Hired two new engineers fresh out of a good school...
But people are not going to be "engineers" fresh out of school. They are going to be greenhorns, engineers-in-training. It takes probably 3-5 years out of college to become a practiced and capable engineer.
If you try to hire fresh graduates to design circuits and products for you, then I think you are suffering from a mismatch between expectation and reality.
By-the-way how do employers usually take a possibility that non-degree selftaught could be way better than those greenhorns with red diploma from school? Or probably just don't care about non-degree people? Please tell me how do employers cope with that. I'd like to understand their behavior, just my interest for better understanding this strange world based on bureaucracy... Unfortunately I don't know anyone to ask that.
I am one of the selftaught group of people trying to complete a degree to get even some chance to get a stable job here. Not only a "year test" with some extensions like I have now, with uncertain result: If I get kicked from that damned school I'm fired. Like free_electron wrote about his experience with their school, exactly the same applies here. The school is useless in terms of any practicval skills (for me, not sure about others).
Last time I had an argument with a professor at exams, if you can directly rectify mains without a damn transformer. He didn't believe me that modern compact VFDs do not include any power transformers at 50Hz. And that was one of the small group of more usable subjects at this school, I quite enjoyed compared to others. That was a "Power electronics 1" class, but not really that in general, it was focused only damn thyristor (SCR) rectifiers the whole semester, only mentioning existence of power BJTs and IGBTs - all that in a 2015! And still it missed a lot, was quite incomplete.
Add the rest of the crap subjects like basics of economy, compulsory humanitarian subjects like history, some other crap like calculationf of steam entropy/enthalpy in a water boiler, measurements and calculations of light sources (of course manually on a paper! And then they tell ya that it's never done like that in practice, cause these methods are quite unaccurate), the whole bunch of unnecessary physics classes full everything but nothing electrical related, not even mentioning the crapload of mathematics, without any references to what are we studying here... and then think how does that entertain someone with alread moderate skills in circuit design. It is simply evil and I hate the school. It does not help me almost with anything. It only gulps amounts of my free time, to do silly schoolish things. I should have rather spent that time like practicing VHDL, but haven't any fucking chance to do that in the last two semesters - because I only switch in between a school mode or I am at work.
Sorry for my another futile rant, but I am starting to be pissed about where my life is going...
Instead of gaining useful epxperience, only spending years of time and tons of nerves for some uncertain piece of paper.