Chip101 Starts

The recruiter con­sid­ered my newly unem­ployed sit­u­a­tion and said, “My advice, don’t look for a job.”   Not the words I expected.  With the num­ber of years of career behind me well into dou­ble dig­its, I’d never been unem­ployed, vol­un­tary or oth­er­wise, until then.   My employer had exited the chip busi­ness and, else­where in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, ASIC design hir­ing had ground to a halt.   The recruiter didn’t have any­thing for me either, but he had invited me in to talk.    “If I were you,” he con­tin­ued, “I’d develop a web pres­ence and…”

His words after the “and” were wise and insight­ful, but my mind honed in on the “develop a web pres­ence” bit.  I had a half-baked idea for a web site that I’d bounced around when I was yet employed, but it had been put aside as my ener­gies focused on find­ing a new job.   I lis­tened care­fully to his advice, went home, found a web host, and reg­is­tered a domain name: chip101.com.

With my now lim­ited bud­get a con­cern, I knew chip101.com would need to be a do-it-yourself project.  I didn’t know much about web devel­op­ment, but I was no stranger to soft­ware devel­op­ment, and I had time on my hands.   I dove in.   As the weeks mul­ti­plied into months before chip101 was ready to go live, I read and saw threads of the recruiter’s mes­sage over and over again.  And saw a num­ber of people—but too rarely engineers—putting the prin­ci­ples into action. Here are the bul­let points:

• The work world has become project focused, staffed for imme­di­ate needs.
• It’s not what you have that’s impor­tant, it’s what you can give, your strengths and unique talents.
• You don’t need to please every­one to be successful.
• Your rep­u­ta­tion or per­sonal “brand” is the key.

Of course, there’s noth­ing there in par­tic­u­lar about chip devel­op­ment.   But the peo­ple I run into and have a chat about how the job is going, or how the job hunt is going, are into some facet or other of inte­grated cir­cuit devel­op­ment.  And they (mostly) want to improve their skills, advance their careers, and be suc­cess­ful and happy in doing so.

Chip101 is prepar­ing to help that hap­pen. Here’s how it might work:

• Sub­scribers with some pro­fes­sional or aca­d­e­mic involv­ment in any aspect of chip devel­op­ment are invited to cre­ate a pro­file and become mem­bers of chip101.
• Mem­bers are invited, no, encour­aged, to post con­tent on chip101, shar­ing what they know.
• Any sub­scriber may post com­ments on content.
• A member’s pro­file is clearly asso­ci­ated with posted content.
• Mem­bers with most-viewed con­tent are highlighted.
• Con­tent about chip devel­op­ment is vis­i­ble publicly.
• Con­tent about career devel­op­ment, per­sonal brand­ing, and help for cre­at­ing and post­ing con­tent is vis­i­ble only to members.
• Con­tent is mod­er­ated and may be edited to improve clarity.

This is John Mac­Don­ald.  Your com­ments are welcome.