Shopkeeper asked me what you will do with these PCBs, I told him I am learning PCB designing and want to see if I can make (copy) PCB as good as ready-made PCBs. Listening to that he told me if I can design one PCB for him he will pay me 40/-, it was a small design. I did it in two revisions. I got very excited about this.
In 2004, I was working for 8 – 10 companies and doing PCB design work for them and if I remember correctly I used to get 15 – 20 rupees per square inches, yes, that’s how the cost was calculated. It was really tough work and full of exploitation from companies as money offered was very low but I still continued to do to understand the real life, the experience of working for others, and ultimately to improve my PCB design skills.
I learned a lot during this period like how to approach new people, how to understand requirements, how to give time estimates, how to negotiate, how to handle critical feedback, how to improve productivity by creating templates for repeated work, etc. It was a huge learning for me at the point of time.
PCB Design Job in Delhi
After about 8 – 9 months of freelancing, I stopped and started working for a company in Delhi near Nehru Place as a PCB Designer for 3 months, I used to get 5000/- per month. They used to provide CCTV security & surveillance systems to other companies and there was a separate department for power supply design and manufacturing.
I did more than ten power supply PCB designs (based on Power Integration chips) during that period and learned about technical stuff about PCB designing which I was lacking before. That was the time I started learning in-depth like design rules, best practices, noise reduction techniques, etc.










NEXT (how I got introduced to Google & Microcontroller World :))