Tall And Thin Or Short And Fat: Are Engineers Ready For Industry 4.0?

摘要

Are you a tall and thin engineer or maybe a short and fat one? I’m not talking about body shapes, but rather what kind ofengineer are you. As unflattering as these phrases appear, they’ve been used in the past to describe two types of engineers:those with broad experiences versus specialists with deeper backgrounds in their domains, respectively. Most recently, thetall-thin phrase has been used to describe engineering experience levels and skills in a data-driven society. But before onecan appreciate the modern interpretation, one must first understand a bit of semantic confusion with the term tall, thinengineer.Historical Viewpoint: At first glance, one might think of a tall, thin engineer in terms of their levels and years ofexperience, meaning very deep and specific. After all, deep is just another word for tall if you’re looking from the bottom-up.Apparently, that was not the perspective taken by Howard Sachs, VP and general manager of Fujitsu MicroelectronicsGroup’s newly formed LSI division back in the late 90’s. According to Sachs, the idea of a tall, thin engineer was firstpromoted in the 1980’s at UC Berkeley when the first 3 micron CMOS chips (up to 100k gates) were just coming into themarket. There were no real layout tools and in theory one really good engineer could do both design and layout of a chip, inessence, creating the entire chip.