Why Millennial Engineers Should Work for Cadence

Many years ago, when Nokia was at the top of its game—one in every three phones shipped was a Nokia—I chatted to the sister of a friend of mine who was something senior in Nokia finance. I think she was the controller for a good part of their Africa business. Since in the US Nokia was never really successful, it is easy to miss that in places like Africa, cellphones and Nokia were almost synonymous. My friend's sister was around 40 and was thinking that maybe she should quit Nokia and join an NGO, and "make more of a difference." I argued with her that Nokia was already making far more of a difference in Africa than all the NGOs put together, and her small part in it was the best way for her to fight injustice and make that difference.

Cellphones had allowed individuals to control their lives like never before. Africa, outside of a few big cities, didn't really have telephone service (wired, I mean), nor banking. Mobile phones changed all that. One particular story I remember reading was about a fisherman who could come into two or three ports. Before mobile phones, he was at the mercy of whatever price he could get in whichever port he chose. After mobile phones, he could call and find the price in all the ports, and choose the best one. In Kenya and Tanzania, and later some other countries, M-Pesa allowed anyone with a phone to transfer money. Suddenly the son working in the city could transfer money back to his parents in the village without having to actually make a round-trip journey there. There are hundreds of stories like this.

Don't Bother Volunteering, Get a Real "Boring" Job

I was reminded of this episode recently when I read Andy Kessler's piece in the WSJ for new grads to "Scale or Bail." The subtitle of the piece was the heading just above. His point was similar to mine, that volunteering just isn't very effective. A couple of examples he picks:

Don’t spend all your time caring for the sick. Prevent disease. Gene therapy, early detection and immunotherapy can change the trajectory of disease because they scale. Don’t build temporary shelters. Figure out how to 3-D print real homes quickly and cheaply. 

Later he says:

A “real” job sounds boring. Your business-intelligence analyst title won’t sound as interesting at EDM festivals compared with your friend’s project to raise $10,000 and clean up a few tenements in a Rio de Janeiro favela. But I can guarantee you’re the one having real influence.

Ignore Impractical Advice

As Andy also said in his piece, ignore the pabulum of commencement speeches. There is far too much exhortation to "follow your dreams". Of course, some people make it that way, which means you can't 100% say that it is wrong advice. But a lot of very visible, successful people, from Mick Jagger, to Oprah, to JK Rowling, are in industries famous for almost all the entrants failing and ending up waiting tables instead. Founding a startup is the same. It might be the next DropBox, but more likely it will be the next Sprig or Jawbone.

But for the millennial generation, there is another strong temptation, which is to do something that makes you feel good, and will get you lots of likes on Facebook, but doesn't really affect the world. Assuming you are a programmer, is it better to volunteer for a week at a food bank, or to do freelance programming for a week, and use the money to pay for a crew of people who are struggling to go to the food bank in your place? For three months. Now scale that idea up a million times.

How Many EDA Engineers are there?

In rough numbers, Cadence has 7,000 employees. About 35% of revenue is spent on engineering, so if we just pro-rata the employees (there are good arguments that this is wrong, but it's close enough) then we get about 2,500 engineers. Synopsys and Mentor probably have about the same (Synopsys a little more, Mentor a little fewer). Let's add another 2,500 for all the other EDA companies. That means that there are roughly 10,000 EDA tool developers. For now, I'll ignore IP (since it involves so many companies), and focus on EDA tools.

Scale

If you want a job that affects the world, then you need a job that scales, as Andy Kessler pointed out. I think that working in Cadence's engineering organization is hard to beat, unless you found your own company and grow it to success. But remember the stuff about dreams: most startups fail, and so have very little effect on the world. But if you have a great idea, then ignore my advice. I'm sure the parents of both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg told them they should knuckle down and finish their Harvard degree and then run their side-project.

Nobody can design semiconductor chips without the EDA industry, and nobody can design electronics without semiconductors. There are more smartphones already than people in the world, so electronics is clearly affecting everyone's lives for the better. And that's just smartphones. I could tell you all the market sizes for semiconductors, electronics, world GDP, but that's just numbers. The current world, and especially the future world, is clearly driven by technology, and technology is driven by electronics, and electronics is driven by EDA.

Marc Andreessen had a famous piece in the WSJ too: Why Software is Eating the World. Huge amounts of VC money are making that come true. But software needs computers to run on, and that means semiconductor chips, and semiconductor chips have to be designed, and that means EDA.

Be a Spartan

At the battle of Thermopylae, a Greek force of about 7,000 men held off the Xerxes' Persian army at the pass, perhaps as many as 150,000 men. That's small scale! Just 10,000 EDA engineers are the cutting edge of the chisel that creates all technology.

EDA is the point without which the future doesn't happen. Google or Baidu? Nothing without EDA. Amazon? Nothing without EDA. iPhones? OK, you get my point. But it's not just big tech behemoths. Drug discovery, blood-delivering drones, precision farming. and so much more.

So if you are a computer scientist or electrical engineer, a massively scalable way for you to change the world is to join Cadence's engineering organization (or, to be fair, our competitors). Be one of the 10,000.

Another quote from Andy:

It may feel good to ladle soup to the hungry, but you’re wasting valuable brain waves that could be spent ushering in a future in which no one is hungry to begin with.

Working at Cadence is a great way to be part of ushering in that future. Be one of the 10,000.

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