Dear Diary:
Engineering interns chronicle life
at a startup
BY DAVID F. SALISBURY
I get hit with a
wall from the moment I walk in. Pete needs an FM
broadcast board to play with and I don't really have
a board that has FM working. Elaine needs more
corrections to the board markups I gave her. Tracy is
asking me for corrections to the bill of materials as
she is compiling a new one. Jacob needs some data
sheets. And I arrived late, so I think it was safe to
say that I was missed.
Diary of
Benjamin Jun
Ideo Inc.,
Summer 1996
Benjamin Jun, a master's
student in electrical engineering, knows firsthand what
it's like for new engineers who join the exciting and
frenetic world of high-tech startups.
Jun spent the summer of
1996 as an intern at Ideo Inc. of Palo Alto through a
program sponsored by Stanford's Technology Ventures Co-op
(TVC) program. The pilot program is designed to teach
entrepreneurship to engineers through classroom study and
internships with some of Silicon Valley's hottest new
companies. TVC is part of the Stanford Technology
Ventures Program in the School of Engineering.
Related
Information:
As part of their
experience, Jun and fellow interns recorded their
experiences in diaries that now are being analyzed by
Keith W. Rollag, a graduate student in industrial
engineering and engineering management, under the
supervision of TVC director Tom Byers, consulting
professor of IEEM, and Stephen Barley, professor of IEEM.
Rollag says the diaries
represent one of the few sources of information about
what it is like for new engineers who go to work in
high-tech startups. The goal of his research is to find
ways to help new engineers succeed in these
entrepreneurial environments.
In response to growing
public interest in entrepreneurism some are even
calling the '90s the age of entrepreneurism the IEEE
Spectrum, a trade magazine for electrical engineers,
is running an extensive article in its November issue
about five of the students' experiences, along with
excerpts from their diaries.
"Journal studies like
this get at people's immediate reactions to things,
reactions to organizational life that tend to get lost
over time, and therefore don't show up in standard
surveys and interviews," Rollag said.
Today I realized
that I had been accepted as a member of the NeoMagic
family. While I was talking to Benny, Louis walked by
and said, "Hey, what's up?" to me. Then I
talked to Chuck briefly in passing. . . . When Bob
came into the cafeteria as I was getting water, he
commented that he hadn't seen me in a while and asked
me how things were going. Just things like that
somehow made me feel like I was really part of the
group and not just some temporary person. Every
summer, I always feel like a temporary part of the
department I'm in, but this is different."
Diary of
Alison Hu at NeoMagic Corp.
Many of the TVC interns
reported that they felt that over the course of the
summer they had become a member of the team, rather than
remaining visitors. That feeling is crucial to making the
internships with small, startup companies different from
summer jobs at large established companies, Rollag said.
In large companies, the
internship programs tend to be partly recruiting and
public relations. Generally, the organization gives its
interns non-critical projects. Students receive a
valuable learning experience, but nothing like being
entrusted with a project that is critical to the
company's survival, which is the case in startups where
virtually every job is vitally important. "It's a
much different feeling and, believe me, the students know
the difference," Rollag said.
At 5 we met. Andy
[Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc.
and Granite Systems] was running around getting
binders of transparencies from different people. He
was very excited to talk to us and said we should
have done this before. He would start talking about
the business model and then go off on a tangent and
never return to the same subject. He was getting
everyone's transparencies all out of order and
throwing them around the table as he looked for the
right thing. He was aware of when we had to stop and
kept checking his watch, but Chris and I encouraged
him to just keep talking.
Diary of
Stephanie Hannon at Granite Systems
The leaders of startups
tend to share more information about the company's vision
and strategies with the entire staff, which also helps
the student to feel a part of the company. In
fast-growing startups, new people arrive weekly. Helping
to orient and train new employees quickly gives interns
the sense of a being company veterans.
"By the end of the
summer, the students report feeling that they were part
of the startup culture, not just an intern," Rollag
said. The strength of the bond that forms is indicated by
the fact that more than half of the students have stayed
on with the company where they interned in one capacity
or another.
Interning in the hectic
world of the startup also has its disadvantages. For
example, things can get so busy that the mentoring
arrangements set up as part of the program can fall by
the wayside, particularly if the student is not proactive
and persistent, Rollag said.
"New people are very
reluctant to ask questions. They seem to feel that their
time is not as valuable as that of more experienced
workers," Rollag said. "As a result, they can
spend a lot of time trying to figure something out
themselves, things which would have taken a fraction of
the time if they simply asked someone else. When they do
ask questions, they usually find that other people are
eager to help them. A major regret that most interns
expressed is that they didn't ask enough questions from
the very beginning."
The diaries illustrate the
importance of people skills in this specialized work
environment, something that engineering schools do a
relatively poor job of teaching, Rollag said. Yet these
same skills can have a major impact on how well a new
engineer does on his or her first job, and studies have
shown that this early experience has a major influence on
an engineer's success throughout his or her entire
career.
I met with Karen
Coates at 10 a.m. just to chat. Karen has been very
busy so we haven't really had much one-on-one time
since I got here. I e-mailed her last week to see if
we could meet sometime and talk. So we talked for
almost an hour about all sorts of stuff. . . . She
said that the philosophy of the company is to make it
a great place to work; therefore people should be
able to balance their lives. . . . She also talked
about how she, Jerry and David (engineers responsible
for the early architectural design of the company's
base station products) try to manage the engineering
issues. Jerry and David are polar opposites of each
other, but that's a positive thing since it gives the
company more ideas to work with. . . . I thought this
was a really good talk. Karen really listens to
people and makes people comfortable. She genuinely
enjoys what she does and that affects other people.
Overall, I feel that the company is run by good
people who understand and respect others. That gives
me some confidence in their success.
Diary of
Diana Yan Fu at Spectrum Wireless
The diaries, which Rollag
describes as extremely candid, are "definitely a
gold mine of information about what a new engineer
experiences when going to work for a startup." It is
a source that he will be mining for the next few years.
SR
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