Doug,
If the company wanted to safe that money all they would have to do is stop funding the work. Your third paragraph is true. Suggestions for improvement would be appreciated. Simply pointing out a problem is not constructive. Ghery Pettit Past President, IEEE EMC Society From: doug emcesd.com <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 9, 2024 9:44 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PSES] experiments as a source of knowledge Hi Ghery, I can see why you feel that way, but take a look at my analysis below backed up by a technical class at Bell Labs, feedback from my clients, and my personal experience over the last 55-60 years. Engineering time at a company fully loaded cost is about 3x salary, about $2,000/day in California. Salary for an engineer in Silicon Valley with 5 years experience in SI is about $180,000 or more, from a headhunter I talked to. That works out to about $500,000 per year for 250 working days per year. This includes an engineer's office and lab space (very expensive), the very expensive lab equipment, HR and IT support, about 160 days per year off (weekends, holidays, vacation, sick days etc), expensive government regulations on the business, and more. So companies really transfer a lot of wealth to the IEEE when their employees participate. One can argue whether that benefits the company. I do think it is worth it for the company, but these days more and more companies don't think so. Unfortunately, the long term outlook for symposia is not good because of this. We need to do a better job of letting companies know the benefits of participating employees! In my case I get paid for only a few days per month and need to cover $6,000+ in expenses from that. The rest of my time in is spent on overhead and research. I am in the office seven days a week. If I take two weeks out to write and deliver a paper I likely will have little income that month as the overhead stays the same. I think the IEEE needs to streamline the process of delivering a paper as much as possible to encourage papers from people like me, as DesignCon and PCB West already do. My daily rate is about $3,000 per worked day, but engineers come to me with problems they have been unable to solve for weeks or months and I fix the design in two days typically, stopping the often $100,000/day bleed from delayed product introduction (that number was given to me by one of my clients). I have saved two companies from extinction as their main product was having problems in the field. In both cases I was able to correct the design error in a few hours after a lot of effort by their engineers. So my fee is a really good buy for these companies, but I get paid only when I work, not when writing a paper or maintaining my computers or devising new troubleshooting methods, or sending emails, or traveling, etc. That overhead consumes more than half my time. Here is an interesting example: there is an instrument sitting on Mars right now on one of the rovers that would have been non-functional had I not looked at their design. They had an op-amp circuit, bandwidth of a few kHz, where they did a normal design but had not accounted for parasitic capacitance of a few picofarads. I had never seen a circuit like that before but it was immediately obvious what was wrong. The circuit was very high impedance, and they had not realized the implications of that. I earned my fee that day in a big way. The gain error was about 3x and hopefully they would have caught that in testing. But I still have to cover my expenses and earn enough to live on and I appreciate that DesignCon and PCB West seem to realize this. Engineers have little awareness of the cost of engineering time. I only do because of the internal required one semester class in Engineering Economics required of all new engineers at AT&T Bell Labs when I started there 50 years ago. Back then a day of engineering time cost $1,000 but we were furnished everything we asked for equipment and facility wise. If I needed a $20,000 instrument, I got it! What a contrast to today. Doug Smith Sent from my iPhone IPhone: 408-858-4528 Office: 702-570-6108 Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Website: http://dsmith.org _____ From: Ghery Pettit <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, December 8, 2024 10:24:13 PM To: doug emcesd.com <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >; [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: RE: [PSES] experiments as a source of knowledge What costs $10,000? You lost my interest in the rest of your claims right there. Ghery S. Pettit Life Senior Member, IEEE From: doug emcesd.com <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, December 8, 2024 5:41 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PSES] experiments as a source of knowledge Here is the problem. If I want to submit a paper to the IEEE, they want the completed paper submitted, a huge cost to me of well over $10,000 only for the paper to be possibly rejected if it doesn't fit what they want that year, is controversial, or exceeds the technical abilities of the IEEE reviewer. I wrote a paper jointly with a professor from a European university a few years ago that was rejected because a hidden "peer reviewer" did not like it. This reviewer had no idea what he was doing and clearly did not realize the implication of Faraday's law. I offered to communicate through a third person but that was rejected. I have irrefutable data on my website to prove the reviewer was wrong which I could have put in the paper if asked. Wasted effort on a likely older member of the EMC Society that was not able to understand anything new. By the way, I use this principle regularly to solve client problems that their engineers have struggled with for months within a few hours. Too bad it could not have been published by the IEEE. This technique is however available to engineers who take my seminars and is well used by them. I wish the IEEE would go back to deciding on papers based upon an abstract and summary of the proposed papers. For authors that do not yet have a reputation, a mentor was assigned to make sure the paper came out ok. It you are paid by your employer to write papers, wasting your time does not matter when a fully written paper is rejected. But for me such a process takes food off the family table! If the IEEE would like to get some innovative papers they need to change the process to the one they used to have. For now, I will self publish or publish through forums like the EOS/ESD Symposium, DesignCon, or PCB West where I have in the past. Doug Smith Sent from my iPhone IPhone: 408-858-4528 Office: 702-570-6108 Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Website: http://dsmith.org <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__dsmith.org&d=DwMFAg&c=e uGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=c9NR2mGfldry-2pM9Bbuww&m=g_8jd- GcEg32Q2wF9xisuR_Rkbey_0nnZfxS2yt0MAoyK_c8vPg00aue3wgILRMw&s=Q3GijH27-Xg5DoS oKcJ9kzDcTfqzRpKTDCrkLPX2yfU&e=> _____ From: Richard Nute <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, December 8, 2024 4:15:56 PM To: doug emcesd.com <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >; [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: RE: [PSES] experiments as a source of knowledge Hi Doug: I've been doing PowerPoint presentations and formal papers for the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society since it was founded. My employers allowed me to prepare on company time and paid my travel and attendance expenses. The NkdkJdXPPEBannerStart Be Careful With This Message >From ("Richard Nute" <[email protected]>) Learn More Potential Impersonation The sender's identity could not be verified and someone may be impersonating the sender. Take caution when interacting with this message. NkdkJdXPPEBannerEnd Hi Doug: I've been doing PowerPoint presentations and formal papers for the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society since it was founded. My employers allowed me to prepare on company time and paid my travel and attendance expenses. The IEEE/PSES presentation/paper process has not charged me or my former employer for the presentations/papers. I did get a "best paper" award in 2013. For this society, there is no IEEE membership pre-requisite for presentation/paper, although there is a 20% higher attendance fee. Almost daily, it seems, I get invitations to present papers at some other IEEE conference and related conferences. None have expenses other than the charges for attending the conference, which are modest. As these are out of my field, I ignore them. In the past, I did some original research (published) while employed. Now that I'm retired, my "research" is searching and reading published papers related to a particular subject. I still do presentations and papers. I disagree with your assertion "the IEEE process makes it excessively expensive for an independent contributor to write a paper compared to DesignCon." Attendance fees for DesignCon 2025 and IEEE PSES ISPCE 2025 are nearly equal. Richard Nute IEEE Life Fellow Bend, Oregon, USA _____ This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. 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