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46 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 engineering before was unique. It meant that you spent all this academic time to really put yourself together. These days, having a bach- elor's degree is just another tick in the box. Finding someone without a bachelor's degree, sure you could do that, but the compe- tition in the market space means that you could just as easily find someone with a bachelor's degree, so why not make a degree a require- ment? Plenty of the people who graduated with it are struggling to find jobs or they're competing against hundreds of other people in their fields. STEM fields and education is defi- nitely changing. Shaughnessy: One thing I was thinking is that maybe this having an actual path to a job will be a really good thing. There has never been a real path to this job, so if you're a high school guidance counselor, design is not even on your radar. Maybe if college becomes a requirement, these counselors will start spreading the word because there's decent money to be made in this field if you know it exists. LaPointe: That's a good point. A lot of the peo- ple who I started working with were originally in drafting or something else. One guy was actually a mailman. He showed up to deliver mail to somebody's house and they offered him a trainee position as a PCB designer. Shaughnessy: Wow. That's a whole new "how I got into PCB design" backstory. LaPointe: True story. It can be as crazy as that. The man had his own little design service and he needed some help, so he asked his mailman if he wanted to be an intern and the mailman said, "Sure." Now, he's a designer. Shaughnessy: When you got to Cadence, did they send you through classes on their software or did you already know about their tools? LaPointe: I was actually a very heavy user of the Cadence tool set before coming in, so I was very familiar with the layout tools, specifically Allegro and OrCAD. I did have to do a little bit of learning on my own for some of the sche- matic and simulation tools, but we had inter- nal training and there were external resources everywhere. By and large, I already knew what I was getting myself into. Shaughnessy: Very cool. How do you think all of these newcomers to design are going to affect Cadence and other EDA vendors? LaPointe: I don't know about the company, but I think the industry's going to have to learn to make changes. As Dan said, when dealing with the newest generation, I don't think you can do things the way they've always been done. That's not just for us at Cadence; that's going to apply to everybody. I think it will have to be incremental for everyone because nobody has the resources to immediately jump in and change the whole industry overnight, but somebody needs to start paving the way. Shaughnessy: I talked to one company that has a lot of millennials, and they said one thing really helped—having a dunking booth so the kids can dunk the older people. Salary isn't as