I love that recently Westerns movies are making a comeback. Something about the romanticism of a hired gun coming in with no baggage, looking at the situation pragmatically, and doing what everyone knows needs to be done, but just can’t.
Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Sergio Leone’s epic Spaghetti Westerns, aren’t the only foreign influence on what we think of as American Westerns.
Some might say that the greatest Western ever was Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The plot is simple: a small village harassed by criminal bandits, hires seven warriors to fight them off. Sound familiar?
The hired warrior isn’t afraid to kill a few bad guys. And then they leave and peace is restored. Japan has long had the concept of a hired gun. The characters 助っ人 (suketto) in Japanese are ‘helper person’ and are used to describe many situations, even PCB design.
They do what the regular team can’t—or won’t—do, but everyone knows needs to be done. I like to think that sometimes our PCB design teams work the same way.
Designs are getting so complicated that it’s rare to find someone who knows everything about everything and can do it all alone. So we have our in-house suketto or hired guns.
These experts that can come in, quickly assess the problem, do what needs to be done and get out so that the rest of us can get back to our regular lives.
But there’s a problem. PCB design isn’t shooting a couple of bad guys. Everyone else doesn't hide in the church, we all need to keep on designing.
That means we can’t divvy up a design into segments because the lines of your domain and mine are not geographical, they’re technical. My buddy is the expert in DDR4 high-speed routing, but I still have to do my work while he’s helping me out.
This situation is pretty common with lots of our customers. They have teams around the globe and many domain experts scattered throughout the teams. They came to us for a way to leverage these talents without disrupting design projects, locking down files, or involving IT.
Now, our customers have a distinct advantage over their competition. They have hired guns taking out the bad guys for them all while shortening their design time.
How much shorter?
Check out this handy calculator we put together and find out how much time you could be saving.