Post History

ESD precautions can save a lot of tedious failure analysis.

A very inconvenient thing about ESD is that a failure can be attributed to ESD only by ruling out every other possible cause.  ESD failure is established by exclusion.  One checks every other possible failure hypothesis, and none of them pan out.  Only then one can say in a not too confident tone:  "Hm...  Then it ought to be ESD.  We can't think of anything esle."

 > ... I had never seen its [ESD] effects myself.

It's possible that you had failures due to ESD.  But you didn't see the ESD discharge.  So, you didn't attribute the failure to ESD.

I have seen failures due to ESD first-hand.