How to tell if your company is going under
Monday, April 28, 2003
The U-Haul truck showed up this morning and a bunch of minions from P-corp swarmed in and scoured the place one last time for assets. I ducked out the back door and am now secretly working in the company next door, which has loaned us four cubes for the interim. Last week I told the CEO that being asked to work for two weeks with absolutely no guarantee what will happen next feels a bit odd, and that some sort of motivating factor for getting the chip working might help the overall employee morale. As it stands, I feel like we will lose our jobs in two weeks regardless of whether we can get the chip working or not.
Friday, April 25, 2003
So today I applied to nVidia, Plantronics, some small medical device company in Santa Cruz, Bermai, and Global Locate.
I keep telling myself to Bee Positive if we do in fact get continued funding, and use this time wisely to cultivate those skills I have left dormant for so long. Meaning using equipment and time at work to develop new pet projects.
Rolled in at noon today. Lack of sleep from the past few nights finally caught up to me. My boss tells me now the VC has decided he wants to see if the chip works or not, so we'll get paychecks for another couple weeks (as opposed to getting the last one in five days). But there's still a deal to work out with P-corp, which wants all our assets, including the Bluetooth group, and until today had been planning to roll up with a truck on Monday morning and haul everything away. At this moment attourneys for both sides are meeting, and figuring out whether the VC can legally keep the Bluetooth group or whether P-corp can haul everything away.
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Went to the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco yesterday, and walked around and collected info from companies that I might like to work for. U-corp treated us to lunch, and we also met with B-corp. U-corp seemed very excited about Bluetooth SD-cards for cell phones; I voiced my concern over a complete lack of standards for piping voice over SDIO. Tim picked me up after the conference and we had a good time. Came back to work this afternoon, there's (surprise!) nothing to do, but I learned that in a meeting with P-corp this morning, my boss convinced them to make an offer to have the three of us work as consultants for a few weeks. The idea being that if they like us, they'll hire us on as their new Bluetooth group. Yow. Don't know if I really want that.
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Today I wandered around the house and did some paperwork, and thought of more get-rich-quick schemes and more electronics projects that I would like to complete. I decided to wait on the AB project until I could play with some simpler technologies first, like getting a 24-bit ADC working at 24 bits (hard), or building a simple inclinometer or accelerometer out of sample parts from Analog. But then I went on a walk and decided I would be better off making the most out of my time and jumping right into the AB project.
All that changed with a message on my machine. It was my boss, telling me there was very positive progress with U corp. I don't believe it. I never thought U corp would be stupid enough to continue funding us, but it appears that they are. So now I'm supposed to go up to ESC in San Francisco tomorrow to meet with my boss and find out what's going on. I told my coworker I would be really annoyed if we got "saved" at the last minute. Well, if this message is any indication, we'll be saved, and boy am I annoyed.
I did charity work yesterday at Applied Geomechanics helping Jeff find the source of A/D glitches in his firmware. No money available to pay me though.
Thursday, April 17, 2003
I love resumes. I just had to look up the 68HC11 because I couldn't remember if it was 8 or 16 bits. All this so I could say "8 bit experience". Just don't ask me any questions, OK?
Writing my new resume here. I was depressed last night because I thought after 2.5 years I had little to show. But now my resume looks overstuffed. Great. I'm having a great time choosing words for my resume:
Constribute, Assist, acquired detailed knowledge, designed, worked, acted, modified, managed, supervised, debugged, proposed, integrated.
So today a bunch of people from P-corp came over and combed the place for inventoried items. They finally left after an hour or so. We got our latest chips back from TSMC and tested them. The spectrum looks quite different but the drift is still there. The 2.4GHz VCO wanders all over the place. It wanders lots when you touch the board, or move it, or zap it with a blast of freeze spray. There's obviously a serious issue here. Perhaps it's noise, or perhaps it's a floating input on the chip. I don't know what else it could be. I'm ready to go home now. We tried the new chip, it failed, it will never work because of this noise problem, which we never addressed in the past because we don't have the resources to fix it if we tried.
So here I am in the lab saying "why are we trying to make a connection when the VCO is wandering all over the place? It will never work until we get it to lock down." And my boss is saying "don't be a spoilsport, let's try!"
Let's try... let's try to throw this baseball to the moon. Let's try to start this car without an engine. And if it works, what have we proven? That we can get really lucky and make a connection for a few seconds while the VCO is in the sweet spot.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
My boss is complaining at me because I didn't bring my resume in for him to proofread. I'll miss this place.
Monday, April 14, 2003
So this uncertainty thing is really annoying and now that I'm all ready to be jobless I will surely be pissed if it turns out we have to stay on in some life-after-death incarnation of our company. I will feel relieved when the CEO comes back on Wednesday and tells us that all bets are off.
Right now I'm trying to decide whether I want to take a not-so-perfect job (programming) in a perfect location (Santa Cruz) or a perfect job in San Jose. Of course, it may be turn out that I don't get a choice.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
We all had a meeting with the CEO today (that makes four people total); today is our unofficial "notice" day, the last paycheck will come at the end of the month. Other than vacation, there will be no severance. P-corp will come in at the end of the month and loot the place to reclaim the loss on their $1m loan. And we will cease to exist, unless U-corp or T-corp fall for our pleas for help. We will know the results of that by Wednesday of next week.
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
I asked my boss today "how soon are we going to be flipping burgers?"
His reply and the ensuing conversation was refreshingly open and candid: "I'm pretty sure we'll get a paycheck next week, but after that I really don't know."
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
So being a Bluetooth company we were going to buy an Ericsson T68i Bluetooth phone so we could build a headset for it, as a snazzy demo to potential investors. Unfortunately none of us wants to spring for the $30/month phone. Asking my boss the other day if the project was dead, he said "with our future so uncertain, I don't want to go buy a phone right now."
Thursday, April 03, 2003
Yesterday I was given a "company resume" which reads pretty much like a personal resume, except it has three names at the top (one for each employee). I was listed as an "expert" in several fields. Talk about embellishment. We will be showing this "resume" to potential investors.
Last month, AM came by and asked me if my computer had an asset tag. I said no, but my monitor does. She was carrying a clipboard and asked where some other items were. I helped her and asked whether this was for tax reasons. No, she replied; it's an inventory of the collateral we posted for the loan we've defauled on. Great. So now P-corporation is going to take all our stuff.
