Why are you creating proprietary tools when you could work for CAD vendors, creating industrial standard tools? You know the skills you develop is not marketable outside. Your proprietary tools not only causes inefficiencies to product development, you are also making the engineers less marketable outside because they lack exposure to standard tools.
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Well the managers in DTS yes, the DA managers a little less so. But most of it is just human nature.
Writing on ones review that you installed X versions of EDA software, filed Y tickets against them... and wrote some macros just doesn't look as good as "Lead a team of technical specialist to spec, design and implement a tool for blah blah blah which showed a 15% increase in speed of industry tools". And if you are the manager of that person, it gets even worse, as second levels don't care about installed software and such... they want bigger bullets.
So you got that.
But really, the DA managers wouldn't get away with it if their customers didn't praise them up and down for it, and request more and more things they didn't really need. I wrote some macros for one of the in house tools years ago. I inserted some code to track how much the macros were getting used. Less then 10% got used more than once. All were created because of customer requests. And they were even vetted by a committee of expert customers to prioritize. I got a promo that year... The year I added the most actual value by improving stability of things and making them run faster... you guessed it, last year. Got a stock 4 for that... and out the door.
The whole process is based on making someone else feel like you did what they asked, not what is actually needed. So you get into a cycle where a customer will praise work that was of little value so that they might get the one thing they actually want. And when it comes to DA versus DTS management, you get a cycle of I will praise your work, you praise mine... we all win... except the company.
That culture is what lead us to where we are.
And intel isn't alone in this pain. It is an affliction seen at most big companies. It is considered part of the cost of being a big company. I never really belonged at Intel... I didn't like to play that game. So I was the first out... makes sense, and doesn't bother me. I feel better about the value I added before I left than the waste I contributed to get my promo's. And that is more important than keeping that job.
I have nothing against engineers in DA/DTS , it's your management who made/influence the decision to use internal tools.
I don't understand what benefit do the decision makers get?? Can't be bribe, maybe job security ?
To keep intel design inefficient and slow
The answer to why... cause design people demanded them. I was a DA. Most of us kept asking the same question as you... if were using industry standard tools, we could have spent more time writing macros to make people work more efficient.
Everyone in DA teams should be moving to an EDA company ASAP. The axe is about to fall.