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Author Articles

  • Assessing An Employer's Financial Health

    By Peter Varhol, June 18, 2001

    It's not only the dot-coms that are laying off thousands of professionals. Established technology companies such as Lucent, Nortel, and General Electric have also announced layoffs that total in the tens of thousands. Telecom companies have suffered...

  • Take Control Of Your Time On The Job

    By Peter Varhol, April 16, 2001

    Maybe you've just come into a new job and the amount of work seems overwhelming, or perhaps your company has experienced an increase in design projects and is reluctant to hire more engineers. Either way, you find yourself with a workload that you...

  • Skills For A Successful Manager

    By Peter Varhol, March 19, 2001

    A career as a manager requires development of management skills in terms of leadership, focus, and a less-controlling environment that fosters creativity. This article will lead you in the right direction as a manager.

  • Make Telecommuting Work For You As An Engineer

    By Peter Varhol, February 19, 2001

    Over the last several years, a great deal of press has focussed on the advantages and limitations of telecommuting—that is, performing office work while at home. This approach has proven very successful for jobs whose tasks, responsibilities,...

  • Are You A "Great Communicator"?

    By Peter Varhol, January 22, 2001

    No, the above title doesn't refer to Ronald Reagan. It doesn't refer to a new and vastly more powerful Internet protocol either. Instead, it refers to your potential as a communicator of ideas, concepts, designs, and implementations. Like most broad...

  • Identify And Manage Work-Related Stress

    By Peter Varhol, December 18, 2000

    With complex engineering problems, short deadlines, and not enough people and equipment, the demands placed on engineers today can make any design job highly stressful. For engineers who are used to making and implementing decisions analytically,...

  • Managing Travel And Design Conflicts

    By Peter Varhol, November 20, 2000

    Today, many engineers find themselves traveling for business reasons. With an increasing number of business and technology partnerships, conferences, trade shows, and acquisitions, as well as geographically distant development teams, you could find...

  • Simulation Tools Speed Design Debug And Verification

    By Peter Varhol, November 06, 2000

    Shorter time-to-market cycles and the increasing densities of both programmable logic devices (PLDs) and system-on-a-chip (SoC) ICs have made design simulation an essential part of the development cycle. The growing practice of designing hardware at...

  • Managing Conflict In The Workplace

    By Peter Varhol, October 30, 2000

    Most people don't enjoy facing the difficult situations that sometimes occur with co-workers in the workplace. Such situations may arise from honest disagreements over design or engineering issues, personnel or benefits matters, management decisions...

  • Should You Go Back To School Or Not?

    By Peter Varhol, October 16, 2000

    Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield's 1986 movie of a successful businessman returning to college to work on his bachelor's degree, illustrated many of the nontraditional reasons for continuing a formal education. Dangerfield's character,...

  • Weighing The Pros And Cons Of Vendor-Specific Certifications

    By Peter Varhol, September 18, 2000

    There was a time when professional engineering certification meant something. Every state in the United States has long had education and experience requirements for being licensed as a professional engineer, or PE. Holders of that license were...

  • Knowing When To Leave: Look At Yourself And Your Environment

    By Peter Varhol, August 21, 2000

    My father worked for the same company, in the same job, for 31 years. Today, it's becoming unusual for professionals to spend a significant part of their careers with a single company. One reason is because hiring goals have changed. Also, shifting...

  • Mixing Work And Leisure: A Blurring Line

    By Peter Varhol, July 24, 2000

    At the end of the workday, some of your fellow engineers head out the door together, perhaps for dinner, drinks, or even a movie. They used to invite you, but you had family activities or night school after work, and repeatedly declined. After all,...

  • Embedded Linux Starting To Make Sense

    By Peter Varhol, June 26, 2000

    The Linux hype is in full swing in embedded-systems projects. A small but rapidly growing number of startup companies are offering Linux code, tools, and services for embedded development. Web sites such as www.Linuxdevices.com are springing...

  • The Hybrid Alternatives

    By Peter Varhol, June 26, 2000

    Most traditional real-time operating-system vendors, along with their respective tool chains, are threatened in one way or another by Linux. To existing commercial solutions, the most dangerous aspect of Linux is royalty-free distribution. For...

  • Building Linux Databases

    By Peter Varhol, June 26, 2000

    A growing number of embedded-system developers are seeking access to small and fast database-management systems for their projects. There was little need in the past for databases driven by embedded systems. But, the requirements of data-acquisition...

  • Preparing For Your Performance Review

    By Peter Varhol, June 26, 2000

    One of the most difficult nonengineering chores that both managers and employees have to contend with is the job performance-review process. Employees feel at the mercy of the system and their managers, while managers usually don't have time to...

  • Sell Your Ideas To Your Colleagues

    By Peter Varhol, May 29, 2000

    Many of us who toil in the trenches have some definite opinions on our product or service, how we perform our jobs, and what we should do differently, now and in the future. Yet, in an existence that appears to strangely mirror Dilbert's, our...

  • Deciding Whether To Take That Promotion

    By Peter Varhol, May 15, 2000

    It happens to just about all of us eventually. So you're a mid-career engineer, possibly a project leader. You've been with the company for many years, receiving very good performance reviews and above-average pay raises. You're pretty confident and...

  • Hot-Swap Hardware And Software Hurdles Continue To Fall

    By Peter Varhol, May 01, 2000

    After years of design-engineer frustration, hot-swap and live-insertion technologies are gradually evolving from expensive, special-purpose solutions to mainstream design alternatives. Thanks to standardization efforts from board vendors on both the...