The Circle of Life

I left OSRAM in 2018 for a few reasons, one of them was a drift of actual optical design work to suppliers (around 2016). The buzzword was „supplier enabled innovation“. Perhaps purchasing just defeated R&D. In a certain project (I had my own optical design completed after two weeks) it was my task to deal with those suppliers. In some cases to teach them what to do. Some of them did not even have optical design in their portfolio and had to hire somebody. So I decided to search for a place where I could do optical design. Now (2025) the wheel seems to be turning again and I move one step further and welcome my new life. Doing optics.

Bridges

I was lucky to be able to do optics all the time in various functions and different fields. It is incredibly exciting to discover interconnects and bridges between the fields. For example, you can measure MTF by evaluating rays on a receiver (to appear soon in LT). And you can indeed simulate diffraction in non-sequential software (10.1364/AO.55.003847).

Flashbacks

After switching back to imaging at Fisba, I had so many flashbacks regarding illumination, Seems I had many open problems stored in my head and in some cases solutions came to me at strange times. For example, we had a lot of discussions in stage lighting about the edge of a beam (yes: nice and bright), Later I found a way on the basis of zoom optics to tune the shape from top hat to soft edge (10.1117/12.2603649).

Karma

I had really great customers and less pleasant ones. I had excellent and less capable supervisors. And it happened that a great customer hired one of my worst bosses. That‘s life.

R&D controlling

At a first glance, it sounds reasonable to track the hours spent by R&D personnel (but nobody else). However, my experiences related to several employers tell a different story. There were always ridiculous side effetcs. In one company, the project manager was not allowed to check the debits on the project account for „privacy reasons“. Strange effects happen to mixed teams (some report their hours, some don‘t). When the budget gets tight in the end of a project, the incoming work will be given to those who don‘t report hours to save money. Some day a customer‘s optical design was assessed by a product manager and a business developer instead of the optical designer … When I was a group leader, we were always tight on projects and had to book hours to the cost center. At the end of the year, the accountants would apply an according increase of the hourly rate. After two years, we were too expensive and product managers would order the next project from a chinese supplier (and did not show us the design which was ridiculous).

Swiss Innovation

Swiss startups are always founded by graduates from ETH or EPFL . They are confident and for sure mastering science but will usually not hire a CFO (let alone somebody with experience in product development). Fortunately, CSEM has a department to support them. The Swiss are very proud to be (according to some statistics ) the most innovative country on earth. My personal experience leaves some doubt on that.

Only those who have the patience to do

simple things perfectly will acquire the

skill to do difficult things easily. (Schiller ?)

Engineers are self-motivated.

Sales people need incentives.