INDUSTRY NEWS

Headcase reduction

Ignore that defect data for a second. Now take a deeeeeeep breath. Hold it. Okay, breathe out sloooowly. Feel calmer? No?

In a time of die shrinks, fab closings, and "headcount reductions," if EOS also means "engineer overstress" to you, then Allan Westreich wants to help. In the Fall 1998 issue of Today's Engineer the New Jersey—based psychologist writes that "the typical high-technology professional" has certain personality tendencies. Once you know your tendencies, you may be able to handle gently the fact that cat hairs somehow found their way onto an entire wafer lot during your shift.

"Each individual's personality style," says Westreich, "is based on preferences along four dimensions: introversion-extroversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and perceiving-judging." The typical high-tech prois more likely to be introverted and thinking. Regardless of your preferences, there are four steps to managing your stress, Westreich advises. They are: Be aware of your preferences, identify tasks requiring extensive use of your nonpreferences, balance tasks in the direction of your preferences, and change "your internal stressed-out style of coping." Relying too much on "your preferred coping style. . . may cause your strengths to become liabilities," he warns.

The magazine's URL is http://www.todaysengineer.org. If Westreich's advice doesn't help, don't take it out on him, though. Remember: No matter how stressed out you are, "die shrink" is still not an imperative sentence.

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