I've been involved in projects where I designed a circuit and built a prototype by point-to-point wiring. This was usually part of a whole system, one of several pieces of equipment. The entire project would go through an evaluation period and if it was successful, all the vendors had to quickly produce thousands of whatever it was they had designed. So I would have to come up with a few thousand silkscreened enclosures, circuit boards and all the components to populate them with fast.

If a single part wouldn't fit, it would amount to thousands of mis-ordered parts. I quickly realized this task was the most difficult of the project, way more difficult and time consuming than design work or building of the prototype. I would have never thought of procurement as being so daunting, but it is.

Don't anyone rat us out and admit to our wives that purchasing stuff takes real talent.