Oh, one more thing

Wanted - Excellent verification engineers. Must be 6' 4"

Most people will (hopefully) agree that selecting a verification engineer by height would be a bizzare thing to do.  In fact, if we saw an advert that said "Wanted - Excellent verification engineers.  Must be 6' 4"", then we'd probably think that the advertising company were pretty strange, and didn't really know what they were looking for. 

After all, what's height got to do with verification?  It's a physical thing that you have no control over, and you are the height you are whether or not you did anything useful while attaining that height.  In fact, I'd pass the advert by and move onto a more sensible prospective employer. Any team selected by height probably isn't going to be much good, and I can imaging daily life on a project would be pretty dire.

Years of experience (YoE) is not much more useful than height in telling us how suitable the candidate is for the job, so why then, do companies still use it as a major selection, or rate-setting, criteria?

The tyranny of the, err, hem, actually, I'm not really sure

There was an interesting post on the verification guild this morning called "Testbench's Tyranny".  It's interesting to me because I have no idea what it's about.  I'm baffled, although I think I have it narrowed down to 2 possibilities:

1. It's going to be a discussion on why constrained random testbenches are evil, why OOP is evil, and why RTL based directed tests are all we need
2. It's a precursor to an announcement of yet another wonder product that's going to make verification push button, and remove the need for verification engineers and their brains

Based on the poster's name "xxx" and the fact this is his only post, I suspect the latter (unless we're encountering an interesting crossover from an entirely different industry!).  If it turns out to be possibility 1, then I'm looking forward to the follow up posts about why we should never have abandoned schematics in the first place, and a counter reply along the lines of "schematics!  It's been a disaster since we stopped using Rubylith".

Either way, I think it's worth watching.

But what prompted me to launch myself out of my writer's block and type was the following line:

"What on earth is the good of [sic] ``OOP, Layered'' TB to a DUT, which is written in plain Verilog modules/VHDL processes ready for synthesis"