Post by Jon Connell

Today is the first day of my retirement from full time work and a life in tech. Since that teenager walked into a Siemens office for an intern interview almost 40 years ago, I’ve changed a lot and was helped along the way by some amazing people. Hartmut Hiller gave me so many opportunities to develop as a young engineer and never shied away from stretching me or helping me pick up the mess from my mistakes. Burkhard Hartmann led me and a group of other engineers to Infineon to build a new team, which switched me into the CPU modelling career that would be my biggest break. Burkhard was the kindest leader I’d ever met in my career and I hope I’ve lived up to that in my own leadership. In the first demonstration of how important networks are, Tim Hopes, who I first met in Munich when he worked in EDA, introduced me to what became one of the most influential tech companies in the world. I had not planned to stay at the incredible Arm so long, but it formed the bulk of my career. Arm was still a little bit startup-like even in the year of its first IPO and that was exciting for a still quite spiky young engineer. Tim helped to round off those spiky edges and I started on a path to leadership. Along the way, I learned that I am not very good at marketing, though reflecting since then, I did not realise at the time how important great storytelling is in all forms of leadership. Hobson Bullman rescued me from those poor decisions in product management and over the next few years helped me become a serious engineering leader. I knew Hobson from my previous roles with Tim once again showing how networks help you make your own luck. In the final chapter, it was with the leadership team for Arm’s superb support organisation that Ciaran Dunne and Niki Dow changed me the most as a person. I remember horrifying Hobson by saying I needed to ‘turn on’ my empathy and it was Niki that finally helped me keep it permanently enabled. And Ciaran has that remarkable balance of kindness and challenge that I first saw very early in my career, and that shaped me so importantly as a young engineer. Thank you everyone who has guided, helped and fixed me along the way. I will miss the people the most.