What happened to the industry?
Working as a design engineer and supporting designers and the technical community for more than 41 years, including running FAE teams for semiconductor and component companies, has taught me a great deal about how technical and technical sales support should be done. I owe much of that education to outstanding customers and companies in my early days, especially Motorola Semiconductor, may it rest in peace, and Analog Devices.
So, what happened to the electronics industry? It’s a long story, but here’s the short version: The so-called “professional managers” took over. Especially after the dot‑com collapse, the industry was flooded with MBAs armed with Microsoft 365, dashboards, Salesforce.com, and lots of metrics. Finance and operations people gradually displaced engineers in sales, marketing, and customer engagement. We once understood how to properly support technical customers, but today that knowledge has eroded. Decision-making has shifted to people far removed from engineering realities.
Common sense says that if you’re selling or marketing technology products to technology customers, you need technical people at the interface between the company and the customer. Yet business schools have taught an entire generation that you can run a semiconductor company, a power supply company, or an embedded computing company with Excel and an MBA alone. In fact, knowledge of the industry could possibly be detrimental since you might be seen as too passionate, rather than businesslike and clinical.
Also, American business has become heavily financialized. Everything is measured, quantified, and reduced to metrics. Customers are no longer treated as valuable relationships to cultivate but as numbers on a spreadsheet and data on CRM reports. Meetings, if they take place, are typically used for tracking the project rather than for supporting the engineer.
The need to support design engineers
Design engineers need what they need, and much of it simply isn’t being delivered. A major part of the problem is the lack of what I call “whole and complete products” being delivered to customers. As an engineer I talked with put it, “Note to component companies: make our jobs easier and I will use more of your parts.” It’s simple, yet more than 90% of component companies either get it wrong or choose not to do it. Egos, money, agendas, metrics, and politics interfere with the process.
So, what happens when design engineers are not speedily provided with whole and complete products and must manually request what they want? Ultimately, increased costs and added delays make it harder for companies to get their products to market in a timely manner.
What is needed to bring new technologies to market in the electronics industry is the combination of speed and getting it done right. However, it’s as if companies today are managing F1 racing teams and the people at headquarters want to focus on fuel efficiency. A noble cause, but not the point; you’re not going to win any races. Perhaps this shift in perspective has happened in all industries, but this is the one I know.
Before the industry lost its way, I worked with many excellent technology customers who taught me the right way to support design engineers. Now, in semi‑retirement, I’ve come to believe that the area of technology sales and marketing is fundamentally broken—and I want to help fix it. My informal industry survey shows that reps, field staff, and distributors now spend 50 to 85% of their time on administrative reporting — time that should be spent on activities that customers actually notice. This is a massive issue.
I want to hear from you
In today’s industry, the engineer-customer is an afterthought. Thank you to EEWorld Online for the opportunity to cover a topic that no one else is talking about. Up next: How did we get here, and where do we go from here? Let’s discuss.
Meanwhile, I want your feedback. Share your experience on how companies are, or are not, supporting your design tasks. Challenge my assumptions, tell your funny stories, or just join the discussion.
About the Author
Kevin Parmenter is president of Pins Out Engineering, an electronics consulting firm specializing in technology, marketing, sales, and applications. He has a BSEE from Purdue University and a BS in Business Administration from Colorado Technical University.
Kevin was the director of field applications engineering for Taiwan Semiconductor, North America, until December 2025. Before that, he was VP of applications engineering for the Americas for Excelsys Technologies (now part of Advanced Energy Technologies) and director of advanced technical marketing for digital power products at Exar Corporation. He has also held positions at Freescale Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, ON Semiconductor, and Motorola Semiconductor’s Products sector.