Median tenure is falling I believe.
And employees in their mid-twenties and thirties have way lower tenure than those in their fifties. I think it's about 3 years as opposed to 10 years. Job-hunting is much more prevalent.
Hence the "TCS" jab from empressplay. A lot of IT contracts for major companies in Australia are outsourced to multinational IT companies. Those multinationals use a lot of 457 workers and get the big contracts via undercutting and paying low wages to poor migrants.
Then various politicians have attacked the 457 scheme over the years. Most recently, one government backbencher from a regional mining area where unemployment is still very high threatened to quit over it.
It's reputation has been shady for quite a while. It is always raised in a bad light by the media due to abuses.
I do feel that this current move has unfairly affected legit skilled researchers like a_bonobo though. How they manage to be lumped in with 457s brought in by outsourcing companies makes zero sense.
The OA is talking a bit more specifically than just getting kids to play IMO. His title is Head of Innovation.
Innovation is corporate-speak for actual company processes where they change things up like their business model, or their target customers or their product etc. I believe he is talking about teaching some of those techniques in an education environment.
The attributes he mentions (relationships, curiosity, agility, creativity, empathy) are teachable skills in that context. The sort of lateral thinking exercises that Edward De Bono advocates or other brainstorming methods are used in the more kiddy version in alternative style schools like Montessori or Steiner schools.
In those schools it is an active-learning, constructivist philosophy where kids have to cooperate with each other on projects and seek out the info rather than be fed info. It's not like practical skills aren't taught. Some are very hands-on. They might build a windmill or something. As they do, they learn all about physics and mechanics.
As someone from the FPGA industry, bigger projects just use your CASE 3 on a board to start prototyping. A Zedboard or similar. Cheaper version could be the Zybo. It's like $500 vs $200.
When you get to production stage, you whip up your own board.
What exactly is your complaint about the propriety tools? You are using Altera tools with the DE0 Nano.
k. Interesting. A former employer of mine used CASE 4. The FPGA was connected to the CPU via a memory interface. In general this option should be more flexible. You can choose the exact processor and FPGA type you want. On the other hand CASE 3 may has components which are optimized for each other. But for an industry product I would feel to be in a better position in CASE 4 if one of the components is discontinued.
About the complaint. It was a bit too emotional, because I had some specific issues in mind, that cost me a couple of forum searches and hours. Included GUI bugs, some none-intuitive settings and IP blackboxes that weren't working or buggy. Not only Altera but also Lattice. The Lattice FPGA contained a Hard-IP SPI. Didn't do anything. I posted on the forums, a couple of users replied who had the same problem but no reaction from Lattice at all.
It's all about bad management. But it's about how they make plans and deadlines in the first place.
If they don't spare a thought for what future problems can come up and make allowances and contingencies for these risks then they can't manage. Who cares if you tell them about problems early if there's no ability/wiggle room to change directions?
If management don't want surprises, try thinking ahead. It's called risk management. Who is to blame when a predictable issue eventuates? Not engineering. If you have no slack in the schedule get ready for shit to hit the fan.
The comments on this thread have been more interesting than the article. I think the common theme is a push to innovate and take the next step in computer systems.
If we scan this thread we could come up with a list of issues/problems with UNIX. Human inclination is to instantly look for each solution as each problem presents itself. Eg. "Text as an interface is unstructured" -> "Use other formats". The end result becomes a lot of feature creep, adding layers over the OS to hide the usability issues of the past. Then, a new user comes along and wonders, "How did it all get so messy?"
The ideation-style approach to innovation is NOT to leap straight to solutions. Avoid analyzing the problems immediately. Don't criticize other people's existing thoughts.
Instead we use our creativity to add to the list of problems. We build it up even more. Add tangential issues that may be not just UNIX related problems. Add future issues. Add past issues. You keep adding until you exhaust all the avenues. You don't want to block your thoughts or anyone else's. If anything, the previous problem someone raises should inspire your next one.
Once you have drained out all the issues and you can't squeeze out any more complaints, then you can take a step back and look at all the problems as a whole. You group them into categories that have common themes. You try to generalize and re-express them in vaguer terms.
After you have your themes, you can think about making a list of solutions. Again you don't want to be critical about the feasibility of a solution. You just want to build a list of different solutions. Each solution should inspire a new different solution. There are mental exercises that you can do to inspire tangential thoughts - word games etc.
When you have a giant list of solutions, then you categorize again. Those categories are the start point to building something innovative.
The alternative is just another iteration of what already exists.
My own thoughts on this are that I seem to need "power-user" abilities way too much. My field is actually Hardware. Something is wrong if I am jumping through a lot of hoops outside of my specialty just to get work done. It's not just UNIX either. My friends and family often call on me to handle their Windows or Mac issues because I am the closest thing to an expert they know. They shouldn't have to.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head.
What people outside of the EDA field fail to understand is they are coding at a much higher level. RTL does not model all the aspects of the logic. You have different signal delays due to lots of different reasons: fanout, wire lengths etc. As you go through different stages of synthesis via these tools, a lot of decisions are made governed by the constraints files. Each decision affects the performance of the design. It's slow because it's doing a lot of work to optimize speed or area. Some designs won't fit the constraints. Then it reports errors.
The tools are trying to help. The end product is the physical device. The various models are all just abstractions of the physical device. The tools are reporting the problems on the abstractions to assist you to improve the physical device. If you can understand the reports, you can improve things, either altering the RTL or adding more constraints.
The point being that the only time RTL is actually run like a software program is during simulation. This simulation is only an approximation of how the actual thing will work. It is not like SW. The tools do a lot of other things with that RTL. Maybe if people don't throw garbage in, it wont crap itself trying to figure it all out.
Median tenure is falling I believe. And employees in their mid-twenties and thirties have way lower tenure than those in their fifties. I think it's about 3 years as opposed to 10 years. Job-hunting is much more prevalent.