Why employees leave electronics and embedded systems companies and how to understand why

Two resignation letters reach the owner's desk in the same week. One comes from the engineer who wrote the motor-control firmware. It says 'better opportunity'. The other comes from the AOI inspector on line two, whose mother needs her at home. Both may be honest. Neither says whether the replacement engineer, or the replacement inspector, will last any longer.

An electronics business keeps three crews under one roof. Designers and firmware developers live with schematic tools, debuggers and scopes. Rework and test technicians work at hot-air stations, flying-probe testers and functional jigs. Operators wipe stencils and watch squeegee strokes on the paste printer, feed the pick-and-place machine, hand-solder connectors and do box build. They quit for unrelated reasons, and one blended attrition rate turns them into static. Read this beside our plant-wide guide on why people quit, which it narrows to boards, benches and code.

Engineers seldom resign halfway through a hard bring-up. They resign once the customer build ships and the next ticket is a patch for a five-year-old board, or once a fortnight passes with no word about any next ticket. A bigger package may be the whole story. Often it sits on top of months chasing a board that would not boot past a brown-out reset, a layout respin forced by a late customer change, and no senior title in sight.

Ask instead about the final quarter. Which board, which late nights, who picked the next assignment. The replies tend to land on three causes: how projects get allocated, a technical ladder nobody has written, and a manager who never asked where the engineer hoped to be in two years.

• Eyes at the stereo microscope: hours of joint inspection leave sore eyes and stiff necks. Was the bench height or lamp ever adjusted?
• Reels that never came: a short part idles the line or forces a hurried changeover. Did incentive drop for a delay that began in purchasing?
• Rework skill priced as bench labour: whoever can swap a QFP without lifting a pad often earns what a trainee earns. Did that come up at increment time?
• Night duty during big orders: did one small group absorb the nights each time a large customer schedule landed?
• Red tags from test: when the functional tester failed a batch, was the root cause explained on the line, or was it only a telling-off?
• Missing static kit: were wrist straps, smocks and grounding points stocked, or were operators faulted for skipping kit that was not there?
• Temporary badges: did contract operators ever hear whether a permanent post could open up?
• Last bus after second shift: was transport waiting when the late shift clocked out?

Leavers usually name one item and carry several. Ask them to put the items in order of weight.

Skip the line leader and the engineering manager, since either could be part of what went wrong. A trainer, a quality engineer who looks after a different product or someone from HR can sit in instead. With a departing firmware engineer, a senior developer from a different team often draws out more, because the jargon needs no translation.

Ten or fifteen minutes is enough. Tell the person exactly whose desk the notes will reach, since gossip moves fast in a unit this size. Use the leaver's mother tongue where you can, and read the questions aloud for anyone who struggles with forms. A printable leaver questionnaire gives you a layout to adapt.

1. 1

   Think back: when did another job first tempt you?

   That moment often predates the letter by months and follows a specific release, roster or appraisal.

2. 2

   Which product, bench or team will you miss?

   Points at what to safeguard for the colleagues staying behind.

3. 3

   Did the role match what the offer conversation described?

   Mismatch tends to hide in shift patterns, project type or promised training on a new machine.

4. 4

   Who decided what you worked on each week?

   For engineers, project allocation. For operators, station, overtime and night-duty sharing.

5. 5

   Which skill did you ask to learn and never got to?

   BGA rework, a new test jig, another microcontroller family, embedded Linux.

6. 6

   Was there a payslip or grade letter that caught you off guard?

   Shows whether grade tracked skill and whether increments came with an explanation.

7. 7

   Any moment you felt unsafe, worn out or wrongly blamed?

   Covers eye strain, flux fumes, static rules and how test failures were handled. Any safety point goes to the safety officer before the shift ends.

8. 8

   If you could brief your replacement, what would you warn them about?

   Ends on an item the team can actually change.

Record the headline reason, any lesser ones and two lines of plain fact. Mark what the leaver actually said apart from your interpretation. Add tags for team or SMT line, product, lead, grade and months served.

Clusters then surface. Engineers handing in notice after each customer build. Operators vanishing inside their first six weeks, or just after the Diwali bonus. A spike on one line after a new line leader started. Lay the exit notes against rework logs, overtime sheets and the skill matrix. Three similar exits justify a closer look; they prove nothing on their own. Calculating attrition and its blind spots shows how a single plant-wide figure buries all of this.

• Engineers quitting after builds ship: the engineering head names each person's next project before the current one closes.
• No written technical ladder: the founder and HR draft senior, lead and principal grades, each with what it owns.
• Rework and test skill without a grade: the production manager works with HR on tested grades that carry a pay step.
• Incentive lost to part shortages: the plant head and planning agree how material-driven idle time is treated.
• Microscope fatigue: the safety lead reviews bench height, lighting and breaks with the inspectors.

Asked a month after a release or a roster change, the same prompts become a stay conversation. An engineer who hears about the next project from the boss, not from a recruiter, has one less reason to take the call. An operator who complains about reels and then sees the planning meeting change has one less reason to look across the road. Our retention work builds this habit, and the group page covering board, firmware and device makers sets out the other pressures these businesses face.