Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1093246
MARCH 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 41 er, more experienced person and hire two younger people to replace them. This doesn't per- mit a natural growing together of skill and knowledge transfer. I prefer how some large engi- neering companies will do a filter cycle, evaluating on mer- it and performance. If you're young, but you're screwing around, you're out. Look at the newer tech com- panies that aren't necessari- ly designing hardware; they're software-based, which has been flashy and the sizzle. For our industry, it's not the hiring practices that are to blame; it's just that young people aren't drawn to it. Other tech industries are ironically facing the opposite side of the same coin: "How do we draw out wiser and more experienced people to our industry?" Shaughnessy: What you're saying is that you see all of these things that are exciting, but they're just not as cool as the other technolo- gies. Hazelett: I think the reason some industries become very specialized for youth is that it's a new technology. Those who are older and are already doing something in the industry using their skills in, such as programming C, didn't need to retrain or learn the next pop- ular programming language or system. Mean- while, somebody younger came in who didn't bother learning C; they just went into Java. Then, when the company is looking for some- body with Java experience, the person who's been in the industry longer and is a good pro- grammer but doesn't know that specific lan- guage yet gets dropped out. With PCB design, it's not really the same. A lot of these skills are transferrable. If you're using one layout tool or another, a transmission line is a transmission line, and connecting the chips together is still fairly similar. But as a friend of mine who runs a PCB design firm shared with me, "It's equal- ly art and science to do layout right." Shaughnessy: How did you get involved with Polar? Hazelett: I stumbled into it really. I was intro- duced to Polar by the father of a friend of mine from early youth. I knew her dad who was a salesperson and used to work at Tektronix. Ken Taylor and a lot of the other guys at Polar have either worked at Tektronix or their spouses worked at Tektronix. He would stop by the of- fice frequently and learned that Polar was hir- ing. He said, "I know someone who's an EE. He might fit." I had just come back from work- ing in China for four years. Shaughnessy: Before you came here, did you have a lot of PCB experience? Hazelett: No. It's kind of funny because when I was an engineering student, my very first in- ternship related to my major was a small en- gineering company called Engineering Design Team (EDT). A large entity bought them, but I was testing new cards and got some very specialized soldering training with surface mount—very small, hand-done parts—be- cause it wasn't big lots. So, that was my first experience with it, which was even before col- lege. When I went to college, I had inquired with professors, saying, "I know a little bit about this. It would be cool when I'm working on a project or programming FPGA or some chips to be able to build this. They said, "No. It takes