Just be sure they're not contracting out development to artificially reduce the FTE count and increase this ratio. Another strange ration was a CEO at a tier 1

Just be sure they're not contracting out development to artificially reduce the FTE count and increase this ratio. Another strange ration was a CEO at a tier 1 automotive supplier telling us he was looking at engineering as a percent of sales (or revenue or similar). We were above the industry average which seemed to indicate spending "too much" on engineering. My first thought was that a lot of engineering (vehicle specific calibration and software tweaking and integration) was on a per-vehicle basis, so that metric could be improved by not taking the smaller production programs. DUH. But as a leader it makes sense to grab all that business, including the less profitable projects. Maybe those are even a basket of programs with one OEM negotiated all at once. Who knows.