Work ethic

When I agreed to take the job; that means I will do everything I could to complete the job no matter how difficult, including working 24/7.  Then I resigned if I don’t see a future in the company.

 

Case in point, a company wanted to establish emulation capability, a multi-million$$ bleeding-edge technology and project where most people had never heard of, and Emulation is a specialized field.  I agreed to take the job because despite this was a bleeding edge technology and was one of the most complex chip development projects that involved working with the whole chip development group, that most people didn’t realized such, and that’s why no one could run such project at the time; I was going to show a way this complex project can be done on time and within budget, with limited budget, cheaply.  Therefore, most managers had never heard of emulation, and is expected; it is up to me to bring them alone and make them look good.  It is about team work!

 

To fully describe the environment I was dealing with, it was like an American to build a football team from scratch in N Korea, being a woman in a company where the whole engineering dept had only 2 White guys and I was the only woman engineer, the rest were people from Asia.  I assumed the roles of the coach and the Quarterback.  It is important to acknowledge that the VP of Engineering signaled all depts. that this is a very important project to him, and asked the stake-holders to help me anyway they could.  Since 99.99% were 3rd world sweatshop factory workers, mostly from Taiwan, rumors such as the VP were playing favoritism and that we were having an affair were all over the place.  I had never even spoken to the VP or email.

 

To begin, I make sure everyone understood what I was doing.  Then spoke to every dept individually to explain what I need from them, answered questions (only a few people had heard of emulation), and will let them know at least a month ahead when I will need their resources, whether it was talents, hardware or software.  I trained everyone that had to work with me because none of them had heard of emulation.  I also make sure my manager (Chinese from Taiwan, PhD) looks good with other managers by letting him know my progress and what I was doing.  This is the resulted of worked 3 jobs every summer since High School and at least one part-time and a temp during school year, the equivalent of 20 years of working experiences prior to graduation.  Where most people from Asia that could afford college were the rich with servants, and had never worked a day in his life; otherwise only government/communist loyalists such as Princing were allowed to go to college and had never work a day in their lives.

I believed my manager attempted to take all the credits, and was mocked by managers who knew emulation was bleeding-edge tech that very few people had heard of, least a manager from the East Coast such that of my manager.  People outside the company did gave all the credits to my manager and all my male subordinates that had never heard of emulation prior to this project.  Nevertheless, he and my all males team got the credit, and were hired by 3DFX to do what I did, and failed miserably; they were all fired, and 3DFX went bankrupted because they couldn't get their product out to the market; which is why despite the complexity and costly, companies still willingly use Emulation.

 

By acting as a Coach and the Quarterback and succeed in taking the project from scratch (built the lab) to completion, it is akin to winning the  Super-bowl on the first season.  I had limited chip development experience where emulation required in-depth understanding of the whole chip development process; so why Stanford/MIT/IIT graduates failed and I succeed despite we all taught the same technical knowledge?  I worked 3 jobs every summer since High School, the equivalent of 20 years working experience prior to graduation from Grad School with background in Applied Physics research as well software programming experiences.

When I couldn’t get the resources I needed such as at least 20 Unix workstations (20 X ~$80,000 at the time when a million$$ means something), I either “borrowed” or kick-off my script to run over night using co-workers workstation when they weren't using.  I used to babysit this type of compilation in Texas Instruments where I would walk into my lab at 11pm, 2am, etc.  (This was how remote control was born).  The problem, was I was using an IPX workstation, akin to using a P3 to run Window 10 applications.  My manager never provided me with the proper hardware nor the support.  I was on my own while I was employed. 

Nearly all my managers did everything they could to sabotage me, which in term the project .  Most of these managers, especially the one in Texas Instruments Ivan Sherlock was promoted within the same company.  Unlike Sherlock only look after his own interests, there were some really good top level managers were looking after the interests of Texas Instruments.  I was very impressed with these managers.  They tried so hard to try to help me, but one senior technical guy got in their way because he said he was "in love" with me.  That was not true.  He had never considered for my well-being, and had consistently undermined me with his protégé.  He blocked all efforts by all Directors and head of depts tried to put me in a project.  Talk is cheap.  I was not some love-sick teenager nor flattered by some white guy's attention.  I was a scientist in training.  The real reason was he didn't want me to replace him because I found a PCI bus bug the first week I joined the company.  That bug had been plaguing the whole Networking chip department for months and was at the verge of being scrapped.  This was to compete with Cisco in the early 1990s.  Today, Networking is a 100s of billion$$$ market.

 

As long everyone in the company share the same goal of making the company successful,  but there are those self-interested type will eventually tried to sabotage me because I will be promoted and bonuses, which in term the project and the success of the company.