<[email protected]> wrote: > Also, the older you get, in general, the higher the salary you command, > mainly due to experience, the more likely you'll be replaced by a lower > salary, less experienced person.
A customer of mine, a large electronics manufacturer, went through a series of drastic restructuring and rationalization plans in the 80's and 90's. At one point, they decided that their R&D department was way too expensive with all its 'overpaid' engineers who had been around for far too many years, wasting money for all the prototyping and fooling around all day in their expensive test labs. So, off went the old buggers and their test lab. They were replaced by a bunch of fresh young engineers from the local university who had learnt to do their circuit design and testing with modern computers. No more time and money wasted on prototypes and test labs. Virtual prototyping was introduced in a hurry to catch up with modern times. Shortly afterwards, I got a large order for translating the operating and service manuals of their new series of PA amplifiers. A few months later, the same stuff was again on my desk, with major changes in circuitry and component layout. What had happened? Those brilliant young engineers had designed the first amplifiers of their young lives, all with virtual prototyping. No more than breadboard samples had been built before the whole design was rushed off for production in the Far East. "Short time-to-market" was another of the buzzwords at the time. When the first production samples arrived back in Europe, they were humming, buzzing and whistling. What had worked so nicely in their computer simulation turned out to be a total failure. Apparently, noone had taught those young wippersnappers that one should rotate the output transformers by 90 degrees against the mains transformer, that the latter shouldn't be located right next to the microphone inputs, that ground connections can't be put just anywhere, and that there's generally a whole lot of components and stages who make very bad neighbours and should be kept well apart. The simulation software of the era didn't know a thing about this, either. They had to scrap the whole series, hire some of the old engineers on part-time contracts and restart from scratch. Ralf -- Ralf R. Radermacher - DL9KCG - Köln/Cologne, Germany Blog : http://the-real-fotoralf.blogspot.com Audio : http://aporee.org/maps/projects/fotoralf Web : http://www.fotoralf.de -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
