Author: Chris Gammell

Is your engineering team getting bigger?

I’m willing to bet no. In fact, I’m guessing some of you reading this don’t even have a “team” anymore. Maybe you’re at a startup and you’re the only hardware engineer on staff. Or maybe you’re at a small company and you have other hardware folks, but none that cover the same areas as you do. You have no one to talk to, no one to collaborate with.

There’s a lot of focus on hardware these days. Yes, it’s true that it’s easier than ever to get hardware designed and manufactured. No, it’s not true that it’s “easy” now.

I want to put a line in the sand and state something unequivocally: manufacturing is neither easy nor glamorous.

This article was initially published on Medium as part of my job at Supplyframe running the Supplyframe Hardware group. “Perfect” is not an absolute requirement. But every step away from perfection moves you closer towards failing to deliver a working product on time. I recently made a foray back into the manufacturing world for the Hackaday Superconference badge. I was not the hardware designer, I was simply helping coordinate the manufacturing of a product. And only 300 pieces at that. In reality, I was playing the role of purchasing agent for a small run of manufacturing. This task involved evaluating a…