Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1398328
64 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2021 to automatically go to China aren't necessar- ily going to China anymore. For all the things that we read about in the news, does that mean they're staying in Silicon Valley and being man- ufactured there? No, not really. Silicon Valley is R&D, and when it goes to any kind of apprecia- ble volume, it's usually going somewhere else. at somewhere else from where we sit seems to be Mexico right now. Some South- east Asia, some Vietnam, some ailand, some Malaysia, but I would say Mexico probably 60% of the time. We've seen an increasing level of failure analysis business coming from Mex- ico, which supports my hunch. Johnson: e more business that's there, the more opportunities for you to see a failure. at makes sense. What's the biggest challenge for Datest right now, Rob? Boguski: One, finding good people, and we're not waiting for them to drop from the sky. We're creating our own. Oen, when you hear people lament the fact that they can't find qual- ified people, it simply means they don't have the desire to train them. We do have the desire to train them, so if someone of native intelli- gence and drive wants to work for us, then we'll make the exchange for your native intelli- gence and drive. We'll give you the tools. We'll give you the knowledge to operate this flying probe machine or to operate this CT scanning system. We'll train you up to that. We're finding them. We have to be discriminating in our search, but they are out there, though it still remains a challenge. e older test engineers are all retiring or getting close to retirement. e folks that came up learn- ing things like in-circuit testing, they're a rare breed and that's a dying methodology anyway. What do you do to replace them? In a small company like ours, we have to hire people who wear multiple hats. If someone is knowledgeable about ICT and can also program a flying probe, that's a definite boon to us. Bonus points if you can also look at an X-ray and interpret the images, that's even better. at's usually how we work. We don't slot people into one slot, we move them around. Finding the right match there is important. e other biggest challenge right now is simply managing our time, being care- ful not to fall into the trap of working with a customer who's picking you for a lot of free engineering and who has no intention of doing business with you. ey'll take whatever you share with them, and then they march down the road to do the same thing for a better price. Part of my job is knowing the difference or determin- ing the difference with each engagement and screening them out, so our guys and gals on the floor don't have to waste time with them. I'm the first line of defense in that regard, and that's a serious issue. We're a 13-person com- pany, so if somebody gets taken offline doing research for somebody for a day or two, that's significant to us because it means they're not working on a revenue-generating activity elsewhere. We have to be rather abrupt some- times, and it's not meant to be rude, it's meant so that we don't waste their time, and in turn, they don't waste our time. Sometimes somebody will come to me say- ing, "I want X-Y-Z done. I want this kind of Additively manufactured aluminum manifold.