Modern Luddites

Entire bookshelves have been written about the various human attitudes towards the perspective of change. And it is quite intriguing to watch the well know patterns unfurl in a real-life situation. I am just returning from a series of customer visits in Europe, and as it turns out, during this streak, I got to experience nearly the exact same conversation in two different meetings. 

In both circumstances the conversation started with this statement. As I went on explaining how HLS can be driven to achieve production-quality results, an engineer interjects and challenges the various case studies and customer testimonials.

In both circumstances the project manager, attending the meeting with the rest of his team, stood up and clarified the situation in a pretty clear way.

Despite the manager’s explanation, the engineer insists. The emotional nature of his stance is quite perceptible. The conversation has shifted from EDA tools to business goals, individual contributions and fundamental roles.

Resistance to change is a well understood pattern of human psychology. There are many examples of how innovation can cause disruption and discomfort, the most famous case being probably the one of the Luddites, a social movement of British textile artisans in the wake of the 19th century. Back then, the industrial revolution brought mechanization and automation to assist with what used to be a labor intensive task. Many skilled and passionate artisans feared the new wide-framed automated looms would constitute a threat to them and their way of life. Resisting these advances, Luddites organized in bands and, at night, attacked factories, destroyed machines and sabotaged equipment.

Don’t get me wrong. Coming from France, I love my artisan “boulangerie”, “charcuterie” and “fromagerie”. Craftsmanship is the recipe to the best things out there; and even in electronic design there is – and will always continue to be – a place for such highly-skilled optimization work. But economic reality also has its say and in fierce markets, change is the only constant.

And I don’t doubt that these two design groups will take the right step forward. After all, it’s not about high-level synthesis: it’s about overcoming their critical business issues.

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