Inge, you hit the nail on the head!  That is a battle I fight daily, from the 
inside.  In an $800mil tech company, I am the only PCB designer left - the rest 
have been laid off over the years.   That's why Mentor makes an autorouter - 
so we no longer have to pay designers.  And if a board works when it gets 
plugged in the first time, there's no reason to believe it will ever stop working.  
Then I spend countless hours trying to help solve problems that almost always 
come back to something a decent design effort could have avoided.  I spend 
far mor time putting out fires than designing anymore.

Slowly but surely, I have conviinced at least some of the upper management 
that up front costs = long term savings in PCB suppliers, but it took some very 
expensive cost saving efforts to get to this point.  Next I hope to make it 
company policy - we do still repeat the mistake too often.

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