Arduino vs 555 reliability

returns like that you said :oP I was on the industrial side of USR (Total Control rack mount stuff). Very high quality, and very reliable. The problem was that due to various production problems, build quality was low, and yeild was terrible. There were huge piles of scrap and rework, with so much stuff getting rejected at final test, and tons of orders that could not be filled due to a lack of passing units. I was working elsewhere in the company (System Integration - essentially making complete dialup racks for both AOL and AT&T, but then they found I was a good quality auditer. They (Big Lou, just under Casey) gave me the power to squawk about anything that was out of spec. Fun times, and I am sure I pissed quite a few people off. Various rules were set up, so if I took a number of samples of a lot, and a flaw was found, the *whole* lot was failed and sent back, wherever in the line it was pulled, and reworked...and sometimes heads rolled.