Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1098973
30 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2019 This month's topic is focused on youth, both in terms of humans and technologies. I think these two topics go together since they rely on each other to a large degree. The latter has more than likely shaped or even invented by the former. Regarding reliability and what we have seen here in the failure analysis lab, youth in the industry have played a large role. In the all too well-known story, company X employs several people that make a nice salary, and everything is going well, but when dollars become scarce, they begin to look where they can save some money to get out of the red and back in the black. One way to do this is to look at the employees making the highest salaries and determine if they can live without that position or hire a younger person with a comparable education to plug in that slot. This can be done in many cases, but that is only on face value. We've seen many times that when you save the salary number, you end up losing more than that in lost experience and tribal knowl- edge. Tribal knowledge is as important if not more than any formal education can possibly give you. This type of knowledge is based on years and years of hands-on experience with the exact equipment being used to build a specific assembly, or other product, which is irreplaceable. For instance, we work with many major CMs around the world, and we see that we end up working with a lot of the same companies within the same divisions but with different engineers. We will work with engineer A on a specific problem, and a few years later, we are working on the exact same issues because the higher salaried engineer was cut to save a few bucks, and when they left, they took all of that experience with them. If engineer A knew about a specific tweak to a piece of equipment when the results were less than anticipated, the new engineer had no idea where to look for this information because most tribal knowledge isn't printed in an oper- ator's manual or reference guide. This is espe- These Darn Kids/Back in My Day Quest for Reliability Feature Column by Eric Camden, FORESITE INC.