If you don't have good engineers, Charlie knew, you can't succeed in this business. Engineers are the lifeblood of the electronics industry and, indeed, of the American economy. From the outset, engineers search for a need or a desire to be satisfied, or they see the potential for something completely new and dramatic, something that people don't yet recognize as a need or desire-the telephone of years gone by or, more recently, the personal computer.
(Charlie remembered that, in earlier days, the personal computer was called a hobby computer; it was something to play with. It was promoted as something you could use to balance your checkbook, a value most people didn't perceive. Most people did not really need one.)
It's the engineers who design products to meet people's needs and desires. They modify their initial designs to slice away unnecessary cost and they modify designs to make them easy to manufacture. Without engineering, nothing happens. Progress stops.
Charlie desperately needed more engineers because many of his old-timers had left to chase higher salaries. A really devoted engineer, Charlie felt, shouldn't concern himself with money. Rather, he or she should find satisfaction in more lofty goals-the challenges of engineering, the quest for knowledge, the excitement of creating something for which people will pay.
Charlie wanted such engineers, but they weren't easy to recognize. So, he devised a series of tests to weed out those who were simply hungry for money and to find people with the necessary basics. The first test was rather easy. Anybody with a basic knowledge-not much beyond Ohm's Law-should fly through Charlie's first test. But candidates didn't.
What to do? He needed engineers. He didn't want engineers who were swayed by high salaries. Sadly, a large percentage of those who took his entry-level examination flunked.
Perhaps he could find the solution elsewhere. Had anybody else encountered such a dilemma? He began to study recent history. At last, he found the clue. He learned that 56 percent of aspiring teachers in Massachusetts failed a basic reading-and-writing test. These were people who wanted a career teaching youngsters how to read and write. Yet more than half of them flunked the test; they just weren't very good at reading and writing.
The Board of Education found a solution, pointing the way for Charlie. The Board adjusted the passing grade to reduce the number of teaching hopefuls who failed from 56 percent to 44 percent. Perhaps more youngsters would learn to read and write, but not very well.
What a great idea. Charlie lowered the score needed to pass his entry-level engineering exam. It worked. He was able to eliminate his engineering shortage.
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