Where Will We Get the New Technologists?

摘要

How shall I break the bad news? I just returned from China, visiting various PCB fabricators. Here are my observations. The advanced engineering education I received 35 years ago has served me well, but the Chinese engineers I talked to had just as good an education as I-only there are about one hundred times as many of them. This allows a PCB manufacturer to have from ten to 600 engineers working in the factory. Twenty years ago, Western Electric (WE) found a correlation between the number of engineers on the factory floor and the costs and productivity of that factory. WE investigated the rumor that Japanese workers were more productive than American workers. They found that Japanese workers did not work as hard as American workers; in fact they had more absenteeism. The key to their higher productivity was that Japanese companies had four times as many engineers on the factory floor. With advanced technologies and equipment for making PCBs, these engineers are vital to higher yields and lower costs.