I thought it was a typo at first. "Please make non-anon," he wrote.

"You mean anon, yes? You're usually anon," I wrote back.

"The economy was good then," he repled. "I could be in the next layoff. I want my name out while I still have a job. Publish non-anon."

I've had simular e-mail conversations with five other normally anonymous ESNUG regular letter writers since then.

At a recent SNUG conference, I told Anders Nordstrom about how engineers were "outing" themselves on ESNUG. Anders, along with 5,000 other engineers, was recently laid off from Nortel up in Ottawa. "One of the first things the outplacement staff did was a Web search on my name to see how I was known outside of Nortel. They said that I had a good outside rep because my name turned up on conference committees and in the ESNUG discussions," said Anders. "It confirms that I'm not a software manager trying to do ASICs. There are a lot of ASIC wannabes out there. In job interviews they tell me, 'You're that guy who posted about Superlog.' It gives people something to talk about."

When I told Cliff Cummings about this, he was much more to the point, asking, "Why do you think I did those five papers over two conferences this last week?" (Cliff had presented two papers at HDLcon'02 and co-authored three papers at SNUG'02. The one he co-authored with Peter Alfke of Xilinx won the Best Paper Award at this year's SNUG'02 conference.) "If I have an opinion on something, I go out of my way to share it. It's like when I said, 'I hope my competition uses VHDL.' Verilog users loved me for saying that. The VHDL people hated me. But that's better than having the whole world not know I exist. It pays to be known."

Engineers, he said, must build reputations "outside of their company. If you act like Dilbert, you'll be treated like Dilbert. Act like Joe Costello, and you'll be rewarded like Joe Costello."

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a contract ASIC designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@theworld.com or (508) 429-4357.