The author seems to misunderstand PCB design flow. This is neither a "factory component placement issue" nor a silkscreen error. The error is in the schematic.
The layout CAD is often done by a different team that follows the schematic provided by design engineering. Automated workflows are common. The silk screen is predefined in a QA'd library. It is not their job to double check engineering's schematic.
The components are placed per the layout data.
Both those teams did their jobs correctly, to incorrect specifications. In fact, the factory performing assembly often is denied access to the schematic as it is sensitive IP.
If you're going to cast blame on a 30 year old computer, at least direct it at the correct group. It wasn't soldered incorrectly at the factory. They soldered it exactly how they were told to - backwards.
>The layout CAD is often done by a different team that follows the schematic provided by design engineering.
Just as a note, this is a fairly archaic way of working nowadays. At my place schematic design and layout go hand-in-hand, and we rejected a candidate because he didn't do the latter. The main reason is layout is no longer an afterthought, it's a key part of the electrical design of the system, and there's little room for a tedious back and forth between the circuit designer and the person doing the layout about what traces are and aren't important to optimize for various attributes.
Indeed, and this is true in other engineering activities such as mechanical design as well. Possibly with the exception of very large shops, there are no draftsmen any more, and the design engineer also creates the production drawings. And the software lends itself to this. Schematic / layout, and design / drawing, are joined together in the design software. It would be very hard to make a mistake like the one in TFA today.
Even the free software that I use -- KiCad -- would ding me.
We make bigger mistakes instead. ;-)
And yet it is not at all unusual for a production engineer to spot these faults and pass them back to the design engineers for rework.
Also true! Most common when you accidentally screw up a footprint and it doesn't fit the part on the BOM. A backwards part is the kind of thing they're not likely to pick up on (if it's marked on the silkscreen incorrectly, at least), but some do.