another twenty-year veteran with a wealth of design and management experience under his belt. I knew I was lucky to have him on the team. He was an expert logic designer who was intimately familiar with the instruction unit, the most complex and critical subcomponent of a microprocessor. An instruction unit is responsible for handling low-level software instructions running on the processor. It fetches the instructions from memory, decodes them, and issues them to functional units, which then execute the operations specified by the instructions. The instruction unit is like the head cook in the kitchen who fetches and reads the recipe, while the kitchen staff (the functional units) executes the instructions handed down by the cook. An inefficient instruction unit could break the back of an otherwise reasonably designed processor and limit the ultimate speed it could achieve. Van Norstrand became my second in command, assuming a significant share of the technical responsibility for the entire microprocessor core.
Jim Kahle recruited Tony Truong (pronounced Trong) back into the IBM fold before I got there, so I inherited Tony as my third technical lead. We had worked together on a previous project in the Server Group, but he left IBM in the late ’90s about the same time I did. I was glad to see he had also returned, and I knew I was lucky to have him lead the design of the PowerPC’s memory subsystem. Tony’s strengths lay in his work ethic and his deep knowledge of memory subsystems. He could hone in on a troublesome area of the design that was difficult to verify, and come up with a way to test it. It might take him several grueling twenty-hour days in a row, but he would finish it, and we would end up with a stronger design because of his work. One of the things I loved about working at IBM was the cultural mixture. Tony was from Vietnam, and I could always count on him to find the best Vietnamese food in Austin.
With these strong team leaders in place to help me, I turned my focus to the organizational configuration. I created a two-in-the-box structure to lead the team. With this two-leader configuration, an IBM second-line manager and I ran the large PowerPC team together. I focused on the day-to-day technical work as well as some of the project management aspects of the project. The second-line manager focused on personnel and administrative issues as well as the remaining project management issues. It was a divide-and-conquer approach.
Previous project leaders at IBM had organized their teams around interdependent functional disciplines—for example, logic design, verification, or circuit design. Experience already taught me that this type of organization created too much of a “throw it over the wall” mentality when problems created by one team were passed on to another to solve. I wanted self-contained entities responsible for all aspects of the design from start to finish. I carved up the microprocessor core into functional units and created teams around those units. Each team was responsible for delivering a final physical piece of silicon (hardware), which was logically and physically verified and complete. Each member of that team worked toward one common goal—functional silicon. It was not acceptable for anyone to say, “Well, I did my piece”—meaning they washed their hands of any problems—because they were all responsible for the end goal. The structure created accountability for everyone on the team. I also created a two-in-the-box leadership configuration for these teams. In most cases, one leader focused on logic design and verification, while the other focused on circuit design and physical design.
I was well on my way to creating a high-performance team.
While I was elated that all three STI partners vowed to provide their very best architects and designers to meet the challenging project goals, I knew it was a promise they would find difficult to keep. Sony and Toshiba faced the larger problem of convincing their top designers to take a two-to three-year tour of duty in the United States. IBM’s problem had more to do with balancing projects and earnings. While they could draw from a vast pool of engineers, they were on the cliff’s edge of the post-dot-com technology bust and were drawing up plans to downsize. In addition, most of the top IBM microprocessor designers were committed to critical IBM server chips, the bread and butter of the company. “Not available” was the line Kahle heard over and over when he attempted to recruit his pals from former projects.
This opened up an opportunity for external hiring.
One human resources representative explained that IBM’s hiring practices moved in cycles, and she warned us it was best to take rapid action as soon as the external hiring window opened, because it could close at any moment. When Kahle pulled me through that window, no one was sure how many others were going to follow.
Microprocessor design demands a team with highly specialized skills. While Jim Kahle and others focused on luring experienced engineers away from other high-tech companies, I withdrew to my sunny new cubicle to comb through a stack of resumes from engineers who expected to graduate from college in 2001. With the shape of the current economy, I knew I could afford to be picky and select only the best and the brightest from top-notch engineering schools. The lifeblood of the project as well as that of IBM rested on hiring top college grads who would bring fresh energy and insight to the company. I liked them because they were fearless. They didn’t know the meaning of the word impossible.
Although IBMers historically conducted very polite, unobtrusive interviews, this did not always lead to finding the most qualified candidates. At Somerset, we brought young engineers before a committee of several interviewers at once and pounded the potential candidates with tough, hard-to-solve engineering problems. It was an effective method, but a bit ruthless. More than one contender left the room on the verge of tears.
For the STI candidates, I adopted a toned down version of that style. I brought each one in for a series of individual forty-five-minute interviews with four or five technical leads and managers. Some of the interviewers conducted the same old traditional polite IBM interview, smiling while they struggled to glean hints of the candidate’s technical capabilities.
I confronted my too mild fellow IBMers: “Come on! Challenge these guys! Your butts will be on the line if we hire nonperformers. We have to be looking for the cream of the crop.”
When it was my turn, I grilled each applicant with several problem-solving exercises and asked specific engineering questions. While I listened to the responses, I tried to decide if I would enjoy working with the engineer on a daily basis. Better yet, would I enjoy drinking beer with him or her? Always an important criteria.
After we completed each day’s interviews, the IBM team met for a lively discussion to sort through the results. Each one of us presented our impressions of the candidates and argued about their strengths and weaknesses.
“Don’t the schools today teach these guys anything?” one interviewer complained after interviewing an inexperienced candidate.
“Did you talk to the woman from Princeton? Or that youngster from Cal Tech?” another crowed, obviously in awe of the pedigrees.
“Oh, yeah, I did. How about the one with the Ph.D. from Duke?” responded another like-minded fan of prestigious schools.
I just wanted smart engineers who worked hard and fit in. With a thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote, we made the hiring decisions. When we disagreed, the discussions tended to drag on. Whenever I could, I shut down these arguments. “If you have any doubts about this candidate, let’s just pass,” I said, sliding the questionable resume into the trash. “Let’s move on.” There was too much other work to do.
I really didn’t care which prestigious high-browed university they attended, though I did handpick a few graduates from prestigious universities such as Duke, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Texas. We even hired a couple from my alma mater, the University of Kentucky. Where someone went to school is not as important as the person’s commitment to an education. You get out of it what you put into it. With the draw of the opportunity to work on the next PlayStation 3 chip, I was able to attract engineers from the very top of their classes. These young techies were born in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and they grew up playing video
