Heres what to write to your ministers...to save EE co's
Dear Minister for industry…
Please could you help in giving helpful advice to British (insert your own country) Electronics company owners so that they can stop damaging their profitability and success.? If the below advice is given to British Electronics company owners, then they will profit more and therefore provide a higher tax return to the Treasury.
The vast majority of British Electronics company owners are terrified of having Electronics Engineers doing work at their company, and then later moving on to other Electronics companies. They fear that these engineers will have seen their electric circuit schematics, and then divulge the company’s secrets to their competitors. However, this doesn’t make any sense. Virtually all general electronics schematics, including all Power Supply schematics, are just “general” electronics. -All the theories of which are already to be found all over the web anyway. I have worked in over 40 different electronics companys, and all of the schematic circuits that I saw in each one was just “standard, well known electronics”…..nothing to be secretive about.
If there is anything “secret” about electronic circuit schematics, then it is what is inside the silicon chips which are used, but only a few engineers inside a silicon chip fab plant would know about this anyway. And in any case, those silicon chips are freely available to all on the marketplace, along with their datasheets which describe how they work.
Its nonsense to suggest that an Electronics engineer would ever deliver one company’s schematics to a competitor of that company. In any company, there is no need for an Electronics Engineer to ever bring in a previous company’s schematics. In fact, copying a schematic across to a different company would be down-right fool-hardy and dangerous to the company doing the copying. As an electronics engineer, you always produce new schematics to suit whatever is required for whichever is the application. It would be non-sensical to ever copy a schematic across. You would simply use the well known electronics circuit theorys to produce new schematics for whichever company. Or produce new power supply schematics as fit for whichever the application…..using the copiously available sources of info on power supplys which is freely available all over the web.
Even to use a copied schematic, the copier still needs to have the full set of electronics design capability in order to successfully do the copying…and if you have that capability, then you wouldnt bother to copy anyway…it would be easier to just produce a new schematic from scratch, suited to whichever application.
This practice that British Electronics companies have, for avoiding taking on new Electronics Engineers, in case they ever leave , is damaging to themselves as companys. In fact, the more Electronics engineers that have traversed through a particular company, the more successful that company’s products will be…because each engineer will act as an extra pair of eyes to weed out any mistakes in the various manufacture documents and circuits, etc. A single , good electronics engineer could do this of course, but there are few of these around in UK now, since “General Electronics” has been outsourced mostly to China. But even a “well weeded out” schematic would be a waste of time to copy and take to another company……..you would simply rather produce new schematics for whichever new company.
Companies that limit their throughput of Electronics engineers, are always far less successful, and have bins full of scrap, failed , returned products.
Company owners also fear that the more Electronics engineers that have “been and gone” from their company…then the harder they think it will be to ever sell their company at some future date…..since they believe that any future buyer would be deterred by the belief that lots of “ex-engineers” will have already taken the company’s Intelligent Product on to competitors……..though this is simply not a rational thought, for the reasons given above.
Please help publicise that company owners have nothing whatsoever to fear from employing Electronics engineers who may later leave their company for pastures new.
As a small, quick example, I once was due to leave a certain electronics company in a week’s time. Then one of their circuits developed a fault. The Chief Engineer tried to stop me from working on the fault, as he declared that I would get sight of the schematic, and then be able to take it to their competitors. However, he was over-ruled, and thank goodness for that, because I managed to fix the fault. The circuit in question ended up being a ‘bog-standard’ linear regulator…..so "general" that it wouldn’t ever be worth copying….its the sort of thing you produce to a spec “from scratch” whenever it's needed. Ditto the rest of General Electronics and Power Supplys.
Also, Electronics companys often avoid taking on new projects because they say that the project would be scuppered if their Electronics Engineer left them half way through the project. This is nonsense. As if individual Electronics engineers carry with them some closely guarded secret knowledge, known only to themselves. ..Rather, each electronics engineer just uses “standard” and well known knowledge. As such, it is very simple for a new, replacement Electronics Engineer to be brought in and to continue where the departed Electronics Engineer just left off.
Electronics companys often believe that their schematics contain “golden secrets”, and they believe this because an interviewee Electronics Engineer, who was briefly shown the schematic, may not have been able to interpret the schematic’s function during the short time at an interview. However, this is not relevant. The fact is that with any schematic, an Electronics Engineer that is new to that schematic, may still need a good hour or so to redraw the schematic and carry out some analysis work before they come to a full understanding of it. This is normal, it doesn’t mean that the schematic is some kind of golden magic secret.
Another point is that company owners often pay their Chief Electronics Engineer a “retention bonus”…which is only payed if the Chief Engineer manages to retain their Electronics Engineers year-on-year. This encourages the Chief Engineer to reference badly on Electronic Engineers who have left the company, since if engineers are regularly seen to be leaving and going to “greener pastures”, then the other engineers may also be enticed to leave (meaning less retention bonus for the Chief). Retention bonus’s also result in other negative activity, which is detrimental to the country and indeed , to the the company owners within that.
One obvious thing is the way that Electronics companies often draw jobs out, making them last ages, so that the electronics engineer can’t come to an end-point in a project, and then feel they are at a good point to leave the company.
I have worked in over 40 different Electronics companies, and all the general electronics circuitry and power supplies in one company, are simply derived from the same general theory as all the other companies…no point in copying it…no danger of it being copied…no danger to the company of any loss of IP, etc etc.
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