Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/811341
April 2017 • The PCB Design Magazine 69 Warner: I agree. I'm sure you would include in the picture you're painting the PCB designers and en- gineers who are artists and musicians. Romine: Absolutely. Warner: It's the same part of the brain, and you see that. That sort of social awkwardness, I don't find that to always be true. It just depends on what you're talking about. Romine: Keep in mind, I don't believe that the engineers see themselves that way. As an ex- ample, when I first got into the semiconduc- tor business at 25, this was sort of a lifelong…I don't want to use the word dream, but it was my aspiration. I wanted to be in engineering, specifically in some sort of business field related to engineering, and the semiconductor business was, especially in those days, a great hybrid role. We still got to talk about the technology, architecting systems and that sort of thing, but there was a business element to it that appealed to me. When I first got that job, Xilinx was the marquee name, still is. A leader in the industry. Any time someone asked, "Hey, what do you do?" Of course, my response was very enthusi- astic. "Oh, well, I'm glad you asked! I sell pro- grammable data rays and synthesis tools, and floor planning tools, and, and, and, and…" It was pretty quickly that you would see the glaze. Like, "What the hell are you talking about?" It didn't take very long that my response to "Hey what do you do?" had morphed into "Well, I'm in sales." The flip side of that is when you run into someone who is in "the club." When you meet someone, "Oh, I'm in sales." "Well, what kind of sales?" "I'm in technical sales." "Software or hardware?" You think, "Oh, well, maybe this person might kind of know what I'm talking about." Warner: You start speaking in full sentences all of a sudden. Romine: And then all of a sudden there's the passion that we're talking about. That's really who we've always done business with. What we talk about is that nobody becomes an engineer or a designer by accident. I mean, there are some exceptions, but overwhelmingly the personas that we deal with are doing what they've want- ed to do, and it's always what they've wanted to do. It's an emotional experience for them when they first hand-soldered something together, maybe their senior project. For me, it was more around the cars that we built. That first time, it starts is like an emotional experience. The path to becoming a professional engineer requires a lot of education, and a lot of difficult courses. They get through that, though, and they be- come professional engineers and professional designers. Unfortunately, what happens is that engi- neers realize that the majority of their day is not actually designing. We have research that says 61% of their day is on non-design-related tasks. It's looking for information, disseminating in- formation, filling out paperwork, managing a bill of materials. It's going through some rigor- ous release checklist that always will generate an error, that requires you to go back and redo, redo, and redo. I think that is very frustrating; it was for me. Warner: You're talking about things like pouring through datasheets, talking about if a part is ob- solete or at risk of being obsolete, the libraries, etc. Romine: Yes, 100%. As I said, I worked in dis- tribution so the engineers really were forced to have a conversation with me. In those days, it was a little different because the internet wasn't quite as prolific as it is now with regard to data and roadmap information. Of course, when you're talking about long design cycles of a cou- ple of years, they need to know what's coming down the pipe as it relates to field programma- ble logic. What's the newest device and what's coming? But overwhelming, to your point, a lot of it was getting price break information, volume price break information, lead time information, second source information and these sorts of things. Now the engineers had those conver- sations, but they didn't want to. That's a great example of engineers being sort of forced to participate in a non-design related task. That's ALTIUM FOCUSES ON THE DESIGNER FIRST