reality and go where system-scale designs are implemented in FPGAs. That is largely not in the big semiconductor companies that currently represent the 20% of customers that brings 80% of EDA revenue. It is much more dispersed similar to the last time that design was democratized with the invention of ASIC in the early 1980s that pushed design out into the system companies.

A lot of  RTL level  simulation will be required. And one of the high level synthesis companies will be a big winner. In the startup world there are a few companies attempting to offer HLS: Synfora, Forte and AutoESL. Synfora and Forte has been at it for a while (although Forte may be disqualifying themselves in this vision of the future by only supporting SystemC). AutoESL has started to make some progress as well, with one group at Microsoft using just this methodology. Mentor is the current leader with its Catapult synthesis; Cadence has created their own CtoSilicon technology. But Synopsys, who has synthesis running through their veins, have no real high level synthesis product (and, unless they are doing it with people who are unknown in the field, don’t have one in development).  Synopsys does have FPGA DNA through the acquisition of Synplicity.  My  opinion  is that once it becomes clear which HLS company is going to win, Synopsys will  likely  acquire them and for a serious price to complete their FPGA offering.  

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Guest blog: John Bruggeman

Posted on September 22, 2009 by paulmcl

I think that the first time I saw John Bruggeman was at a Wind River Worldwide User Conference when he smashed his way through a polystyrene wall at the back of the stage with a sledgehammer to enter to give his keynote. I thought then that it was daringly different from the way I’ve ever started a keynote! Since Virtutech and Wind River worked together I met him several times and we even persuaded him to open our sales conference one year. When he joined Cadence I immediately guessed his username and asked him to write me a blog entry after he’d found his feet but before he went native. And happily he agreed.

 JohnB is in the house…Will EDA ever be the same?

Day 10 in my new CMO gig at Cadence…

After 100s of meetings, I have 1000s of thoughts relating to my new favorite obsession — EDA. Market dynamics, ecosystem, competitive landscape, conventional wisdom, business models, growth segments, product direction, pricing and packaging — the list of challenges goes on and on. 

But the one observation – beyond all the others – that completely blows my mind is the intense cynicism from friends surrounding my decision to join Cadence. On pretty much a daily basis, I‘m asked, “Why John, would a marketing guy like you make a move to EDA?” Translation: “What the hell were you thinking?”

I’m just two weeks in and unquestionably confident that my decision was right. How can I be so sure? Well, I can clearly pinpoint the exact thought process behind the decision and it all started when I read one simple article.

I’ve learned from experience that it’s easy to know when it’s time to leave a job, but it’s really hard to know where to go. Thankfully, my fellow critical thinkers, this industry has many pundits who have outlined “the rules” that are meant to help us find the light as we make our way up the path of advancement. “The rules” give us generally accepted principles or tribal wisdom by which most people should judge a new opportunity.

As luck would have it, I happened across an article published on Fortune.com that was skillfully written by a seer of great industry insight and highlighted the 10 things to look for in a “LEGENDARY” job. I recognized them right away – this article covered “the rules” in all of their well-acknowledged, well-heeded glory. 

Things to look for in a “legendary” job like…

Number 1: a company in a growing market with a strong brand and leading position.

And number 2: a company with products that customers view as aspirin (read: essential), not vitamins (a supplement). In bad economies no one takes their vitamins

And number 3: a strong balance sheet with lots of cash

And number 4: a legendary executive team.

And numbers 5, 6, 7, 8-10. All more of the same!

Ten things no one would argue with, right? Pretty obvious stuff for a successful enterprise. I read each recommendation closely and then to be sure, I read them again. Only I came to a different conclusion. Companies that already have these ten things going for them don’t need much marketing help.

I mean, who needs great marketing if the company already is the market leader, in a growing market, with the leading brand and the leading market position, with products that are absolutely essential, all supported with an awesome balance sheet?

Maybe I look at the world a bit differently than most people, but I aspire to be a great marketer and to meet a great challenge. To actually accomplish something extraordinary, I knew I was going to have to break “the rules”.

So why EDA? Here it is – short answer. EDA is an industry that needs to reacquaint itself with “legendary” marketing.

Let me tell you why I think so. EDA is a critically important industry. It matters, but somewhere along the way it has forgotten that it matters. The super complex, increasingly powerful, application-rich chips that are required in every device that is produced today CANNOT be developed without EDA tools.

However, this industry is in desperate need of leadership and vision. There’s a transformational business and technology shift changing the way that companies develop silicon. We’re at one of those inflexion points that comes once a generation. I strongly believe the company that enables and accelerates this transition will become the undisputed leader on all fronts: innovation, technology, thought and market.

EDA used to be exclusively about design. I’ll even pay homage to Intel’s symbolic team of engineering rock stars portrayed in its recent ad campaign. In the past, Intel-esque rock stars designed the chips we know and love. It was their goal to constantly make chips smaller, faster, with higher quality and reliability. Basically, these rock stars have continuously innovated all of the IP on a chip – every last piece of it. It isn’t like a friendly game of Guitar Hero either. The rock stars in this game have to spend a massive amount of time acquiring the resources and skills necessary to even start thinking about playing. You can’t fake it – there’s no air guitar.

Nowadays, it’s a fact — every industry is up against ever-increasing time, cost, quality and global competition constraints. I see some forces aggressively beating our industry’s “rock star model” into submission: the physics challenging the continuation of Moore’s law, the increasing importance of software that is embedded and the applications that run on chips. It takes too long, costs too much and worse, the quality is never where it needs to be. There is a tremendous amount of risk involved. It is impossible for one company to afford to keep all of the rock stars under one roof.

These forces have led the chip design process to a point of discontinuity. Integration is becoming just as important as design — integration of analog and digital IP, tighter and earlier integration of every stage of the design process, integration of heterogeneous, multiple cores on a single chip, integration of hardware and software. These and other integration challenges will forever change the semiconductor companies and their value chains.

EDA must rise to meet its customers’ changing requirements. Our customers need help in the transition to a business model that can meet the cost structure, meet the time constraints, and deliver quality in a more complex world. The rock star model must evolve. Rock stars will still create amazing IP, but “system integrators” will be equally important in the value creation equation.

These system integrators will work with internal and external IP rock stars, and even their end systems customers, using distributed systems. Hardware and software teams will be managed using executable specifications and metrics that bring more predictability to schedules, just as the complex system integrators do in the embedded software world that I come from.

That’s right, I spent the last five years in embedded software going through a very similar industry transformation. I know from experience what a shift to an inte
gration model looks like. Similar to embedded software, a community of experts in the EDA industry is forming and actively gaining momentum. They can’t be stopped and they won’t be ignored. They’re driven by fundamental economic forces. This EDA community is quickly developing a system integration model that can be broadly used and reused by the entire industry. But what comes next?

The way I see it, no one has answered the call of the community. No one has stepped up, raised their hand and focused on making sure our customers have the tools and techniques they need to face the coming challenges of the industry.

Well look closely, because my hand is up!

A great company is going to seize this opportunity. At the end of the day, this company will have achieved legendary results and be able to boast all of “the ten things to look for” mentioned in the Fortune article. This company will be THE “legendary” EDA company. This vision is why I joined Cadence. 

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Spending money effectively

Posted on September 21, 2009 by paulmcl

People die because they run out of oxygen. It doesn’t matter what the reason is—trauma, cancer, heart attack—lack of oxygen is what finally kills us. In the same way, startups die because they run out of cash. It doesn’t matter what the reason is—engineering never finished the product, the customers wouldn’t buy it, it wasn’t possible to raise another round—running out of cash is what finally kills us.

So obviously cash is so important in a startup that it should never be spent? Well, not so fast. I’ve seen some really silly decisions about how to save money in startups over the years.

Most of the cash being burned in a software startup goes on engineers’ salaries. Consequently it makes sense to do everything to make their work environment as productive as possible. Do not force them to use old computers because they are already around. Computers are pretty cheap these days, a few days of an engineer’s salary will buy you something really high end. Do not equip the servers with so little disk space that they have to delete old data that will eventually turn out to be useful. Terabyte disk drives are under a hundred dollars. And don’t forget to make it easy for your engineers to work from home, by having good VPN and paying for them to have good internet connections. You pay your engineers more in an hour than their internet connection costs for a month.

One thing we discovered at Envis was that companies that provide PCs for gamers deliver the most bang for the buck. They overclock the designs, add special fast memory, have custom motherboards and so on. For a lot less than Dell will sell you a machine, you can get one that is half as fast again, with lots of cores. And a bonus, they look really cool.

Do not hire a consultant and then, for egalitarian reasons, give them a day on which it is their job to clean the kitchen at $150/hour. In fact, don’t make your engineers clean the kitchen anyway. That’s pretty pricy labor. And don’t annoy your engineers by charging for coffee or soda.

In a semiconductor company, there is an additional significant cost, namely design tools. Sometimes this is a cost in a software company too since they need tools for quality assurance and integration purposes. This is a hard balance to get right since too few tools again means that what looks like saving money on tools is really burning extra money on engineers’ salaries. Too many tools obviously wastes money more directly. When I was at Cadence we had a venture investment program where we would provide almost unlimited tools to startups for a mixture of cash and an equity position. We’d discovered that most startups underinvested in tools because they were so expensive but that this jeopardized their success.

Benefits, especially medical, are another area where startups can be penny wise and pound foolish. The most cost effective way to handle medical benefits, given that usually everyone is young and fit, is a combination of catastrophic coverage and a health savings account (HSA). In fact this is probably the best way to handle medical period, but that’s a political hot potato right now. It is what Whole Foods does and what John Mackey, the CEO, has recently got into trouble with the left for recommending as better than what congress is attempting to put together.

Bottom line: remember Gordon Bell’s line that cash is more important than your mother. But remember that engineers’  salaries are your biggest investment, and it is foolish not to do everything to make that investment as effective as possible.

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Friday puzzle: U2

Posted on September 18, 2009 by paulmcl

U2 has a concert that starts in just 17 minutes and all of the band members must all cross a bridge to get to the stage. The four men begin on the same side of the bridge and you must help them to get across to the other side.

Due the weakness of the bridge, a maximum of two people can cross at one time. To make matters worse, it is night-time and there is only one flashlight. The flashlight is always required when crossing the bridge and it must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each band member walks at a different speed and a pair must walk together at the rate of the slower man:

Bono takes 1 minute to cross
Edge takes 2 minutes to cross
Adam takes 5 minutes to cross
Larry takes 10 minutes to cross

For example, if Bono and Larry walk across first, it takes them 10 minutes to cross. If Adam then returns with the flashlight, a total of 15 minutes will have passed. How do they all get across in 17 minutes?

Last week’s puzzle was to find two US states that combined are anagrams of two other US states. It’s not quite a trick question but almost: the letters in North Dakota and South Carolina can (obviously) be rearranged to make South Dakota and North Carolina. And yes, it’s unique; unfortunately there isn’t a beautiful solution like Florida+Oregon = Nebraska+Ohio.

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One Laptop Per Child

Posted on September 18, 2009 by paulmcl

The one-laptop-per-child (OLPC) seems like it must be a good idea: create a cheap (under $100) laptop for children in poor countries. With access to computers, children could take control of their education and…well, good things anyway.

However, things have not gone well and the OLPC has laid off over half their staff and appears to be in a death spiral. It turns out that it is the Toyota Prius of education, better at making rich westerners feel good than having any actual impact.

I think there are three problems. Firstly, in most of the world people access the net through their phone and not through a PC. It is similar to the way Iridium failed because, despite its technical brilliance, everyone already had a mobile phone by the time Iridium was available. By the time OLPC was available everyone already had a mobile phone. Obviously not everyone, but if they were going to get something that was it.

Second, there is absolutely no evidence that computers in education improve educational standards (nor, by the way, small class sizes, nor universal pre-school education: both are good for employees in education though so I’m sure we’ll get lots more of both). There is even a certain amount of evidence that they have the opposite effect by adding a distraction for teachers. For basic education (the three Rs of Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) computers can’t do much except perhaps for drills and apparently not in a way that helps. For more advanced stuff, they don’t do a lot except allow access to the richness of the net, and for that computers don’t have a lot of advantage over phones.

Thirdly, if you are going to spend money on kids’ education in really poor countries, what do you think the most important thing you could spend some money on would be? It turns out that anti-worming pills is probably the answer. Nearly 2 billion people (1/3 of the world) suffer from intestinal worms and they are a major reason that kids have high absentee rates: they are sick a lot. Spending 50c per child increases school attendance by 25%. Bed nets wouldnt go amiss either in the malarial zones ($10 each).

So an OLPC computer (which actually costs $200) could increase attendance of 400 children by 25%. Now that’s an increase in education. As is so often the case, the glitzy solution is much less useful than something comparatively boring. It’s like that number that $20B is all that it would take to give everyone in the world clean drinking water. So little…why arent we doing it?

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How long should you stay in a job?

Posted on September 17, 2009 by paulmcl

How long should you stay in a job? The answer will depend a bit on your personality. But I think a job is interesting so long as you’re learning a lot and that seems to mean that you should stay in a job about three years. The first year you don’t know how to do the job and your are learning a lot, the second year you are getting the hang of it and by the third year you have become good at the job. But being good at the job typically means that you don’t have much more to learn from the job by continuing to do it. It’s time to move on.

When I say it’s time to move on I don’t mean that you need to move company, although that is certainly one option. If you move to work on a new product you’ll be learning stuff again. If you relocate to Japan you’ll be learning stuff again. If you move from application engineering to product marketing you’ll be learning again.

In particular, if you get promoted your job will change and you’ll be learning stuff again. This is especially acute the first time you are promoted into management. Typically you are the best engineer or salesperson or whatever on the team and so you get promoted. Now you have to learn about management, a subject that previously you may not have taken much interest in. It is an especially difficult transition since your comfort zone is not to do management at all, just do everyone’s jobs for them (after all, you were the best on the team so you are better than they are). It is a hard lesson to learn that as a manager your output is not what you do personally, it is the output of your group. It is not a positive that you did a lot of the work yourself, that means you are not doing a good job of nurturing the people in your group, not training them to be as good as you are.

People will often move on to another company anyway if they are bored since there might not be an appropriate position to move into, or a promotion to be had. This is especially true of new graduates who get fed up with some aspects of the company bureaucracy or culture and move to a new company to escape. However, the new company is typically the same (although different in details). It’s just the nature of companies that they don’t always do just what you think they ought to. The result of this phenomenon is that I think the best value people you can possibly hire are people who have already worked for at least one company and have 3-5 years experience. At that point they are enormously more productive than a brand new graduate, not about to leave because of company bureaucracy, and although they are paid more they are not paid a correct premium. The new graduates are probably overpaid and the 3-5 year people underpaid.

I know mostly about engineering and a good engineer is not 30% better than a poor one, they are ten times more productive. So 3-5 year guy is not 50% better than a new graduate, which may reflect the pay differential, they may be 5 times better.

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