#264 – The Cost Of Doing Business

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded August 25th, 2015. Episode 264. The Cost of Doing Business.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell of Chris...

Chris Gammell: No, no. You do it again.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that bloke is on every week. Yeah, no, that's it. That's it. We agreed that we're not wasting another second.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: He screwed up the intro. Professional podcaster.

Chris Gammell: Nah. Far from it. Far from it.

Dave Jones: Far from a hacked up setup in downtown Pasadena.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. I'm on a cell phone and then recording separately. And yeah. Oh, man. Technology. Dodgy ads, folks. Yeah. Can't trust Wi-Fi. You know, like... Oh, Wi-Fi's shit.

Dave Jones: Hotel Wi-Fi is a whole nother level of shittiness above regular shitty Wi-Fi. Yeah. Like, for some reason, Wi-Fi is like the ultimate shit. I don't understand why.

Chris Gammell: Probably because... I mean, it's optimized for different things, right? At least I think these days it's optimized for like streaming Netflix and stuff like that. It's not... It's never going to be like, oh, quick ping and deterministic type stuff. Hang on.

Dave Jones: Streaming Netflix? Nobody's going to stream Netflix via Wi-Fi in a hotel room. They come in via the cable so that they can charge you whatever, right?

Chris Gammell: No, not me, man. Really? I don't watch cable. Yeah, I don't watch cable. So, yeah. No, no. But I think that that's... You know, a lot of people don't think about that in a lot of situations. You know, like thinking about non-deterministic communications, stuff like that. Like I see some things that are coming out with like Bluetooth low energy on them and you're like, how are they going to possibly have the bandwidth they need for their applications? Yeah. I mean like...

Dave Jones: It's Bluetooth low energy, right? It's a pissy little... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, some people are pushing it. Some people push it to...

Dave Jones: Really?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: What? To like broadcast quality audio?

Chris Gammell: I don't say that, but what's broadcast quality like? 320 kilobits?

Dave Jones: Yeah, something like that. And well, that's MP3, right? So, you know, wash your mouth out kind of thing. But no, it'd be, you know, at least, you know, 44.1 kilohertz, you know, CD quality kind of streaming.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think you're... Aren't you confusing the bit rate with the... I actually don't even know. The bit rate with the frequency content, stuff like that? Kilohertz versus kilobit per second.

Dave Jones: Oh, right, yeah. Okay. Well, you're talking about, you know, you want a good solid 20 kilohertz bandwidth, right? You want, you know, proper amp, you know, proper audio full-on bandwidth, which requires to get your 20 kilohertz, you know, it requires your 44.1 kilohertz CD sample rate. CD bit rate.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess I'm talking about the encoding and stuff like that. Anyways, for transmission, I don't even know. But...

Dave Jones: Oh, I can say, yes, because, duh, because, you know, Wi-Fi is like bits per second, not bytes. Yeah. Or samples. Yeah. One sample could be, you know, like, yeah, like, you know, CD quality is 16-bit sampling at 44.1K, right? Right. Yeah. So, you know, that translates into, yeah, you've got to multiply and get your bit rate. Duh. Right. I'm sure we know what we're actually talking about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, I'm starting to get into audio stuff for contextual electronics, and I'm a little worried because, first off, we had like...

Dave Jones: I thought you were an audio guy.

Chris Gammell: Well, I say I'm an analog guy, but that's... It's like you're a muso. Oh, like that. But no, that's the thing. I'm not... Like, we talked about that last week with Fran. Like, you know, like, I don't really do audio stuff. I've done a little bit, but not much. So, it's kind of one of those learning as I go kind of things, you know? All right. So, we'll see. We'll see how that goes. I mean, like, it's a lot of the... A lot of the base... Like, it's like one of those things where it's like, you know, you're on the edge of what you know, and like, I know transistor theory, and I can synthesize information from a lot of sources. Like, there's a lot of great sources out there online, but I think that one of the skills these days is being able to like, you know, take the information you find online. It's always been this, I guess, but, you know, take that information you find online, and it's about how quickly you synthesize that into usable output, so.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We'll see how that goes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. What have we got this week? It seems like it's all bloody hardware startup.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Every second link seems to be...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's a ton of it. Well, one interesting one, which I added, which I thought... Oh, well.

Chris Gammell: Let's go right to that. Yes, of course.

Dave Jones: Well, let's go straight to that, because I don't add many things to the list, so why not?

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right. Fucking hell. Chris has been keeping an eye out on this all week, but Dave happened to trip, stumble, and

Dave Jones: just add something to the last minute, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And fall on top of a story that may or may not be relevant, so let's find out.

Dave Jones: Anyway, this comes from... Actually, I don't know what website it is. Sorry, it's imree.net or something. Clicky... Clickety-click blog or something. Anyway, the title is, Is There an Uncanny Valley for Hardware Projects? And you may not have heard the term, but I hadn't heard the term before, but I know what the term is. Yeah, but... Uncanny Valley?

Chris Gammell: This is a total misapplication of a term. I mean... Right. The Uncanny Valley refers to robots and how as they get increasingly more human-like, they fall off...

Dave Jones: See, no, I've never heard that. I've never heard that term.

Chris Gammell: I don't think I have. If you look at any humanoid robot, you're going to find someone talking about the Uncanny Valley because eventually someone goes, ugh. Well, no, sorry.

Dave Jones: Well, okay, fine. Yeah, that's where it comes from. That's what it says here, but I've never heard of it, okay? Oh, yeah. So, right? And, yeah, it comes from, yeah, the more, you know, the more human they get, there's a little graph here, you know? It basically talks about how, and how it relates to hardware projects in that the more you try and make your project professional-looking, right, there's a point where if you're just below professional-looking, then it's not going to be very appealing to people. So, you've either got to go full-on, full Monty professional, or you've got to go amateur, right? There's like...

Chris Gammell: I don't agree with this at all. I don't agree with this at all.

Dave Jones: I'll give you the... Well, that's what we're here to talk about, right? I'll show you... I'll explain the graph. It starts out at zero, right? And this is the professional execution on the X-axis versus the satisfaction on the Y-axis. So, picture, you know, wave your hands around and picture this, folks. Okay? So, it starts out your breadboard prototype, right? That's probably, like, the least professional execution you can have, okay? And people's satisfaction with that is, like, not very exciting at all, right? As, you know, if you publish your, you know, or sell your... Try and sell your project on a breadboard, or, you know, publish it on a breadboard, and, eh, people are going to go, eh, you know, it's a breadboard. But you put it on a pre-CB prototype, hey, you know, people's satisfaction rating goes up. Hey, it's on a PCB. Beautiful. It's at least starting to be professional, right? And then the graph goes up as you reach a fully documented project. You know, you've got this... You know, you've got a blog page with all the information that's all there, all your bill of materials, your schematic, your theory of operation, blah, blah, blah, right? Everything's there. A fully documented project, every... People's satisfaction is absolutely huge, right? People go, wow, that's a well-executed professional project, okay? And then you get... And then it sort of... Then it falls off a cliff into this uncanny valley. And your satisfaction actually goes negative at this point. And they give a few examples of why. When a gadget moves... You know, when your product moves to surface mount components, for example, but they're hand-soldered, okay? So you've tried to be professional by going all surface mount and, you know, everything, but you've just hand-sold them and it looks all dodgy, right? That's their, you know... That's where you're trying too hard to be professional, but you've screwed it up and it just looks dodgy as. That's actually worse, apparently, in the satisfaction rating than... I'm sorry, I don't agree with this at all. You don't agree. You don't agree. Anyway... Who cares? Who's... I don't know. Like, okay, so...

Chris Gammell: Who's the arbiter of satisfaction, right? Well, yeah. I mean, like, I guess if you're selling all these things, but... Like, fully documented project and hand-soldered components, these things are not mutually exclusive. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. I'd say, like, if you're getting to the point where it's like, oh, it has a case, but it's 3D printed, okay, yeah, sure, that's dodgy, but, like, I'd put all that stuff before. I don't... I think this is just a clickbait title, unfortunately. I do agree...

Dave Jones: A clickbait title? I've been suckered in. You totally have. I've got to admit, I haven't... Well, you know, like, yeah, all right.

Chris Gammell: I do have some relevant data points here, so I was helping judge the early stuff for the Hackaday Prize. Right. So the product side of things. As in the latest one? The first round, yeah. I helped with the first round last year. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, I'm one of the silent judges. Not so silent. Okay, but you're talking about the current contest. Oh, yeah, yeah, the 2015. Yeah, so there's a product that's tracked this year, and I got to take a look at some of the early stuff, the early products and stuff like that, and, I mean, that's what it is. It's like, you know, it's a product they had actually sent in hardware this year versus last year. You know, if it wasn't a product, it was different. But, you know, when you hear product, you're like, oh, well, it's done. You know what I mean? Like, but it's...

Dave Jones: Right, yeah, yeah. It should be a product. It's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, and so what...

Dave Jones: That's the definition of the word. A product is a commercial product.

Chris Gammell: Right. It should be polished and finished. Right, and... Obviously, we've had arguments about out-of-box experience here, but, you know, like, there are certain things you expect. Like, it has a case. It has packaging. It has a note, at least with a link to some startup documentation online, that kind of thing. Like, yeah, that's a fit-and-finish type of thing. And I do agree that that's difficult, but I'm not sure that it falls off where it's like, oh, I got a PCB. And then, you know, like, I don't know. Like, I don't agree that...

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, I think it's exaggerated. I can see their point. I can understand their point. I just don't... I think the graph is highly exaggerated.

Chris Gammell: I think that getting from a tindy board to Dave complaining about, you know, a finished watch not having perfect firmware on it, yeah, okay, sure, there's a lot of steps in between there, and there's a lot of Dave complaining in there. But let's be honest, folks, there's a lot of Dave complaining everywhere. So, but I... Oh, my goodness. What I will agree with is that, you know, having, you know, like, especially, like, as people, obviously, there's a lot of this maker pro kind of people moving into other areas and trying to sell products and stuff like that. A case alone, you know, having a custom case, doesn't have to be custom molded, anything like that. But, like, yeah, even just a, you know, a custom 3D printed, hand polished kind of painted case, like, that adds a lot to a project. Like, no doubt about that.

Dave Jones: That adds a world of difference.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, like, like, having light pipes in a case versus just having LEDs sticking out or having, you know, just LEDs trying to shine through something. Yeah, that makes a, that's a big difference. Having silk screening on plastic, having good silk screening on a board, like, those are like the, you know, that's like that last 10% type of thing. Sure, yeah, I'll give you that. That makes a big difference in a project, but I don't think that it, it doesn't fall off from that, from 80, from 80 to 90% done. It's not like it's, yeah, it's not like it's nothing. So, yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Tell us, folks, would you be, you know, if you're expecting a real polished product and you get something that has, you know. Well, no, I can see, no, actually, now that I think about it, I can kind of see their point, right? If I paid for a professional product, right?

Chris Gammell: Okay, well, let's, let's use a concrete example here. And I opened it up. Hang on. No, no, no, let's, let's use, let's use the microcurrent as an example. I think that's, that's fair, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, because it's not a consumer product. No, no, no, no. Not consumer.

Chris Gammell: We're not talking about consumer, are we?

Dave Jones: No, I wouldn't, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It says commercial, not consumer. I think we are.

Dave Jones: You're trying to push it. Well, you're trying to push it to general public, you know, right? As opposed to selling specifically to engineers who understand stuff. Right, maybe. Anything you sell to the general, my microcurrent doesn't sell to the general public, really, right? Okay. It sells to electronics enthusiasts, hobbyists, engineers, right? It's different. No, but just, you know, like if you bought a Wi-Fi router, right? Or something, I don't know. And you open it up, right? If you went to the shop and you bought it and you open it up and all the components were hand soldered. All the SMD parts were hand soldered. You'd have a pretty low satisfaction rating, almost negative satisfaction rating of that product, right? Yeah, but this is, that would, I think that's what they're talking about.

Chris Gammell: No, because if you're following this curve, then you're saying at some point, if it was just a Wi-Fi router board and it was just a prototype, then you would be somewhat satisfied. And I don't agree with that.

Dave Jones: That's what they're saying because you don't, because your expectations aren't as high when it's just a sort of, you know, an amateurish project. Like once you make that leap to full-on professional consumer board off the shelf, the expectation for it to be perfect in, you know, not every way, but at least professionally executed is much higher. And then if it's not and you get all your hand soldered components, SMD components, or it's got bodge wires all over it, right? Okay. Your satisfaction is going to be pretty low. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: My satisfaction is pretty low with this conversation.

Dave Jones: With this article. Okay. Well, there you go. Anyway, they've tried to equate it to the uncanny valley in robotics, so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Kind of.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Next.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, Altium.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I have. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Altium bought. Altium bought.

Chris Gammell: Two people.

Dave Jones: Octopart.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Congratulations to them. And also Siva, who's another bomb tool company. Well, kind of more like manufacturing. And I will state up front. Oh, did they buy them too? Yeah, they did. I will state up front that I am a little bit biased on this stuff because I work on similar products, so people should keep that in mind. But I know the Octopart folks, and they're great, so glad to hear that.

Dave Jones: This happened quite a few months ago, apparently. But it's only, yeah. Well, it came out a couple of weeks ago.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it just announced. The news public, anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yes. And no surprises whatsoever. I did a blog post ages ago. Yeah, I forgot about that. In fact, back on September 5th. It's a year ago now. September 5th, a year ago. I did a blog post entitled, Who is Altium Buying? And, yeah, I'm surprised it took them this long to actually buy someone. But I think that was one of my...

Chris Gammell: What was the prompting for that? What was the prompting for that article? I don't remember that article.

Dave Jones: The prompting was, is that Altium, for the first time since they floated, first time in 15 years or something, they took capital, external capital. They got... Oh. Oh, what was it? Yeah, they raised some capital. They raised... Yeah. Which they didn't have to. This is a company that's in great financial shape, has no debt, tons of cash in the bank. They didn't need to raise capital. So, at the time, I questioned, well, the only reason that they'd raise capital is so that they could buy somebody.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you're saying like they would have been fined just on their own? Like just...

Dave Jones: Oh, they would have been fined just on their own. Yeah, shut it along. They could have made small acquisitions even with the cash they had on hand. So, it was very puzzling that they actually got money, that they actually raised capital at the time. That was a year ago. So, I can't remember how... I don't even... I don't know if I have it in my blog post here. It's a very uninformative blog post of mine. Anyway. So, yeah. I think that was one of my... You know, I thought it'd be someone bigger. Like, I thought maybe Polar Instruments, for example, who make the fan... You know, one of the best signal integrity toolkits on the market. You know, because Altium is very lacking...

Dave Jones: Software. Software. Okay. So, yeah. Because Altium Designer is very lacking in signal integrity type stuff. In fact, their building stuff pretty much sucks. Right? Everyone uses, like, Polar Instruments. I thought, you know, that'd be a good thing to buy for them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe an auto router that actually works. Ha. You know. Never trust it. Never trust it, Dave. Never trust the auto router. That's right. You know, and it's... Anyway. Yeah. And the obvious... Actually, no. Because it was a year ago, because they hadn't even done the whole CircuitMaker thing then. So we didn't know about SIVA and Octopart being the back end. This is why, by the way, for those who don't know, this is why they bought Octopart and this SIVA mob. Octopart and SIVA are the back end, the entire back end that they're using, and database and component library that they're using for CircuitMaker. Plus, they're probably going to, you know, integrate it with Altium Designer, blah, blah, blah. You know.

Chris Gammell: Well, they've had a plug-in for Designer, too, for Octopart. That's... Oh, okay. Right. I see.

Dave Jones: I don't use the latest version. Right. Oh, right. So that makes sense. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, cool. Like I said... So that was obvious. Yeah. I think... Like I said, I know a bunch of the Octopart guys. They're great. So I'm really glad to see they're going to a cool company like that. So hopefully... I wish them well.

Dave Jones: Bring it on. Yeah. I hope Altium don't ruin them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, any merger's tough. I mean, I've been through a merger. Yeah. And usually there's always, you know, culture clashes. Have you been through one ever?

Dave Jones: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. I've been through mergers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's tough because it's like there's always expectations and a lot of fear. So people are on edge. And if it's Danaher, you know, usually they're well-founded fears. They're right. Yeah. But yeah, you know... The Danaher way, you know, the Danaher system.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: Now they're going to Octopart are going to get the Altium system. Yeah. But they're continuing with Octopart, like, as people know it, right? The website search engine, right? So they're continuing with that, aren't they? I don't know. I think the only reports were that they were.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I read Sam's... I mean, you know, we know what the blog post says. So Sam wrote a blog post about it. So yeah, I mean, they say they're continuing on. So that's good. Cool. Yeah. I don't know if people were expecting more fireworks from us.

Dave Jones: No. The end is night. No, no, no. It's like a completely obvious acquisition. I think there's still another acquisition on the cards with that money. Because I don't think Octopart were that huge, and they would have paid a huge enough amount of money for it. Seaver, I don't know. Although we must find out how much they pay, because Altium's a public company. Altium can't keep this quiet. They can't just say, oh, we're not going to tell you.

Chris Gammell: Do you know how much they raised for that stuff?

Dave Jones: I can't remember. Like, I think it was $60 million, but I can't...

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: I don't have it in my... Yeah. Sorry. Maybe I'll quickly Google it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway. No. Sorry. Google's Kaminagatza.

Chris Gammell: That's okay.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, that's cool. So, I guess that's...

Dave Jones: So, anyway, I think there's someone else on the cards to be acquired. Okay.

Chris Gammell: You think maybe more on the tool side, like the...

Dave Jones: It'll always... Well, hopefully it's always on the tool side, rather than the stupid morphic cloud crap, you know, FPGAs, which they spent 10 years acquiring. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of FPGAs, did you see this article that Hackaday posted? I don't know, like, how groundbreaking it is, but... Which one is this? Uh, well, it's just that there's a new Chinese fab that's making FPGAs. And I thought that was really... Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. But who? Who's the FPGA company? I've never heard of them, but it was... Goin...

Dave Jones: Well, nobody's going to use a third... Nobody's going to use a no-name FPGA.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, you'd think that, but then they, you know... Come on. So Synopsys is doing the tool chain. Because at a certain point, it comes down to tool chain. For FPGAs, it comes down to tool chains, right? No, yeah, totally. Yeah. Totally. So...

Dave Jones: And they're hideously complex beasts. Hideously. They're the most complex tool chains on the planet, FPGA tool chains. I don't think that's any exaggeration.

Chris Gammell: I don't even... All I know is that FPGAs use... Come on, you've played around with FPGA tool chains. No, I know I have, but all I think is, like, I know that there's Tickle scripts in there, and I know that there's a lot of other stuff I don't understand. Tickle scripts? Yeah, TCL.

Dave Jones: What's a TCL?

Chris Gammell: TCL is a programming... It's like a scripting language.

Dave Jones: Oh, right, okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And they're called Tickle. And I know that's not a true measure of complexity, but I'm just like... I see that, and I'm just like, nope. But, yeah, I mean, and it's not... Even under the hood, you know, there's tons of processing and stuff like that, and... Yeah, it's nutty.

Dave Jones: They're insane. They're insane tool sets. So, look...

Chris Gammell: And if you've used... I don't know. If you've used Actel before, so Actel had... So, I've used the... I think Synopsys bought Simplify... I think Simplify was a separate company? Maybe not. Maybe it's... Maybe it always was Synopsys.

Dave Jones: Oh, God. Yeah, I can't remember. They've had more mergers and buyouts.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, lunches.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I've used their stuff before, actually. I used to use a... A... What's it called? What's the MATLAB little block diagram tool? Shoot.

Dave Jones: MATLAB block diagram tool?

Chris Gammell: No?

Dave Jones: You've got me.

Chris Gammell: MATLAB block diagram. Guess what I'm doing.

Dave Jones: Oh, this is pathetic. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Simulink. Sorry. Simulink is the... Oh, Simulink. Right. Yes, of course. Yeah. So, when I was doing some FPGA stuff back in the day, which was 2004, there was a couple of different plugins you can get where, like, basically, like, Synopsys, or, you know, Simplify had one, and then Xilinx had one, but basically you drop, like, these FPGA blocks into Simulink, and then you could basically create, like, these math models, and then, you know, tweak it, and then it would just basically spit out VHDL at Verilog, which is great for an idiot like me. Not great for making maintainable code, but... So, that was my exposure to it. And, man, it's... They have some expensive, but some fancy tools, but they also... If you've ever used the Actel slash now Micro Semi toolchain, they use the Simplify Pro, I think, place and route stuff. So, I mean, like, so what I'm trying to say is, like, legit names.

Dave Jones: Yeah, what are you trying to say?

Chris Gammell: So, like, a legit name is working on this stuff. I mean, it's not like it's, like...

Dave Jones: Okay, well, that's good, but still, is anyone still going to trust it? I mean, yeah, the company, by the looks of the chip here, I'm looking at the article, it's called Go Win Semi. Yay! Go Win Semiconductor. I'm going to use Go Win Semi FPGAs. Not? Well... Like, why would you make the choice? Like, are they... How compelling are they?

Chris Gammell: Well, so here's the thing. Compared to the others. So, like, if you read through the comments, which is, you know, sometimes tough on TACA Day, but pretty good. So, Mike from Mike's Elector stuff, he actually brought up a good point. Like, you know, like, it could just open up different segments of the market. So, we've talked on here about, you know, smaller packages, and he restates that there, that kind of stuff of just, you know, more accessible packages, stuff like that. Just like things where... I've been fighting for more accessible FPGA packages for 20 years, yeah? Right, exactly. And it's... And that's the thing, though. Like, you're not going to win that battle with, like, a Xylenx or an Altera, but if you've got someone who's serving a lower-end market that might... You know, like, it's all these things where, like... Sure. You know, like, the Espressif, the ESP8266, right? No one would ever think... If you told someone that three, four years ago, like, oh, well, you're going to use a core that no one really uses anymore, and it's going to have Wi-Fi on board, and you're going to use the AT commands to connect to it, and it's going to get popular with, you know, because it's... Simply because it's low-cost. You say, well, that's stupid, but, like, so many things, you know, like, people will do so much to get around just low-cost. They'll deal with hardware bugs. They'll, you know, they'll just... People will develop tools around it, obviously, like the Espressif stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, all right. I don't know. It's just the history of FPGA shows, FPGA startups, you know, coming into the market just ultimately mostly fail. I mean, it's just...

Chris Gammell: That's true, but they usually fail because they try and roll their own software. As far as I know, I remember, I've seen a couple articles over the years with, like, EE Times where it's like, yep, still none... Like, that there's still no number five, right? There's still... There's always the Altera's and Xilinx and the Micro Semi-slash-Actels and Lattice, and then... And then... You know, it's like... It's not there, right? But it's still... I mean, like, if... Usually, it's because these startups are trying to do everything, and maybe this is the kind of thing. And then the cost basis is always... You know, if you have to... If you're trying to roll your own silicon and design all your cells and trying to carve out a niche there, you have to, you know, do some weird things. But maybe we don't need to here, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, okay. Well, is... Okay, it uses Simplify Pro, right? Yes. As their tool chain, right? Okay, fine and dandy. Is that free?

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: You can get a free evaluation. Exactly, right? It's an expensive tool.

Chris Gammell: Right, yes. That is very true.

Dave Jones: So, this is not... This is not... This is not designed for the low-end market, right?

Chris Gammell: You might underestimate... It can't be with an expensive tool. How much people steal software in China? Or, you know, if there's...

Dave Jones: All right, well, yeah, okay, right? No, I'm talking Western market here, right? Engineers, right? Right, but this is a design for the Western market.

Chris Gammell: Think about how many things...

Dave Jones: Then who's going to go with it?

Chris Gammell: It'll start in China. Who's going to go...

Dave Jones: Are you going to trust... Right? It's like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM argument all over again, right? It's got... Nobody got... Nobody ever got fired for using, you know, Xilinx or Altera, right? You've got to... As a design engineer, you've got to put your ass on the line and go, oh, I'm going to use this win, happy go, whatever it's bloody called. Win, go win semi, FPGA. Yeah, oh, there. I'm going to stake my professional reputation on that. I'm going to design that in. Like, it's a tough ask.

Chris Gammell: I agree with that, but what I'm saying is, like, people pay... Say the tools are 10K. I think they're probably more, but say it's 10Ks for a license of Simplify Pro. People are paying 10K for Altium licenses and stuff like that, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. Okay, yes, I am. All right.

Chris Gammell: And if you're making a thing that needs the reconfigurability and you're making a million a year and you can now go from a... You know, I don't know many FPGAs that are less than five bucks. If you can go from a $10 FPGA to a $2 FPGA, right?

Dave Jones: Well, fine. Okay, but is this all speculation? How much is this FPGA in volume? What's the compelling difference?

Chris Gammell: I have no idea.

Dave Jones: See, okay. It comes down to the... Is it compelling enough to people to... For design engineers to risk designing it in?

Chris Gammell: Probably not.

Dave Jones: Because there's risk. There's also the... You know, we've talked about this countless times about the support risk down the track. Will you be able to buy this go-win semi-FPGA in 10 years' time? Yeah, I don't think...

Chris Gammell: Okay, so imagine now... No, I think... So right now... Okay, I'll tell you. You'll never have...

Dave Jones: The industry I come from, I would never... The strict industry that I came from, right? And both the military and the strict commercial industry I came from where customers demand five, 10-year product support times. There is no chance in hell I could ever choose a part like this.

Chris Gammell: And what were the volumes like for those things?

Dave Jones: Oh, you know, tens of thousands. Things like that. But we would have to get written assurances from the company that they would still support the product in 10 years' time. You know how difficult that is to get? I do. I've done the same thing. Oh, yeah, we might be able to get the CEO of go-win semi to say, yeah, we'll still sell this in 10 years' time in China. Come on.

Chris Gammell: But... Why? But what the thing is...

Dave Jones: That's a practical reality of the market that I came from.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, from your market. But what I'm saying is, imagine this, right? You, right now, name a consumer-level device that has an FPGA in it. And I think maybe... Sure. Even... For consumer stuff? Yeah, okay. Sure stuff, right? Like, even the Cast AR, right? That's not going to have an FPGA. It's going to have a... They're switching over to ASICs because you need to get the cost down. That's right. But if you could do an FPGA instead and it was at the decent price and you're selling a million of something and you're saving enough and it opens up FPGAs in a consumer-level market...

Dave Jones: Yeah, but hang on, hang on, hang on. Don't make the mistake of trying to compare FPGAs with ASICs. It's not only about price. It's also about area and physical size and, most critically, power consumption as well. Power.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, power for sure. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And you're right. But FPGAs are usually never the choice for power. Like, you know, a couple of the Actel, like, low power parts are interesting, but...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, right. Of course, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, no, no. You're right. But when I start to think about it, it sounds like... It seems like, like I say, imagine you have something where you have a million of something in a... You know, you're making a million of something and you need it to be reconfigurable in a year for whatever reason. You know, like... Hmm. You know, you start to... You know, you talk about risk, you start to remove some of the hardware risk over time because you have reconfigurability. Now, granted, sending out new FPGA images is not a trivial thing for sure, but it's something, it's different, right? I mean, like... And what it really just gets me going...

Dave Jones: Of course, it's one of the advantages of FPGAs is that you can, you know... It's in the name, Field Programmable Gatorade. Right, in the field. You can upgrade... In the field. In the field. In the field. In the field.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, goodness. Yeah, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: Anyway, what they're... They're saying here that basically this is an interesting thing because it gives them a home field advantage because they're made in China. So, you know, yes, they could get, you know, a dominant foothold in China for... They're talking about LVDS, DSP, and other stuff that FPGAs do quite well, you know, so...

Chris Gammell: You start to get parallel processing type stuff.

Dave Jones: It's fine, but like... Okay, that's great. Yeah, they might have a real successful thing. Would I start using GoWin semi-FPGAs? I can't see it, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: But that's just me, right? Are you designing a lot of FPGAs in these days, Dave?

Dave Jones: No, but I'm just saying if I had a project where I had to choose an FPGA...

Chris Gammell: Of course. Right? Of course.

Dave Jones: Would I choose this? No, of course not.

Chris Gammell: Of course I wouldn't. I think that you're right, especially with... I'm not... I took a look over at the Simplify Pro or the Synopsys site, and I didn't see any, like, intro tools. They're all, like, kind of, like, send us an email and we'll quote you the price kind of thing, but...

Dave Jones: You can get a free product evaluation. You can request... Sorry. Request a free product evaluation. Right. But, yeah, no, this is not... You know, you can't just download and go.

Chris Gammell: Well, you can't just download and go with them. No, no, no. You can't just download and go with any FPGA software because you're going to be waiting for 10 hours.

Dave Jones: No, but you know what I mean. Right? No, but you know... But there are free tools, right? There are free tools which support most of the low-end FPGAs. Right? So, technically, you can just download them and, assuming you have the knowledge to use the tools, you can just go.

Chris Gammell: Assuming you have a fiber connection. Right? Yeah, no. Come on. You know what I mean.

Dave Jones: Right? You know what I mean. Right? You don't have to pay anything. You can just download and go.

Chris Gammell: I'm just giving xilings a hard time.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, you're clutching. You're clutching.

Chris Gammell: No, I'm not clutching. I'm just saying that xilings tools are like 16 gigabytes of downloads. It's ridiculous.

Dave Jones: They're behemoths. Yeah, well, how big is Simplify? I don't know. I haven't downloaded it in a decade.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I haven't either. It's been a while.

Dave Jones: I don't know. So, yeah. It's been a long time.

Chris Gammell: I wonder about this stuff, too, because there's some kits out there. I like the Papelio is an interesting kit and stuff like that. And Jack Gassett was over on Embedded FM. It's got to be almost a year ago, I think, now. And, you know, I was listening to it, and I wonder about it. Obviously, I'm interested in FPGAs. But, you know, some of the stuff, it seems like, obviously, micros are so ubiquitous. I think that there's value in learning about the parallel processing stuff. But I wonder about, you know, where the line is between, like, okay, well, this is, like, an educational thing of, like, yeah, it's interesting to learn versus actual implementation of parallel processing and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Well, this is why FPGAs didn't take off the way Altium and others thought they would come to dominate the industry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's because they're still mostly suitable to niche applications that require, you know, huge parallelism or, you know, fast multi-channel serial interfaces or whatever, you know, decoding, all that sort of jazz.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. I need 38 I-squared C ports.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, right, right. Yeah, you would whack in a little FPGA or CPLD or something, right? Right, right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They're the solutions to extreme problems.

Dave Jones: Right. Exactly. And they probably always will be. That's just the nature of the beast, you know. You can't beat dedicated silicon, you know. If you need a smart processor to control something, you're not going to whack a core in an FPGA. It's just, you know. Right, because there's also IP costs. Very few people are going to do that. Stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's only, there's very little upside to doing that. There's lots of downside, you know. It's just, you just use a micro. Right. You know. Right, right. So that's why micros dominate almost everything.

Chris Gammell: And now the, even a lot of the FPGAs now have that hard silicon built in. Like that's, that's an increasing trend as well. You know, they'll slap a, you know, versus, you know, generating a memory controller, they'll just have it in there. No, yeah.

Dave Jones: They've got hard cores built in. DDR2. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. DDR3.

Dave Jones: Most of the new FPGAs have new, you know, arm cores built in and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I meant, I just meant memory. But yeah, you're right. There are also a bunch of the arm cores in there too, so.

Dave Jones: That's, see, that's the thing. That's, you know, the dream of FPGAs was shattered once they started doing that. Oh, you know, yeah, okay. People are doing this. Oh, we better actually build some hard silicon into FPGAs because we don't want to piss away our FPGA fabric with a generic CPU by people, you know, whacking in a soft arm core. We may as well whack in a hard arm core. Oh, we may as well whack in a hard Ethernet decoder as well. Oh, we may as well whack in a, you know, a hard, you know, serial interface, blah, blah, blah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, apparently that's one of the things that the PSOC does pretty well where it's, it is that, you know, kind of everything in the kitchen sink, but then also there's some reconfigurable fabric and stuff like that. I keep hearing good things about the PSOC 5, PSOC 4, stuff like that. So, I get to try it.

Dave Jones: They've got analog stuff on there as well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm always pretty weary about that, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's pretty ordinary performance, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yeah, it's like if you're in a pinch, that kind of stuff. Like, and usually the ADCs on board, silicon like that is usually, you know, you can get 12 bits pretty standard, but you're not going to get great linearity. You're not going to get great, you know, like performance at the low bit side of things. So, yeah, the future.

Dave Jones: Hey, Artifruit's up to $33 million.

Chris Gammell: I saw that. A year business. That's very impressive, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's pretty good. Well, yeah, it's been a slow climb because last time we sort of talked about that, it was, they were at the $10 million point. They're at the $10 million a year sales, I think.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no. No, no, that was SparkFun. I think Artifruit were at a million or something. Anyway. When was it? A long time ago in a galaxy, far, far away. Right. But, yeah. Yeah, no, because there was a presentation at like the Open Hardware Summit or something, was it? I think that about different, you know, there was, you know, open source hardware companies, you know, were still coming up. SparkFun was like number one or something, you know, at $10 million. I think Artifruit were a couple of million bucks turnover and things like that. So, geez, that must have been, yeah, that was probably like four years ago, five years ago.

Chris Gammell: Well, still, I think that's great growth. I mean, that's, that's.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, no, it's awesome. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hell of a lot more than I'll ever do. Exactly. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: It sounds like a lot, but it's, you know, when you're.

Chris Gammell: No, no, Dave. It is a lot. It's a lot. They're moving a lot of products.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, it's a lot. No, but even small. Yeah, but okay. As a comparison, right? It's not that hard for a one or two man band operation to turn over a million dollars a year selling product. It's not hard. Okay.

Chris Gammell: I was listening to a thing the other day, though, that said every time, what were they saying? When you go from one to three people, that's a total shift in culture of your company. When you go from three to ten people, it's a total shift in your culture of your company. Right. Including in, you know, because your cost structure changes, everything like that. So, I think.

Dave Jones: Oh, everything changes. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Everything changes. So, I don't think that, you know, using. I agree. I know people that we might be thinking of the same people that are doing that kind of, you know, million dollar revenue stuff. But I think scale-wise, you know, that's, it's more than you think to get to that, you know, these, these doublings and stuff like that. So, I think. I'm very impressed with this.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. So am I. But they've got, how many? They've got 85 employees now. Okay. There you go. So, they're a $33 million a year company with 85 employees. But, you know, which is interesting because, as I said, you can, I actually know almost one, you know, that, you know, sub three people companies, you know, turning over a couple of million bucks a year in sales. You know, it's not hard. You know, if you're, it depends on the margin of your business, right? The Artifruit one is, well, it's probably high margin, but they've got to sell a lot of products because they're not high value products, right? They're, I don't know, their average sale might be 30, 40 bucks or something, right? And so they've got to sell a lot of stuff. They've got to ship a lot, a lot of volume to get that $33 million. Whereas somebody, a couple of person operation to, you know, earn a couple of million bucks a year in sales, you know, if they're making, you know, a hundred bucks profit on each one, you know, or sorry, if they're selling high value products that are worth, you know, 300 bucks a pop, you don't have to sell that many to turn over a couple of million bucks. So, you know, yeah, it's interesting. Well, I don't know. Where's that going?

Chris Gammell: I won't be doing any $33 million companies any time soon, so.

Dave Jones: Anyway, this is a Business Insider article. But yeah, the highlight of it was, well, the title is how one woman turned her passion for tinkering into a $33 million business without a dime of funding. And that's the, that's the novel thing these days, right? To not do it without any funding at all. To bootstrap the thing. Right. Right. And, and that's where it's coming because nobody bootstraps anymore, which I, we've talked about a lot and I think it's a shame. Everyone wants the quick, get rich quick crowdfunding viral bloody, you know, thing, right, to happen. They want to go on Kickstarter and there's suddenly a $10 million company. Woohoo. You know, like, like, bullshit, you know. Buy parts for, you know, save up a bit of pocket money. Buy, you know, don't drink 20 coffees a day. Just save up some money. Or beers. Buy, you know, yeah, or beers. Buy a hundred kits worth of parts. Sell your hundred kits. Make your, make, you know, I don't know, a few grand on it. Use that few grand to buy more parts and then more and then more. And you bootstrap it that way. And it takes time. But, you know, everyone's just trying to get funding quick these days. It's just, in fact, you know, a lot of like graduates who come out, they think that's the only way that you can start a business. It seems like. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it seems like to me. Every, oh, we have to go on the venture capital thing, right? We've got to go do the dog and pony show to all the venture capital firms and get our funding. Or we have to do a Kickstarter. Or we have to do this or that.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think some of that stuff seems glamorous too, you know.

Dave Jones: But. Yeah, totally.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I don't know.

Dave Jones: It just seems like the only way today. And I'm sick of it. Because I'm a fan of bootstrapping, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And the good thing about it is it's a zero risk way of doing it too. You know, you can't lose. Like, you know, you can't lose. If you operate at, you know, if you start with no debt, right? Or you say, you know, you have to do that initial. You've got to buy, you know, 100 kits or 50 kits or whatever. So you've got to put the money up. And if they don't sell well, okay, you've lost your money. Right? But assuming that you can sell 50 or whatever, you might start out with 10. Right? So you might risk $1,000, for example. And, you know. Which is a lot when you start out, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, that's a lot.

Dave Jones: It certainly. It certainly can be. You know, but you can even start out smaller than that if you want. And, you know, and then just keep doing it. And then if you've got low overheads and you just keep making a profit on each sale, you're a one-man band, you're a midnight engineer, then, you know, you can't fail.

Chris Gammell: Financially, anyway. Right, right. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: You can fail by the sales dry up, et cetera. But, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. You're on the ramen diet. You're eating. Right. Hot dogs and oranges.

Dave Jones: Well, no. It's always. Well, yeah. The problem with it, though, is that, you know, you're always one production run away from failure. Right? Because, you know, right, you've got to, right, I've sold my product. Okay. Like, I'm out of stock. Okay. I've got to get another thousand manufactured. Okay. So, you've got to put up that DOSH for a thousand units. Right? And if all of a sudden your sales vanish, then you're left holding the bag with a thousand units. Right? Right. So, you've got to, you know. Yeah. Yeah. But the history of all your sales pretty much guarantees that you, you know, you're going to have a hard time failing. So.

Chris Gammell: You're saying because you've already proven to the point where you could sell five or ten.

Dave Jones: Because you've already proven that there's a consistent change. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to sell five, ten a week or whatever. You know, like, it's totally consistent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you can measure that. And, you know, statistics works. Once you have enough people, statistics works. That's how I can make money from ads. You know? Yeah. In theory, all of my ad revenue can dry up tomorrow and I'm out of business. Right? Yeah. But statistically, I know that is ridiculously improbable. You know? That that would happen. That everyone would pull their advertising at once. You know?

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You know? So, it's fairly consistent. So. And if I get enough views on YouTube, you know, I might get, okay, I get X thousand per month in ad revenue. Right? From, you know, YouTube. And, you know, yeah. And that'll vary from month to month. Right? But I know, I can pretty much guarantee that's not going to drop to zero. Right? Right? It is, you know, there's just so many people. People searching for videos and watching that, you know, the sheer statistics of it pretty much guarantees it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No. So. Yeah. It's great. It's great that there's people out there searching for stuff. So.

Dave Jones: Hmm. But, yeah. I kind of feel disappointed that there has to be an article like this without a dime of funding as if it's the most novel thing ever. Oh, my God. Somebody started a business and got no funding. Oh, how do you do that? It's a miracle. Right. No. It's called bootstrapping. It's been done for bloody thousands of years, I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: I mean, so now that I'm in the web world a little bit more, too, it's like, it's like the default assumption is you're not selling anything. You're, you know, just giving everything away to start with, you know? And so I think that's one of the big differences, too. So.

Dave Jones: Huh? How are you giving everything away to start with?

Chris Gammell: On the web? Like, so, like, startups, a lot of the startup world is like, oh, so we're going to have this free app and then eventually we'll figure out how we're going to make money. Right?

Dave Jones: Well, you can't do that with hardware. Like, you know. Of course. I know that's what I'm saying. Very few companies go, oh, okay, I'm going to give you a free widget. Right. And then I'll figure out how to make money. No. Right?

Chris Gammell: Hmm. No, no.

Dave Jones: Please don't fuddle up the software with hardware. Ugh. No, no.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what I'm saying, though. I think that's where the expectation comes from, where it's like, oh, I can't believe they didn't raise money because every startup has to in order, every software startup has to in order to survive. There's no one that, there's very few that are like, well, we're going out and charging money for this software that's not proven yet. You know what I mean? That's the big difference.

Dave Jones: No, I don't know. I don't like the software analogies.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Not a fan. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: It's okay. You're not the one making them. It's all these journalists that are making them. So I think that's, I'm just trying to explain what's going on here, Dave. Oh, goodness. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, awesome. Yes. I wonder how much SparkFun are worth these days because SparkFun was always bigger than Artifruit. So if Artifruit are 33 million, have they like caught, did SparkFun plateau and Artifruit have caught up? Or if SparkFun like 300 million? Because SparkFun was always like an order of magnitude bigger than Artifruit kind of thing. And that's how I always. I don't really. I didn't really. In terms of sales.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I'm glad. As long as they're all increasing still. That's good. That's good news for us. People still give a shit about electronics. That's good news for us.

Dave Jones: I wonder how she handles running a business that big now. 85 employees. That's starting to get to the point where if you were the original founder, you may not actually know everyone who's been hired in the company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right.

Dave Jones: I'm sure she does. I'm sure she does. But it's almost getting to, you know, almost getting to that point where, you know, people could be hired and you could be the original founder and you would not, you wouldn't have been involved in that hiring decision and you wouldn't have met them. Right. Or you might run into them on the production line. Who are you?

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. No, no, yeah. You're right. And that's, I just remember it was the, it was a, oh crap. I forget who it actually was, but it was on a Tim Ferriss podcast that was talking about, he was interviewing someone who was talking about that, that 30 to a hundred, a hundred to 300, 300 to a thousand. Right. And that same guy was saying that I think that the, there's some like, there's some law out there that like, once you get past like 150 people in an office. Some law. Not law, but you know, it's like a, I think it might've been Richard Branson or something like that. But once you get past like 150 people in an office, you just, it's literally impossible to know everyone. Whatever that number is. I think it's based on social networks and stuff like that too. You just literally can't keep, maintain that many social connections.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's by, yeah. Based on a lot of, um, psychology, but social. Yeah. Something like that. Social research has gone into it. Yeah. You can't have more than like 150 personal friends or something. It's just like, you can't maintain that many personal relationships. It's, you know, part of the human, whatever. Yeah. It's social psychology. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Godwin's law.

Dave Jones: Godwin's law.

Chris Gammell: I think so. I'm trying, I'm looking at the stupid, stupid page. Oh no, that's a different one. I'm sorry. That's terrible. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Godwin, of course it is.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was. It's not. It's not. It's not this.

Dave Jones: Godwin's law is the Hitler thing.

Chris Gammell: It's as long.

Dave Jones: Sorry. If we do the, we just did it. We just did it. Yeah. You're right. If you do this show long enough, we're going to mention Hitler.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. The probability that a discussion will devolve to talking about Hitler. Sorry. Self-fulfilling.

Dave Jones: Wah. So, yep. Godwin's law fulfilled again.

Chris Gammell: Works every time. Yeah. Dunbar's number. That's the one.

Dave Jones: Now let's see the comments in the air power page. Yeah. I give it 10 posts before it reaches, before someone does a comparison with Hitler.

Chris Gammell: No, don't do that. Don't do that. It was, it's Dunbar's number. That's what it is. Dunbar's number.

Dave Jones: Dunbar's. Ah, yes. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Oh, dear Eddie. Suggested cognitive limit. Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit. Here's the educational part of the show, folks. Yeah, Dave reading Wikipedia. Suggested cognitive limit to the number of people who one can maintain stable social relationships. Okay. So, what is the figure? Between 100 and 250.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It lies depending on your social capacity. If you're a social butterfly like Mr. Gamble here, then you're going to be upwards of 250.

Chris Gammell: Me alone in my hotel room drinking a beer, talking to a crazy Aussie halfway across the world over a shitty connection. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Super social.

Dave Jones: I don't think I could reach double digits, let alone triple. Anyway. There you go.

Speaker ?: Dunbar's number.

Chris Gammell: I do wonder about that. Like, you have 150 people in office. Who talks to everyone in their office? Come on. No, no, no. Exactly.

Dave Jones: No. There's some, like, you don't talk to marketing people. It's just not done.

Chris Gammell: Even if you had 50 people in your office, who's going to talk to everyone in that office? I don't know. Yeah, no.

Dave Jones: It's just, no. No work could get done. You know, it's just everyone forms their little social groups and that's it. You know, you generally just, yeah. No, it's just the way it is. Smart companies, I guess. Like, at lunchtime, maybe if you're a smart company, here we go, here's something I've never encountered. Probably a good reason why. Is that, you know, if it was company policy, you would, you know, you turn up for lunch, you know, you go to the canteen or whatever you have, where everyone eats, right? Well, most people eat. Nerds generally just eat at their desk or bench.

Chris Gammell: Yes, they definitely just eat at their desk. Yes, I know that one.

Dave Jones: If it was company policy, right? That everyone had to go to lunch and you came in and you were, you checked the chart and here's your chart of the table you're sitting at today. And it, you know, it's like a wedding, you know, like you have to, oh God, we've invited all of these, this side of the family, these people, who knows who, whose compatible personalities do we put together and, you know, and seat at the tables together.

Chris Gammell: So you're saying you have to literally force the nerds together kind of thing.

Dave Jones: You would, you would have to force them together, but I wonder if that would be a good company approach so that, you know, everyone gets to know everyone. So how successful that would be. Does, does anyone work for a company like that or know of a company that?

Chris Gammell: Well, so, so here's my reference point. Here's my reference point. Maybe it's the same in Australia, but I was literally shot. Not, not this time when I came out here, but now that I work in California once in a while, but the first time I came to California and started doing some consulting work and I was literally shocked that they had food in the offices, like just for like general consumption. Now I know that, but like the reason being that like that never happened, you know, it was always like, yeah, bring your own stuff, pay for your own coffee, that kind of thing. And I'm not sure if that's an Ohio thing or a Midwest thing or just a hardware thing.

Dave Jones: It's a, no, it's a, it's a, it never used to be here. It's a total Silicon Valley culture thing. Right. And that made its way to Australia. Altium, for example, Altium had a first class fully catered canteen. Oh yeah, you used to mention that. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You were always happy when it was hamburger day, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Friday was hamburger day, you know? Yeah. It was like, yeah. I think that was probably the only day that I made an appearance up in the canteen actually. Cause I generally, you know, cause the wife generally made my own lunch, you know, and even though the Altium was pretty darn good, it wasn't good enough yet.

Chris Gammell: The healthy Joneses. Yes. Right. Eating all organic and everything. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, you know, I'd, I'd go up there and get a muffin and stuff, you know, so bad boy me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. But yeah, no, and the idea behind that is to get people to eating together and sticking around at work and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It totally comes from like this software startup culture. Um, I, I, you know, it's the very early software internet startups. Right. All did that.

Chris Gammell: Well, a lot of people don't realize that like the reason the perks at all these companies are so crazy, they want you there as long as they can get you. Yeah. I know.

Dave Jones: Exactly. If you're a, yeah, if you're a young, that was the Altium, right? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, right? If you're a young single person, right? They encourage you to practically live there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: So what, what the hell are you going to do? I just work some more. Right. You know, if you're getting free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, right? Catered for, and plus other perks as well. And you're a young single person struggling to save money. Damn right. You're going to go eat your free breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you would. But I wonder about that. Like, like, I don't know about you, but like, like, we know we're talking work culture here. Like, anytime I've been in a job, like, some of my jobs have had some pretty crazy expectations in terms of work hours, but never, like, expectations in terms of-

Dave Jones: Formal?

Chris Gammell: Formal expectations? Never. They were never allowed to be formal.

Dave Jones: Never formal. It was all informal, right? Yeah. It was peer- 30 hours a week, right. Yeah. A peer-based, right. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Wait, what? You work 38 hours a week? What?

Dave Jones: That's the standard here in Australia. Was it 37 or the- Yeah, 38 hours a week. It's the standard working week here in Australia. I guess 40 is the standard, but-

Chris Gammell: 40 is in the US. I don't know, man. I've had- I'm sure that, like, I'll have people that agree with me, but like, you would get, like, weird looks if you build less- If you put down less than 50 hours in your timesheet, like, first off, I hate timesheets. I am never- I'm never- Yeah. Yep. Yeah. If- If you could take- You could cut my salary in half, and- No, that's not true, but, you know, like, that is one thing I will never miss about a regular job, so.

Dave Jones: That's- And you talk about cutting it in half, right? I know people who wouldn't actually negotiate with the company, right, to work less hours, and I've always said this myself, right? Mm-hmm. If I could work less hours a week and accept less pay, I would take it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? Because I, you know, I never needed every last cent, right? I was very good at saving, so I never needed every last cent, so I would have worked less hours, and I know a lot of people who've done that in the company, they've gone and said, look, I'd like to work four days a week instead of five or whatever, and take, you know, less pay as well, you know? So they're not asking for more pay, exactly the same pay, but, you know, they only get paid for the four days, and then come review time, they go, well, you're not working five days a week like everyone else. What are you doing? I do. And they go, but I'm only paid to work four days a week. Well, no, your attitude is poor, you know? And they would actually rate them down, even though they agreed to it.

Chris Gammell: And that's when you become a consultant, you triple your rate, and you work whenever you want to. Yeah. Yeah. No, and seriously, that's the choice, and I had to do that too when I tried to go part time when I was switching over to my current. Oh, of course.

Dave Jones: You did that. I remember that. I remember the day, folks. He came in. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is where Dave says, I told you so again. Dave loves this. I've got to tell the story.

Dave Jones: I can remember. It was in the morning. You were still working at, well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It was ABB. People know. It's fine. It's ABB.

Dave Jones: It was ABB, right? Anyway, yeah, it's no secret. You didn't leave on bad terms. I talked about it.

Chris Gammell: No, I've talked about it. It's fine.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, it's fine. Okay, so you were at ABB, and I remember you were, were we talking or were we just chatting? I can't remember. I think we were chatting, yeah.

Chris Gammell: We were talking online because I was really nervous about it. I was going to ask to go part time.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you were really nervous. Yeah, he was going to go in because, you know, the whole contextual electronics thing, he wanted to do that. And so he, you know, he was about to go in. Yeah, I remember you were really nervous. I'm going to, you know, Chris said, oh, I'm going to go in and I'm going to ask if I can work part time. And I went, they're never going to do it. Dude, they're just going to boot you straight out the door. They're going to say work full time or leave. And Chris went, no, no, no. I think they'll be happy with it. I think they'll be okay. And then a couple of hours later, I was waiting to say I told you so. And a couple of hours later, Chris came back online and went, yep, you were right.

Chris Gammell: Dave's always so supporting. I'm gone. So supporting. No, it wasn't like that, though. It was like, it was like I had said to choose. And at that point, I was, I was ready. I was prepared. That gave you an item.

Dave Jones: Exactly like I said.

Chris Gammell: And I was prepared to go. And I was like, okay, well, that's it then. That's fine. And yeah. But no, and it comes down to that where it's like, and it's not, it's not that that actually wasn't the company I was talking about. But, you know, like just these expectations around, like ABB was actually really good about, about a lot of this stuff. But like, you know, expectations around billing and, you know, like hours you're putting in, stuff like that, like how late people stay there. It's, you know, you think, oh, well, I'm not going to do it. But it's a, it's a powerful, that peer pressure is very, very powerful.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, totally.

Chris Gammell: And it's, you know, especially if it's like, hey, look, we got stuff to do here. You really shouldn't be going home right now. And yeah, it's, it's, I mean, and like, you don't want to like let your coworkers down either. So, but that can only go on for so long and then you start to get really weary of it. So.

Dave Jones: I, I, I never felt pressure to let, you know, like letting the company down. I never really cared about the company. Coworkers, yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: You know, like I, I didn't want to leave them home. You know, it's Friday afternoon and all hell's broken loose on the production line. You know, it's 4.30 on a Friday. All hell's broken loose. You know, I'm not going to secretly sneak out the back door while my mates are holding the bag.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know. Exactly. Exactly. And that's.

Dave Jones: You know, if, if they're left holding the bag, I'll stay there and hold the bag with them. But if we all manage to sneak out, then that's fine. You know. Right, right. Yeah. Let's go. Let's go. Quick. All of us. You know.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: That was done more than once. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've talked to some, I've talked to someone where they said, they said it was like a Friday and they had sent out a one day turn on a Thursday night. Right. And then the board shows up at like. Yeah, Friday afternoon. Seven or 8 p.m. on Friday because people are waiting around for it.

Chris Gammell: On Friday. And they're like, all right, the board's here. And it's like, okay, we can go home now. Right. It's like, no, no, it's time to troubleshoot. It's like, oh shit. You know, like.

Dave Jones: Yeah, been there.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, and like a lot of that, some people thrive on that and, you know. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I enjoy it sometimes.

Dave Jones: I enjoyed it sometimes. Not always, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Like now, I'm sure that you, you know, you have family too. Like, it's like, like I've seen coworkers like calling their kids being like, I'm missing your baseball game. It's like, man, that's heartbreaking. You know, like that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, that's. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. And it's always a confluence of factors. It's usually like scheduling around projects and, you know, and there's just, there's a ton of stuff there, but.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Working for a living.

Dave Jones: The moral of the story is don't work for the man, folks.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Choose which 16 hours that you work per day.

Dave Jones: Yes. Exactly. You can work any 16 hours a day you like.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Right. Right. But you know what? It's so much easier to go do chores at 10 in the morning and then work the rest of the day. Work till three in the morning.

Dave Jones: Speaking of which, I have to go now because I've got to finish a video.

Chris Gammell: You've got to go finish a video. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm going to go. Well, I have to. Well, not even finish. I've got to go start it and finish it. Hopefully.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. So what dude's really saying here is he'd spent all morning on the forum. That's what I'm really hearing. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, no, I half set it up. I did set it up. I did something. I did a token effort.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Okay.

Dave Jones: And then, you know, I can't stay back because I've got to go to the gym at 530 and I'd feel bad if I can't leave at 530 and miss the gym. So screw it. Dave's a gym rat. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Got to get out of there. Good. That's healthy. Dave's a healthy person. People should follow his example.

Dave Jones: I don't get to go to it much these days, you know. But yeah, no, I don't want to feel like there's so much pressure in this job that I can't do that. That sucks. Right.

Chris Gammell: That means you're not designing the job right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly. Cool, man.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm glad that this sort of worked. We'll see how the edit lines up. It did.

Dave Jones: I'm surprised it held up for an hour. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, shocked. Does this mean that you're going to get like a $10,000 phone bill?

Chris Gammell: No. I'm unlimited, quote unquote. Remember?

Dave Jones: I can remember a quick story when we went to China for production for a company that shall remain nameless. Yeah. Yeah. We, of course, the Chinese internet and, you know. Yeah. Anyway, we needed internet on the production floor and we needed it for a week. And yeah, we had to use a phone. Had to use a phone. And then the next month the bill came in and it was like $10,000. Holy shit. I'm not kidding. And they just went, yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, cost to doing business, right? Yep, exactly.

Dave Jones: Cost to doing business. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. That's like the magic wand. You could say that and people are like, oh, yeah. What are you going to do? Yep. Oh, Dave Jones charges $3,000 an hour. Cost to doing business. Had to pay him to do that ridiculous video. Cost to doing business. All right, man. All right. Talk to you next week.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Speaker ?: Bye. administered administered administered administered