Intel has some substantial facilities in Chandler, Arizona, and is considered to be a major employer in the tech arena in this area.  In fact, Semiconductors are considered to be one of Arizona's primary tech roadmap milemarkers, and Intel is a keystone in that archway.

Intel is a very large company.

The position was for a validation software engineer on a pre-silicon XScale project.  Specifically, they needed someone to write code for the LCD peripheral on the part, which is used in cell phones, and my background in LCDs and whatnot made me a reasonable match.

I had a single phone interview that lasted for about 30 minutes, and I learned later that while I was described as "arrogant," I did get the position and was off to Intel for my safety training class.

The class started at around 6am and was an OSHA course on handling hazardous materials, locating chemical spec books, reporting problems, following Intel safety policies, etc.  I was hoping I wouldn't be handling too much etching acid at my keyboard, and that was the case, but I felt better knowing what might transpire if I happened to be handling those chemicals and they happened to spill.

After my training I went to the building were I would be working to meet up with the guy who had interviewed me on the phone.  This was not my manager, who was out having a baby with his wife, but a guy who was known to do great phone interviews, whom I would not be working with at all.  We met in the lobby and headed upstairs, and it was then that I saw where I would be working.

I knew within 30 seconds that this would not work, but I tried to present my most optimistic face to see if there was a chance I was wrong.  My bench was right near the lab door, so after a quick tour I landed at my 4-foot table and was left to orient myself.  So far so, uh, not-good.

This guy sitting next to me was an older gentleman, and was in fact a Chinese National who spoke reasonable English.  I sat down and introduced myself, and then I asked him how he liked working here.  His answer was immediate, decisive, and encouraging.  "I don't like it here at all," he said.

The guy who had been working on the thing I inherited had worked there for a few weeks and then had apparently disappeared, and the work he did was essentially useless.  A guy who sat two people down from me had taken over some of that work, and it turns out that his code really didn't do anything, either.  I found this humorous, but the humor quickly left as I realized what a complete and total asshole this guy actually was.  My manager was out for the week and nobody really knew what I was supposed to do, so my first several days there were not inspirational.

Intel is 37 miles from my home.  That's 74 miles of driving every day, in Phoenix traffic, and every day that 74 miles was getting less and less appealing.  Driving a diesel car helped, but when your commute is painful and your destination is worse, you run out of optimism quickly.

One morning I ran into some traffic and everyone was splitting off into the left and right lanes of the 3-lane 51 freeway.  Why?  It appeared that a woman hit a helmet-less guy on his motorcycle, and as I drove by I noted that she was frantic on her cell phone while she hovered over his unconscious, face-down body.  I did spot a trail of flesh on the pavement leading to his head, which was all the more I cared to notice at that point.

Between the whole big-company atmosphere, the work environment, the personalities (there were nice people there, to be sure, but the bad ones always make it suck), the task, the commute, and now the site of possibly-dead people on the roadway, I began to question my future there.  The contract would last for up to one year, but it was becoming obvious that I would not.

At the end of the day, we did manage to validate some of the silicon design before they taped out, using some code from another group on their design simulator.  That was an interesting experience and the guy I was working on that with was really great.  I had many lunches in the Intel cafeteria, where I heard stories of how Arizona was during the dot-com boom that I had experienced directly in silicon valley.

I gave 30 days noticed to the contracting agency, and they claimed that they would handle the termination request with Intel.  On my last day, the lab emptied out early and nobody seemed to know or care that that Friday was my last.  A certain amount of personal apathy helped me to get out of that situation with little difficulty, and I still have my Intel badge somewhere, to remind me...