NOTE: Ricardo no longer works at Arrow. But now instead of guiding innovation from afar, he is now on a new endeavour: Repo Consult and Outsourcing.
I’m really proud of the companies that I have worked on, and I have the pleasant feeling of good work done. I always say that I had merits at these companies and the biggest of these merits was my dedication. But, before Arrow, I was an engineer, a developer. I did my best to be a good professional, I tried to teach my team and to be a nice colleague. But that time came to an end.
One day, I joined Arrow. Although I will always be a developer by heart, I was no longer one of them by practice. I became an FAE. I started to visit customers and to watch other developers from different industries. And that is when the journey began. Working for Arrow has been a paradigm changing experience. But let me say a little bit about the type of systems that I was used back in my development times.
I was a High-end FPGA designer. A circuit board with 8 layers? Easy, it gets big above 20 layers. Megahertz? Slow, let get to Giga. BGA? Throw it in, the more the better! Why save U$ 10,00 if you can spend it to make it more robust? To make it faster? Well, of course I didn’t do it alone: teams of 10 or more engineers, plus several other software guys. That was my world.
Then there was this customer I had visited on my first visits. He was a lone developer for the company complaining that he could not make his board less than 2 layers to lower his costs. He used an old, +15 years, 8 bit micro. In a through-hole DIP (dual in-line package). The whole board had less than 20 components, including resistors and capacitors. I did my job: I offered new tech. A lot of new tech. After all my suggestions, the guy said:
Do not be proud of this impressive new tech you have suggested. Unfortunately, the ability to build this system is nothing, next to the pressure of the cost.
I can swear that he sounded like Darth Vader. Jokes aside, I was trying to help them to get at least up to date; he had dangerously old tech. I insisted that he should change that old stuff… But no, he wouldn’t: it would be expensive, he had no resources, no time and neither the skills. Even though this was not the frightening part. I was almost dropping when I ran out of arguments then I said he might get into trouble if his system goes obsolete. Well, his reply was the real frightening part:
Then I’m out of business.
Yes. That was it. And I was shocked. I couldn’t understand why and how someone would not be able to change such a simple design. I took a full day to understand that. In those few weeks, Arrow not only made my world bigger but more importantly it made me realize that I could help these guys just like I used to help my team. I had to do something.
Almost at the same time I’ve discovered this “Arrow 5 Years Out” thing. It was a synergistic push to what I was beginning to do. First I had to step out my bubble and face reality; there are all types of project and the merit lies on the idea, not on the complexity. Second: to really help, I should share every single bit of knowledge that I had.
From that new mindset, I started to see customers, specially the developers at customers, as part of my own team. I decided to learn from them, to teach when I could and to exchange knowledge whenever possible. As expected, it worked just fine. It gave me confidence to write a book, to write here and more importantly is that it gave me the very same joyful sensation back then when I was designing.
The desire to help and to get every developer I met to be 5 Years Out was and still is the biggest challenge I face at Arrow. That is my 5 Years Out mission: to get them to design good and life changing new tech. I do want designers to have real satisfaction on what they did, not only instant fun. I do want them to have the pleasant feeling of good work done. I want them 5 Years Out.
