Mr. Felling's Career...

Intel Corporation, in Chandler, AZ.

1997-2003



I worked at Intel in 3 different capacities, first as a electrical hardware engineer in a group developing digital cameras, then I switched to software and worked in the Intel Labs on multimedia software, and finally in a software group that wrote firmware and BIOS code for motherboards.



Digital Imaging and Video Division (DIVD) - Senior Electrical Engineer

During this timeframe, when Intel was making the first generation of Pentium processors, as sales started to decline, they needed to slow CPU production and wanted to explore other products that Intel could use their factories to produce when there was a slowdown in their normal chip production. Digital cameras were just starting to become available, so they wanted to try to make the chips required to build a camera.

About 500 people were dedicated to this effort, and my particular role was to take the first prototype chips for the light sensor and camera logic and to build a 'reference design' - a prototype complete camera design which would initially be used to test the new chips, and then be handed off to high-volume camera manufacturers who would use the reference camera as a guideline to design and sell their own camera designs using the Intel chips.


Things I did...
(click an assignment for more details)



Intel Labs, Consumer Media Technologies - Senior Software Engineer

By this point, I was ready for a change, and had been enjoying the hobby programming I was doing at home and the programming tasks that were part of my previous jobs, so I decided to change to software engineering, and there was one very interesting job - a posting in Intel Labs in a group that was exploring different ways new Intel products related to entertainment could be developed to expand Intel's markets beyond computers.

I was a little apprehensive of making this change to software, because Intel, at that time at least, had an infamous practice called 'ranking and rating' where every department's management had to rank every employee in their group and were forced to lay off the bottom 10% every year, no matter how good they were. It made for a cut-throat work environment, but meant that 'deadwood' was quickly eliminated. The issue for me was that this position was for a senior software engineer and I was really only a self-taught hobby programmer, and not sure I could compete with seasoned software engineers, possibly losing my job in a year in ranking-and-rating. I even asked if the position could be lowered to a non-senior position, but they said no...I would have a short grace period, but would have to be operating at the senior level within the first year. I decided to risk it because the work was really fun and interesting and so were the people in this group - it turned out to be the most fun job I had in my entire engineering career.

Things I did...
(click an assignment for more details)



Embedded Intel Architecture Division - Senior Software Engineer

When the Intel Labs job ended, I looked for other software-related openings in Intel and there was only one I was qualified to apply for: a position writing firmware with the Embedded Intel Architecture Division. Firmware is software which is permanently burned into a chip in a computer system.

When a computer is first turned on, a piece of firmware called the Basic Input-Output System (BIOS) is hardwired to a specific place in memory and starts executing. It checks various hardware systems, and then starts loading an operating system, like Windows or Linux, into memory, and then turns control over to the operating system.

Intel made custom motherboards for large-volume customers and provided custom BIOS software for these motherboards which was programmed in this software engineering group. The group also had a product called the Advanced Computing System Firmware Library (ACSFL) which was given to customers so that they could link together different pieces of BIOS code into a custom initialization routine (which could allow a computer to boot up in just seconds by bypassing things the customer didn't need).

I was only with this department for about 1 year, and in that time my main task was to work with another engineer to extend the capabilities of the ACSFL firmware library so that it would allow it to work better with the Windows operating system.



The reason I left Intel (my last corporate engineering job)...

Although I was reasonably qualified for the firmware job with the Embedded Intel Architecture Division, there was a lot of background knowledge about how computer hardware of various generations worked - many, many little tiny details that you could only absorb from writing BIOS code for many years.

Although I had worked at 8 different jobs in 5 different companies over the 16 years of my engineering career to this point, I had always been able to adapt to the new environments, rise to the challenges, and through hard work and determination, succeed in all of my roles, even those for which I was not particularly initially qualified (such as when I changed from hardware to software engineering).

However, in this latest position with the firmware group, I was finding it difficult to stay competitive - there was just too much background knowledge to absorb and be equal to my peers within months of being hired. I was in danger of being in the bottom 10% in this department.

But that ended up not mattering very much, because after I had been with this group for about 9 months, they started bringing in other engineers and telling us to 'show them the ropes'. It turned out that these were Intel software engineers from the Malaysia Intel Division, and we were actually training our replacements. Soon after, they disbanded our group in Arizona and moved all of this software development to Asia.

After getting redeployed for a third time in 6 years at Intel, I did look at the internal job postings, but there was only one job for which I could conceivably apply: a job in the competing media group in Oregon that had ended our Arizona lab, and I could tell from the way the job posting was written that that would be a flurry of activity, but very likely to be cancelled in about 18 months...not something I was willing to uproot my family from Arizona to pursue in Oregon.

Intel was looking to reduce headcount during this redeployment, so we were offered a generous severance package if we chose to leave the company, so I made the decision to leave Intel and to leave corporate engineering altogether.



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