Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Quotas, deadlines, bottom lines I guess companies can in some cases track damages backwards and add these to the quotas and bottom lines. When I was 18 I worked for a few months on the assembly line at a Motorola manufacturing plant, assembling radio communication devices. It was a shit job with minimum wage and we had to meet strict quotas, but assembly errors were also counted, (the goal was "six sigma", https://…
What was your hack?
Anyway, the connector cables were manually soldered to them at a nearby station, and the ladies who did the soldering used to just pile the LED panels in a box, and as a result some of them would get scratches on the visible part and had to be thrown away. At the same time, the speakers I would also screw-in, came in these grid-like trays, where each speaker was placed in a small rectangular cell.
My brilliant idea was to recycle these cardboard trays and have the solderers place the finished circuits in them, so they'd never damage each other. It saved 10-20 defected panels a month IIRC. Not enough to get me bonus, but enough to get me a cheap FM radio and a certificate.
A guy who worked there at the time optimized some circuit board printing procedure and saved the company IIRC like $100K a year (or was it a month?), and got a very big bonus.