PCB designers can have many different career pathways.

The route a PCB designer takes through the job market can lead to a number of different outcomes.

A board designer comes in with a knowledge set that helps transform an abstract schematic into physical electronics. A lot of that has to do with knowing what happens downstream from the day the artwork was created. The steps involved with PCB fabrication and assembly are complex, even for the simplest of jobs.

Take a factory tour and notice the rooms full of different machinery. Material is cut to shape and drilled in a kinetic energy field that makes so much noise. Vast plating lines do serial dunking in different vats of bubbling hazards. These are the CAD data manifested in copper for the first time.

Another room is more Zen, with tons of pressure and high temperature being applied. It’s a slow process, and the presses are very expensive. This is usually a small factory’s bottleneck. Down the hall, a brightly lit room full of automated optical inspection equipment ensures compliance. What we do on the monitors plays out across the factory.

Four important lessons gleaned over a three-decade design career.

There’s an old saying among test pilots: “Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing.” They also know that there are old pilots, there are bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots – or so the saying goes. If you want to hang around as a PCB designer, you can only hope to walk away from your mistakes with your career intact. So, this is a chance to learn from my mistakes from 35 years of design work.

Going all the way back to the ’90s finds me in my first PCB design role. I had just taken an internal transfer to the commercial side of the business after a couple of years of feeding from the government trough. My manager on the mil-spec side, Merrill, was a father of a dozen children and was an all-around nice guy, perhaps a bit of a pushover.

Before applying for the transfer, I wanted to talk with Merrill, so I came up behind him and asked if he wanted to go to Armadillo Willy’s, a local barbecue place, for lunch. I didn’t see that he had a sandwich in his hand and was about to take the first bite. Instead, the sandwich hit the desk with a thunk, and we were off to the restaurant. Such was his dedication to his people.