Keep your engineers

Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 11/1/2001

Hardly a day passes when I don't hear about layoffs in the electronics industry. Now the layoffs are reaching to engineers. Companies such as Motorola and Cisco Systems tried to spare engineers from the layoff lists, but now both have put engineering jobs on the chopping block (Ref. 1).Ten years ago, engineers also went through layoffs. Later, when business improved, those same managers who let their engineers go complained about an engineering shortage. If they'd just kept those engineers, the managers wouldn't have complained so much. Laying off engineers is a mistake, but some managers never learn that.

Smart managers know that a company's future resides in its engineers and marketers. If business slows, these managers may lay off people in production, citing production as the "present". But they never let engineers or marketers go. Marketers define and engineers develop new products so that the company is poised to capture markets when business conditions improve. When business improves, everyone at the company profits.

Not only does laying off engineers risk a company's future, but laying off engineers can cost more money than keeping them. When the economy rebounds, companies who let engineers go today will have to hire and train new people. That costs time and money. Keeping the current engineering staff in place avoids that. You keep the people who know your markets, customers, and products.

If you're a test engineer, you might think you're more vulnerable than design engineers. Smart managers know that their companies will have to test the new products and will keep test engineers, too. Other smart companies will move test engineers into design roles or into design-verification roles until production recovers.

Smart executives, faced with short-term pressures to cut costs, have turned to creative ways to avoid losing talented people. Some companies have imposed forced vacations by closing during the holiday periods or by closing every other Friday, even if it means not paying the employees for those closed days. Nobody likes that, but it beats the alternative. In the end, more engineers stay employed (and keep their benefits). Managers win because they retain people in whom they've invested time and money.

Things will get better.