Edit Article

In 2003, I flew to Dresden, Germany, to learn MEMS design from a PhD-level engineer.

There was a second engineer parked between us as a live translator. My mentor's English was rough, and even in his native German he stalled and stuttered trying to pull the idea out of his head and put it on the table.

I still think about a well-known Malaysian influencer, a former high-ranking civil servant, who said he would reject any candidate who stuttered in an interview — immediately, no capability assessment required.

Run that hiring heuristic, and my mentor gets cleared to sweep floors in Malaysia.

But Alhamdulillah, my mentor was born in Germany.

His whiteboard delivery was never the bottleneck. The research stood on its own, got reviewed, got accepted, and went into production — and it generated thousands of jobs, including the one I was holding at the time as a Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Design Engineer, laying out microelectromechanical sensors.