It's a story worn thread bare by repetition; downsizing, right sizing, and industry consolidation have eliminated the support resources EEs used to depend on to get a working design on the bench. Talking to customers, fellow EEs, we hear the same lament: the technicians have been let go. Leaving the technician's job to the EEs. The result is inevitable: many EEs tell stories of 70 hour weeks where less than half the time is spent doing design. The rest is spent on a range of tasks that the EE doesn't want to do; project management, procurement support, production engineering. In the name of productivity, companies have pushed tasks up to the engineer that were being done quite successfully by support staff. While certainly capable of performing these tasks (engineers solve problems and make trade-offs as well as anyone) the EE is spending less and less time engineering and more time fighting fires related to getting a prototype built- and yet, the challenges to prototyping have increased on the technical side, too.
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