worker-guy rant...

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Saturday, June 17, 2023 at 4:37:56 PM UTC+10, Don Y wrote:
> On 6/16/2023 7:48 PM, Les Cargill wrote:

<snip>

[Sure, there may be A FEW who want to -- out of curiosity -- but it seems
as an obsolescent skill while others are sorting out how to USE those
ready-made items to achieve tangible goals.]

How many folks want to wade through a 1500 page datasheet to figure out
how to *use* a component?

Anybody who wants to end up with a product that works. Complicated powerful devices have to understood in fine detail if you want them to end up doing what you need.

<snipped John Larkin being even more stupid than usual>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2023 21:48:54 -0500, Les Cargill <lcargil99@gmail.com>
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/05/mike-rowe-is-on-a-mission-to-reverse-the-unspeakable-stupidity-of-devaluing-work/

He\'s right. Not everybody can play the college-essay game, and we
don\'t need millions of artists and sociologists and film-makers
surviving as Uber drivers and baristas.

\"America is lending money it doesn\'t have to kids who can’t pay it
back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That’s nuts.\"

We do need more electronics and manufacturing techs, more good HVAC
and auto mechanics, more good IT support people, more good PCB layout
people.


Most EEs now end up working process at defense contractors as \"systems
engineers\".

Is that numericlly true? I do work with a lot of aerospace engineers
at big defense contractors (and I\'m related to one) who in fact work
way up the abstraction stack and don\'t know much about what\'s inside
the boxes they buy. The old guys who used to design stuff have
retired... more business for us.

There are FPGA and hardware people still but that takes
too long and does not survive the contracts process. I submit that a
$10k per unit product is all but officially extinct without a patron.

Here\'s hoping for said patron\'s heart health.

IT support is being utterly hollowed out. I spent most of the week
watching a small ad hoc team trying to get past permissions and
licensing to *get my email working*. Great people pushing some
invisible, variable sized boulder up an imaginary mountain.

Given the mess that computing is these days, IT support is hard.

But mainly, the dominant force in capitalism now is the merger and
that applies debt to the acquired. It\'s \"technology on the halfsies\". so
the kids do what could be done in a medium sized board as a software
stack on some gigahoochie processor.

I hope there\'s some \"maker\" style ecosystem to support the production of
board layout pros because the number of people who understand even the
basics of a transmission line seem very thin on the ground to me.

I\'m looking for smart kids in the maker spaces, ones who can get a
Raspberry Pi to do something real before they go to Stanford and think
that equations rule life.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2023 23:37:46 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

On 6/16/2023 7:48 PM, Les Cargill wrote:
Most EEs now end up working process at defense contractors as \"systems
engineers\". There are FPGA and hardware people still but that takes
too long and does not survive the contracts process. I submit that a
$10k per unit product is all but officially extinct without a patron.

Here\'s hoping for said patron\'s heart health.

There are still a fair number of products in the 10K *and up* range.
But, their markets are usually far better understood AND the folks
making the decisions are considerably more savvy about *each* decision.

By contrast, the bottom end of the market is full of hand-wavers.

IT support is being utterly hollowed out. I spent most of the week watching a
small ad hoc team trying to get past permissions and licensing to *get my email
working*. Great people pushing some invisible, variable sized boulder up an
imaginary mountain.

(sigh) I have a sad respect for IT folks. There\'s is a thankless job as
the decisions are made by folks who \"count checkboxes\" with little regard
for the costs of supporting each of those boxes checked. Then, cringing
when their (labor) costs skyrocket -- and flail about trying to bring
them back under control (by hiring less and less qualified people).

But mainly, the dominant force in capitalism now is the merger and
that applies debt to the acquired. It\'s \"technology on the halfsies\". so the
kids do what could be done in a medium sized board as a software stack on some
gigahoochie processor.

This always *looks* like the expeditious way to an end. It\'s the
embedded version of \"lets build it around a PC!\" -- without thinking
about what the PC brings to the table that is ESSENTIAL and the
attendant risks.

I can\'t count the number of clients who cringed at the idea of laying out
a custom board -- \"Why can\'t we just buy a __________ and use that?\".
The notion that __________ likely won\'t have the I/Os, packaging constraints,
documentation, etc. that an in-hose design would have escapes them.

It\'s so easy to lay out and buy a custom 2 or 4-layer board nowadays.
You can do a nice little board design in a day and have some built in
a week. That\'s hugely better than it was a few decades ago, when the
same would have taken a couple of months and cost 20x what it does
now.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Sunday, June 18, 2023 at 12:46:06 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 16 Jun 2023 23:37:46 -0700, Don Y <blocked...@foo.invalid> wrote:
On 6/16/2023 7:48 PM, Les Cargill wrote:

<snip>

I can\'t count the number of clients who cringed at the idea of laying out
a custom board -- \"Why can\'t we just buy a __________ and use that?\".
The notion that __________ likely won\'t have the I/Os, packaging constraints,
documentation, etc. that an in-hose design would have escapes them.

It\'s so easy to lay out and buy a custom 2 or 4-layer board nowadays.
You can do a nice little board design in a day and have some built in
a week.

It\'s got to be a pretty simple little design if you can do it in a day. The drafting shop used to cost them by pin count, and they were pretty good at it.

> That\'s hugely better than it was a few decades ago, when the same would have taken a couple of months and cost 20x what it does now.

I was laying out my own four layer boards twenty years - six and eight layers would have been equally practical.

Printed circuit board shops would take the electronic layout file and turn it into a couple of boards in day, if you paid them enough.

Shipping it to China wasn\'t an option back then so it probably wasn\'t as cheap, but it wasn\'t as expensive as paying for the time taken to do the layout.

John Larkin seems to have been a bit slow to catch up with the modern world..

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney