Being stubborn, needing to be right, refusing to change course, rejecting unorthodox ideas, always believing data sheets, all wreck designs.
There is at least a 5:1 ratio in productivity between good design groups and pathological ones, and most are pathological.
I judge only by delivery on time, to spec.
Has to be coordinated with production and test capability.
Sales? You've got no control over that.It's where I found the most pathology, mainly because of a rift between the guys who formulated the spec and the guys who ended up having to flog the stuff - usually in the same dept.
RL
And selling price. And performance. A design engineer doesn't have to just do what some spec is handed to him; that's no fun. I like Steve Jobs' idea: Insanely Great Products.
Certainly. Invite them to design reviews. Make sure they will let engineering know when there are production or test problems.
We have a \NEXT\ folder on a network drive, where anyone in the company can make suggestions or note problems with any product.
We have another folder \IDEAS\ where people can discuss ideas for new products.
I have a lot of control over sales. Partly by designing products that we think will sell. More by making friends with influential, Fellow-level people, and designing what they want.
In a small company, the engineers can work directly with product launch customers and write the spec that people actually want.
Most of our business started with a cold call from someone who wanted to talk to an engineer. Our decades of NMR business happened because of an accidental introduction that happened in a men's room in Palo Alto.
We've got lots of business from accidental encounters at trade shows.
The idea is to have our best engineers talk to their best scientists.
An inductor simulator needn't store energy, it just has to pretend to.
It might weigh 0.1% of a real 20 henry 10 amp inductor.
Fortunately, real inductors are far from ideal components, so our simulated ones needn't be perfect either.
Maybe we can make them programmably bad.
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