Mackie Employees to Drop Trou and Resemble Ned Beatty...

[Analogeezer]

I knew this was up but somehow missed the press release back a month
ago. I'm sorry for the employees affected by yet another example of
corporate america...I guess this means we'll be able to buy Mackie
Control units for $129 this Fall:

Analogeezer

p.s. I find it VERY interesting that the opening statement does not
have the word "manufacturer" in it.



To Whom It May Concern,

The purpose of this letter is to make you aware that Mackie has
entered the final stages of an important transition. We believe this
transition will further our position as a world-class developer,
designer and marketer of professional audio products.

For several years, Mackie has been laying the groundwork to outsource
the assembly of a number of high-volume products currently produced in
our Woodinville, Wash. headquarters. This transition will allow Mackie
to bring more cost-effective and competitive products to market than
ever before, while also allowing us to invest more resources in key
areas such as Product Development, Engineering and Industrial Design.

As a result of this new focus, Mackie has issued notices to
approximately 200 employees in Woodinville manufacturing who will be
directly affected by this transition. It is important to understand
that cessation of Woodinville manufacturing is the next phase in a
very important and deliberate transition, and not a scaling of
workforce to revenue, as industry rumors may suggest.

Manufacturing employees affected by this change will receive
completion bonuses and severance packages based on years of service.
They may also be eligible for federal help in the form of extended
unemployment benefits and retraining benefits.

As we move forward, Mackie will seek out the best possible resources
around the world to provide manufacturing expertise equal to our own
design and engineering talents. In some cases these resources will be
internal; in some cases they will be sub-contractors carefully
selected for their ability to meet our world-renowned quality control
standards.

In the coming months, Mackie will introduce an unprecedented range of
new products. These products aim to redefine the pro audio industry
with truly amazing features and value. These new products are also a
clear indication of what we will be able to accomplish as a result of
our new structure.

Mackie remains committed to the creative horsepower of our
Engineering, Product Development, Industrial Design and Marketing
teams, as well as the pace-setting standards of our Sales, Sales
Admin, Support and Service teams. All of these functions will remain
fully active at the company's headquarters in Woodinville.

We feel that we have turned a significant corner at Mackie and are
once again on the path to growth. We look forward to building on the
passion and product development talents that have made Mackie an
industry leader for nearly 15 years.

Sincerely,

Jamie Engen
President and CEO
Mackie Designs Inc.

[nuke]

Yeah, they are moving manufacturing offshore.

I watched a similar story on Nightline a few weeks ago about the furniture
industry moving to china now. The story featured Hooker Furniture and one of
their plants in North Carolina.

The president of Hooker extolled how wonderful his employees were, how they got
more productive when asked, improved quality when asked yet still couldn't
compete with the cheap labor in china.

However, I could not help but notice the footage of the factory floor. Not ONE
SINGLE bit of new equipment in the plant. They were building stuff just like
they did in 1950 with puchcarts and hand tools (air tools).

No CNC, no automation, no robotic spray booths, just a bunch of antiquated
jack-**** investment in the plant. The stuff they were making was plain old
mass production crap.

Hooker is doing 1/3rd of their production in factories in China now. They went
on about how much cheaper the labor was and so on.

But the real trick is the plants in China are brand new, fully equipped with
the latest in automation and production equipment. Hooker invested in the
chinese plants, but didn't put a dime in the US plants.

But the story just kind of glossed over that point.

>I knew this was up but somehow missed the press release back a month
>ago. I'm sorry for the employees affected by yet another example of
>corporate america...I guess this means we'll be able to buy Mackie
>Control units for $129 this Fall:
>
>Analogeezer


--
Dr. Nuketopia
Sorry, no e-Mail.
Spam forgeries have resulted in thousands of faked bounces to my address.

[William Sommerwerck]

I visited Mackie a few years ago. It was all One Big Happy Family. Really. Or so
it seemed.

Mackie was highly automated. It's hard to believe the cost of labor was so high
a percentage of the final cost that it justified the change.

I hope their shift to off-shore production will result in lower prices. I mean,
if you're going to screw people out of their jobs, at least have the common
decency to pass the savings along to the customers.

[Bob Cain]

It isn't just manufacturing that this is happening to. Ask
any design engineer in embedded control, electronics or DSP
that has found himself looking in the last few years.


Bob

Analogeezer wrote:
>
> I knew this was up but somehow missed the press release back a month
> ago. I'm sorry for the employees affected by yet another example of
> corporate america...I guess this means we'll be able to buy Mackie
> Control units for $129 this Fall:
>

--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein

[Mike Rivers]

In article <vkqjm2rot4riad@corp.supernews.com> williams@nwlink.com writes:

> I visited Mackie a few years ago. It was all One Big Happy Family. Really. Or
> so
> it seemed.
>
> Mackie was highly automated. It's hard to believe the cost of labor was so high
> a percentage of the final cost that it justified the change.

Mackie went into automated assembly early on. They made their
investment and it paid off big time. That's how they got to be as
successful as they were. But times change. When the competition is
making a product which, to most customers, is completely
interchangeable, and doing it for half the price, it's time to move on
or move out. I'm happy that they're not moving out. At least they
intend to keep on with the engineering, and being the kind of company
that they are, they'll continue to be innovative.

I was working there for a short time about 3 years ago, and it was
indeed a pretty happy family. I visited there a couple of months ago
and it's still a pretty happy family, but a much smaller one.




--
I'm really Mike Rivers - (mrivers@d-and-d.com)

[Arny Krueger]

"William Sommerwerck" <williams@nwlink.com> wrote in message
news:vkqjm2rot4riad@corp.supernews.com

> I visited Mackie a few years ago. It was all One Big Happy Family.
> Really. Or so it seemed.

> Mackie was highly automated. It's hard to believe the cost of labor
> was so high a percentage of the final cost that it justified the
> change.

> I hope their shift to off-shore production will result in lower
> prices. I mean, if you're going to screw people out of their jobs, at
> least have the common decency to pass the savings along to the
> customers.

This suggests to me that someone thinks that people are somehow "owed" their
jobs. Maybe in a true socialist state this could be true, but it's violently
anti-capitalistic thinking.

I think that in our heart of hearts most of us would like the world to run
in a purely socialistic manner - everybody puts in what they could, and
everybody takes what they want. Regrettably human nature isn't compatible
with this, as has been proven again and again, since no later than the time
of Christ.

When I started looking at production consoles at all seriously, I was struck
with how uncompetitive Mackie seemed to be in year 2003. Since this was
their historic bread-and-butter, I suddenly grasped how dire their
circumstance really was unless they made some striking changes.

Go into a pro audio store and start turning over boxes and opening boxes
looking for something that DOESN'T have heavy content made/assembled in
China. Contemplate the meaning of (consumer) electronic brands like Apex
that seem to be 100% designed&built you-know-where.

The handwriting seems to be on the wall - the only part of the audio that
the U.S. still does better-faster-cheaper than everybody else seems to be
the basic business of making and producing recorded music.

I think the moral of the story is don't get to hung up on where the tools
are made, just devote yourself to benefiting from them the best you can.

[Roger W. Norman]

You ever worked with wood, nuke? I believe, after some 4 years during high
school and summers, that my experience at a custom cabinet shop qualifies me
to say that people working with wood, in old factories with the right jigs
and the right hand tools, could do a 100% better job than any automation.
You want automation, go buy Ikea. You want cheap labor, go buy Pier One.
You want Thomasville, buy from NC antiquated furniture factories (although
they are usually called shops).

Sorry, I'm just of the mind that there are some professions that automation
just can't handle. A robot can't examine a piece of wood for intent. It
can spot blemishes and flaws, but can't know by looking at the wood just
what it's going to be good for. A nice old raw plank might not be good for
a bed frame, but be great for a coffee table with character out the butt.
Assembly line production may not have quite this level of art with it, but
still, other than shaving some seconds, a lathe still requires the same
amount of time to turn a table leg. A table saw can't cut any faster. A
router can't shape any faster. But there's nothing to say that you couldn't
have 15 more routers or table saws or lathes and 15 more operators to run
them.

I'll bet this Hooker character is a 2nd or 3rd generation family owner with
his eye on the bottom line and never spent a day in the shop. He probably
views the shop as a dusty old place full of glue, paint and lacquer smells,
while his father or grandfather knew every piece of wood he put into a piece
of furniture.

But the obvious bottom line in all of this is that the US has to help get
the rest of the world up to snuff in the world economy so that there's not
so much disparity in wages. Think about how much investment we're talking
about. Assuming that some NC company still wants to produce NC pine
products, they'd have to ship the wood to China, have the wood milled, cut,
drilled, assembled, sanded and finished and STILL ship it back cheaper than
they could do it in NC. With all that shipping one wonders if it's the
numbers that play with people's heads. Cheap labor has to account for 51%
of the savings just to make that justification viable, because shipping
costs can't be a positive for the bottom line. In other words, say the
original factory makes 1000 pieces in a week. Unless there is a significant
increase in numbers of manufacture, making those same 1000 pieces in China
and shipping them can't equate to savings. So unless the number of
manufacture increases 10 fold (and then there's a marketing problem), I
don't see that the numbers could really work out. Then the question becomes
whether someone somewhere in the world is going to be looking for that
Chinese made North Carolina furniture. Perhaps the Fender model works best
here. Have the more mass produced products at one price point but yet still
keep Americans employed by making the quality furniture. And it somewhat
appears to me that the onus has to be on the buying public, too. If Hooker
were making the sales he wanted of quality furniture, then he'd need not
shift his workforce to the Chinese. We're a mass produced, crap buying
public used to throwing everything away in a couple of years, even if it
still works. Not many of us are buying quality workmanship with an idea
towards having something like furniture that will last 100 years. Or 400.

Ah, but that's another rant.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio
Purchase your copy of the Fifth of RAP CD set at www.recaudiopro.net.
See how far $20 really goes.




"nuke" <larrysb@aol.commode> wrote in message
news:20030827201533.22749.00000022@mb-m23.aol.com...
> Yeah, they are moving manufacturing offshore.
>
> I watched a similar story on Nightline a few weeks ago about the furniture
> industry moving to china now. The story featured Hooker Furniture and one
of
> their plants in North Carolina.
>
> The president of Hooker extolled how wonderful his employees were, how
they got
> more productive when asked, improved quality when asked yet still couldn't
> compete with the cheap labor in china.
>
> However, I could not help but notice the footage of the factory floor. Not
ONE
> SINGLE bit of new equipment in the plant. They were building stuff just
like
> they did in 1950 with puchcarts and hand tools (air tools).
>
> No CNC, no automation, no robotic spray booths, just a bunch of antiquated
> jack-**** investment in the plant. The stuff they were making was plain
old
> mass production crap.
>
> Hooker is doing 1/3rd of their production in factories in China now. They
went
> on about how much cheaper the labor was and so on.
>
> But the real trick is the plants in China are brand new, fully equipped
with
> the latest in automation and production equipment. Hooker invested in the
> chinese plants, but didn't put a dime in the US plants.
>
> But the story just kind of glossed over that point.
>
> >I knew this was up but somehow missed the press release back a month
> >ago. I'm sorry for the employees affected by yet another example of
> >corporate america...I guess this means we'll be able to buy Mackie
> >Control units for $129 this Fall:
> >
> >Analogeezer
>
>
> --
> Dr. Nuketopia
> Sorry, no e-Mail.
> Spam forgeries have resulted in thousands of faked bounces to my address.

[Arny Krueger]

"Roger W. Norman" <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote in message
news:bikupf$a4c$1@bob.news.rcn.net

> With all that shipping one wonders if it's the numbers that play with
> people's heads.

I think you just stumbled over one of the ways how we've arrived where we
are today: cheap, fast shipping.

[Roger W. Norman]

Aha, and if it were just a point of WHERE the tools were made then it would
probably be a moot point. However, in a lot of things Chinese, we are
talking about a substandard manufacture. I realize that is pretty general,
so I'll try to get more specific. Hand tools, for instance. Every Chinese
hand tool I've had has been substandard. Softer metals in the hammers,
parts that don't last for the life of the tool, and often a feel that just
isn't quite right. I just had a relatively new pair of Chinese loppers
break in my hand the other day. This time I replaced them with good old
American loppers. The original savings? About $12, but they only lasted
about a year. Another for instance. I wouldn't put off-the-shelf
electronics into the next series of NASA's Shuttles. Would you?

And yeah, I know, supposedly not a good analogy, but think about it this
way. Computer parts and offshore manufacture. Take IBM for example. They
moved a lot of their manufacturing to Indonesia and Malaysia, but they also
built and operated the factories, which is entirely different than what's
happening today. Or remember substandard memory coming from both Taiwan and
S. Korea and then the "shortages" due to some fire or something. Those
shortages were due specifically to faulty manufacture and product not
working up to snuff, so there were a couple of times when they had to
re-spec their entire production line.

So I'd say that it is a point of WHERE products are made because it
indicates how well they were made.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio
Purchase your copy of the Fifth of RAP CD set at www.recaudiopro.net.
See how far $20 really goes.




"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@hotpop.com> wrote in message
news:wKWdnXR5KsZFbNCiU-KYgw@comcast.com...
> "William Sommerwerck" <williams@nwlink.com> wrote in message
> news:vkqjm2rot4riad@corp.supernews.com
>
> > I visited Mackie a few years ago. It was all One Big Happy Family.
> > Really. Or so it seemed.
>
> > Mackie was highly automated. It's hard to believe the cost of labor
> > was so high a percentage of the final cost that it justified the
> > change.
>
> > I hope their shift to off-shore production will result in lower
> > prices. I mean, if you're going to screw people out of their jobs, at
> > least have the common decency to pass the savings along to the
> > customers.
>
> This suggests to me that someone thinks that people are somehow "owed"
their
> jobs. Maybe in a true socialist state this could be true, but it's
violently
> anti-capitalistic thinking.
>
> I think that in our heart of hearts most of us would like the world to run
> in a purely socialistic manner - everybody puts in what they could, and
> everybody takes what they want. Regrettably human nature isn't compatible
> with this, as has been proven again and again, since no later than the
time
> of Christ.
>
> When I started looking at production consoles at all seriously, I was
struck
> with how uncompetitive Mackie seemed to be in year 2003. Since this was
> their historic bread-and-butter, I suddenly grasped how dire their
> circumstance really was unless they made some striking changes.
>
> Go into a pro audio store and start turning over boxes and opening boxes
> looking for something that DOESN'T have heavy content made/assembled in
> China. Contemplate the meaning of (consumer) electronic brands like Apex
> that seem to be 100% designed&built you-know-where.
>
> The handwriting seems to be on the wall - the only part of the audio that
> the U.S. still does better-faster-cheaper than everybody else seems to be
> the basic business of making and producing recorded music.
>
> I think the moral of the story is don't get to hung up on where the tools
> are made, just devote yourself to benefiting from them the best you can.
>
>

[LeBaron & Alrich]

Roger W. Norman <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote:

> You ever worked with wood, nuke? I believe, after some 4 years during high
> school and summers, that my experience at a custom cabinet shop qualifies me
> to say that people working with wood, in old factories with the right jigs
> and the right hand tools, could do a 100% better job than any automation.
> You want automation, go buy Ikea. You want cheap labor, go buy Pier One.
> You want Thomasville, buy from NC antiquated furniture factories (although
> they are usually called shops).

When the cost of labor is a large factor in production modern machinery
and modern assembly system layouts make a huge difference in the final
cost of the product.

Indirectly, have you seen the data that shows GM is the world's largest
HMO and that it sells cars only to support its healthcare costs? That
when buying a GM car one pays more for worker's pension and benefit
funds that one does for steel? This is not to dismiss the value of
pensions and benefits, but it raises questions in my mind about the
stupidity of our national "health care" and human support systems.

(Here comes Ty; I better shut up now.)

--
ha

[Charles Tomaras]

"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@hotpop.com> wrote in message
news:G32dnec9nKmSn9OiU-KYuQ@comcast.com...
> "Roger W. Norman" <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote in message
> news:bikupf$a4c$1@bob.news.rcn.net
>
> > With all that shipping one wonders if it's the numbers that play with
> > people's heads.
>
> I think you just stumbled over one of the ways how we've arrived where we
> are today: cheap, fast shipping.


From today's New York Times, an article about shipping and China:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/business/worldbusiness/28SHIP.html?th

[Scott Dorsey]

Roger W. Norman <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote:
>You ever worked with wood, nuke? I believe, after some 4 years during high
>school and summers, that my experience at a custom cabinet shop qualifies me
>to say that people working with wood, in old factories with the right jigs
>and the right hand tools, could do a 100% better job than any automation.
>You want automation, go buy Ikea. You want cheap labor, go buy Pier One.
>You want Thomasville, buy from NC antiquated furniture factories (although
>they are usually called shops).

Right, but that's the issue. People don't want to BUY Thomasville. People
want to buy Ikea.

If you are in the market for making a lot of stuff that is all the same as
cheaply as possible, automation is the way to go. You grind the wood up
and extrude into sheets of particle board that fall apart after a few years
to make it possible to use automation.

>Sorry, I'm just of the mind that there are some professions that automation
>just can't handle. A robot can't examine a piece of wood for intent. It
>can spot blemishes and flaws, but can't know by looking at the wood just
>what it's going to be good for. A nice old raw plank might not be good for
>a bed frame, but be great for a coffee table with character out the butt.
>Assembly line production may not have quite this level of art with it, but
>still, other than shaving some seconds, a lathe still requires the same
>amount of time to turn a table leg. A table saw can't cut any faster. A
>router can't shape any faster. But there's nothing to say that you couldn't
>have 15 more routers or table saws or lathes and 15 more operators to run
>them.

You're talking about craftsmanship and art, not cheap mass production of
low-end junk. As long as the market demands junk at increasingly lower
prices, manufacturers are having to figure out ways to make things cheaper
and shoddier.

>I'll bet this Hooker character is a 2nd or 3rd generation family owner with
>his eye on the bottom line and never spent a day in the shop. He probably
>views the shop as a dusty old place full of glue, paint and lacquer smells,
>while his father or grandfather knew every piece of wood he put into a piece
>of furniture.

Maybe, but the problem isn't the folks making the products, the problem is
the people buying them.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

Roger W. Norman <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote:
>Aha, and if it were just a point of WHERE the tools were made then it would
>probably be a moot point. However, in a lot of things Chinese, we are
>talking about a substandard manufacture. I realize that is pretty general,
>so I'll try to get more specific. Hand tools, for instance. Every Chinese
>hand tool I've had has been substandard. Softer metals in the hammers,
>parts that don't last for the life of the tool, and often a feel that just
>isn't quite right. I just had a relatively new pair of Chinese loppers
>break in my hand the other day. This time I replaced them with good old
>American loppers. The original savings? About $12, but they only lasted
>about a year. Another for instance. I wouldn't put off-the-shelf
>electronics into the next series of NASA's Shuttles. Would you?

The Chinese actually do make some decent quality tools. But they don't
export them, because there's no money in exporting them when they can export
junk and sell it just as well.

Some of the best cutting edges made are hand-forged Chinese knives. But
you won't ever see them in your local hardware store because that's not
what the market demands. If you don't believe me, go to the Da Hua market
downtown and check out some of them.

When you can export ten cheaply-made lathes with soft-metal beds and leadscrews
with pitch variations visible to the naked eye, or you can export one
well-made lathe with a precision leadscrew, which one are you going to do?
You're going to export the junk, because you make more money doing it.

The folks doing this stuff are businessmen... they are in it for the money
and they will make whatever people want to buy. And if people are willing to
buy crap, they'll make it.

I'm seeing a substantial improvement in the quality of some of the Chinese
microphones these days, in part because the American importers have realized
how bad some of them are and have decided that it's worth it to pay more
money for better quality production, and in part because the American importers
have hired folks to go to the Chinese factories and teach them to make better
products. The factories make what the importers demand.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[steve]

At six Indian software engineers to one American (management rule-of-thumb), all
our jobs are going there. Shipping is basically free. Email latency is 24
hours, so my schedule is impacted until the entire group is in India (ie, I can
see me unemployed from a company that *bought* me and my software 4 years ago).
But it's so cheap that I can hear that giant sucking sound; wish I could get
it on tape.

Bob Cain wrote:

> It isn't just manufacturing that this is happening to. Ask
> any design engineer in embedded control, electronics or DSP
> that has found himself looking in the last few years.

[Arny Krueger]

"Roger W. Norman" <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote in message
news:bikvm8$brm$1@bob.news.rcn.net

> Aha, and if it were just a point of WHERE the tools were made then it
> would probably be a moot point.

That was my point.

>However, in a lot of things Chinese,
> we are talking about a substandard manufacture.

IME the Chinese are capable of providing a wide range of quality levels for
what they produce. It's mostly a matter of what someone demands. Their
business is now made up of providing competitive quality for
hyper-competitive prices. IMO the depressed economic situation in much of
the Pacific rim is due to this giant price/quality sucking sound coming from
China.

> I realize that is
> pretty general, so I'll try to get more specific. Hand tools, for
> instance. Every Chinese hand tool I've had has been substandard.

IME YMMV.

> Softer metals in the hammers, parts that don't last for the life of
> the tool, and often a feel that just isn't quite right. I just had a
> relatively new pair of Chinese loppers break in my hand the other
> day. This time I replaced them with good old American loppers. The
> original savings? About $12, but they only lasted about a year.

I've had American-Made loppers do the same thing. I got what I paid for. I
often get more for what I pay with Chinese tools.

> Another for instance. I wouldn't put off-the-shelf electronics into
> the next series of NASA's Shuttles. Would you?

I think that today getting the right thing is a matter of specifying the
right thing and making sure you get it, no matter what the country of
origin.

> And yeah, I know, supposedly not a good analogy, but think about it
> this way. Computer parts and offshore manufacture.

An area I am intimately familiar with. I'm an old-timer, I can still
remember working with US-made motherboards. I can clearly remember Taiwanese
brands that actually shipped Taiwanese-made motherboards and even US-made
motherboards. Today, even high-end Taiwanese brands ship Made-in China
motherboards. If you open up a Compaq, you just might find...

>Take IBM for
> example. They moved a lot of their manufacturing to Indonesia and
> Malaysia, but they also built and operated the factories, which is
> entirely different than what's happening today.

I've compared power amps made in the USA to same make and model power amp
made in China. The big tipoff was the label that stated the name of the
country the amp was manufactured in. Was the Chinese amp made of US-made
parts? Was the US-made amp made of Chinese parts? Were there Japanese parts
in both or either? Did it matter?

> Or remember
> substandard memory coming from both Taiwan and S. Korea and then the
> "shortages" due to some fire or something. Those shortages were due
> specifically to faulty manufacture and product not working up to
> snuff, so there were a couple of times when they had to re-spec their
> entire production line.

I remember that. It was also a long time ago.

> So I'd say that it is a point of WHERE products are made because it
> indicates how well they were made.

I think that 20 or 30 years ago, some Chinese equipment might have been
substandard because they didn't have the technology to do everything right.
Perhaps at some lofty level of aerospace or biotech it's still true. IME at
some time, maybe 5-10 years ago that issue mostly disappeared.

[Scott Dorsey]

steve <steve@nospam_please.com> wrote:
>At six Indian software engineers to one American (management rule-of-thumb), all
>our jobs are going there. Shipping is basically free. Email latency is 24
>hours, so my schedule is impacted until the entire group is in India (ie, I can
>see me unemployed from a company that *bought* me and my software 4 years ago).
> But it's so cheap that I can hear that giant sucking sound; wish I could get
>it on tape.

My experiences watching outsourced software development is that what you
save in hourly wages you lose in the ability to work directly with developers
and in quick turnaround. But let us face it... computer software is the first
industry where quality control really hits rock bottom. And again, it is
because the customers don't demand reliable software. It's true that
Microsoft has certainly reduced people's expectations of software reliability,
but that's no excuse not to demand a higher quality product.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[dt king]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Dorsey" <kludge@panix.com>
Newsgroups: rec.audio.pro
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 11:37 AM
Subject: Re: Mackie Employees to Drop Trou and Resemble Ned Beatty...


> Roger W. Norman <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote:
> >You ever worked with wood, nuke? I believe, after some 4 years during
high
> >school and summers, that my experience at a custom cabinet shop
qualifies me
> >to say that people working with wood, in old factories with the right
jigs
> >and the right hand tools, could do a 100% better job than any
automation.
> >You want automation, go buy Ikea. You want cheap labor, go buy Pier
One.
> >You want Thomasville, buy from NC antiquated furniture factories
(although
> >they are usually called shops).
>
> Right, but that's the issue. People don't want to BUY Thomasville.
People
> want to buy Ikea.
>
> If you are in the market for making a lot of stuff that is all the same
as
> cheaply as possible, automation is the way to go. You grind the wood up
> and extrude into sheets of particle board that fall apart after a few
years
> to make it possible to use automation.

Well, this thread could go on for weeks, but I'll just add a couple of
thoughts here.

When the dotcom bubble burst, many of the most creative web designers I
knew transitioned into creating high-end, customized nitch products. We
make things that you can't mass produce and we charge more for it. Never
going to get rich that way, but I haven't set my alarm clock in years.

> >I'll bet this Hooker character is a 2nd or 3rd generation family owner
with
> >his eye on the bottom line and never spent a day in the shop. He
probably
> >views the shop as a dusty old place full of glue, paint and lacquer
smells,
> >while his father or grandfather knew every piece of wood he put into a
piece
> >of furniture.
>
> Maybe, but the problem isn't the folks making the products, the problem
is
> the people buying them.

It's an easy formula, fire American workers and make your product cheaper
overseas. However, when you've put all the Americans out of work, who will
buy your product?

dtk

[Les Cargill]

"Roger W. Norman" wrote:
>
> You ever worked with wood, nuke? I believe, after some 4 years during high
> school and summers, that my experience at a custom cabinet shop qualifies me
> to say that people working with wood, in old factories with the right jigs
> and the right hand tools, could do a 100% better job than any automation.
> You want automation, go buy Ikea. You want cheap labor, go buy Pier One.
> You want Thomasville, buy from NC antiquated furniture factories (although
> they are usually called shops).
>

Yes, but most people don't want Thomasville. They want something that
looks nice and is cheaper.

> Sorry, I'm just of the mind that there are some professions that automation
> just can't handle. A robot can't examine a piece of wood for intent. It
> can spot blemishes and flaws, but can't know by looking at the wood just
> what it's going to be good for. A nice old raw plank might not be good for
> a bed frame, but be great for a coffee table with character out the butt.
> Assembly line production may not have quite this level of art with it, but
> still, other than shaving some seconds, a lathe still requires the same
> amount of time to turn a table leg. A table saw can't cut any faster. A
> router can't shape any faster. But there's nothing to say that you couldn't
> have 15 more routers or table saws or lathes and 15 more operators to run
> them.
>

There's a lot of people out there making handmade, one-off furniture,
but we're talking an order of magnitude more expensive
than the next step down. Hand made one-off is fine if you sell to
movie stars and CEOs, but the ranks of those are declining.

> I'll bet this Hooker character is a 2nd or 3rd generation family owner with
> his eye on the bottom line and never spent a day in the shop. He probably
> views the shop as a dusty old place full of glue, paint and lacquer smells,
> while his father or grandfather knew every piece of wood he put into a piece
> of furniture.
>

I bet he's just reading the writing on the wall. It's fine that people
can develop craft, but getting paid for it is another story.

> But the obvious bottom line in all of this is that the US has to help get
> the rest of the world up to snuff in the world economy so that there's not
> so much disparity in wages. Think about how much investment we're talking
> about. Assuming that some NC company still wants to produce NC pine
> products, they'd have to ship the wood to China, have the wood milled, cut,
> drilled, assembled, sanded and finished and STILL ship it back cheaper than
> they could do it in NC. With all that shipping one wonders if it's the
> numbers that play with people's heads. Cheap labor has to account for 51%
> of the savings just to make that justification viable, because shipping
> costs can't be a positive for the bottom line.

No, if you can predict the demand for the shipping, it's bloody cheap now.
The process called "containerization" means that it's arguably as cheap
to go between say, New York and North Carolina as it is to go between
North Carolina and China. Th eonly real cost is at the endpoints.

The whole impetus behind the Three Gorges Dam project on the
Yangtzee is to make Chanking (sp? - Chun King usedabe ) a major
port.

In other words, say the
> original factory makes 1000 pieces in a week. Unless there is a significant
> increase in numbers of manufacture, making those same 1000 pieces in China
> and shipping them can't equate to savings. So unless the number of
> manufacture increases 10 fold (and then there's a marketing problem), I
> don't see that the numbers could really work out. Then the question becomes
> whether someone somewhere in the world is going to be looking for that
> Chinese made North Carolina furniture. Perhaps the Fender model works best
> here. Have the more mass produced products at one price point but yet still
> keep Americans employed by making the quality furniture. And it somewhat
> appears to me that the onus has to be on the buying public, too. If Hooker
> were making the sales he wanted of quality furniture, then he'd need not
> shift his workforce to the Chinese. We're a mass produced, crap buying
> public used to throwing everything away in a couple of years, even if it
> still works.

That's right.

> Not many of us are buying quality workmanship with an idea
> towards having something like furniture that will last 100 years. Or 400.
>

Couple in that the price of labor is *artificially* supressed n China,
and that once you build something in China, you have a captive market for resale
of the physical plant, it's going to be an interesting

Oddly enough, this whole discussion is a 180 degree reverse of the one
leading to the Boxer Rebellion. SO this ain't new.

> Ah, but that's another rant.
>
> --
>
> Roger W. Norman
> SirMusic Studio
> Purchase your copy of the Fifth of RAP CD set at www.recaudiopro.net.
> See how far $20 really goes.
>
<snip>


--
Les Cargill

[Les Cargill]

steve wrote:
>
> At six Indian software engineers to one American (management rule-of-thumb), all
> our jobs are going there. Shipping is basically free. Email latency is 24
> hours, so my schedule is impacted until the entire group is in India (ie, I can
> see me unemployed from a company that *bought* me and my software 4 years ago).
> But it's so cheap that I can hear that giant sucking sound; wish I could get
> it on tape.
>

I wish 'em good luck. I've tried to get my employers to think
carefully about the cost of software development for 18 years.
This always comes down to "let's not do anything unnecessary".

Hasn't worked - the funny money thing wins every time. Rather
than do things to reduce headcount, which can
be shown to speed things up and reduce cost, it always ends up
"we need more people".

Would you really want product developed by people who *know*
you're colonializing them and only doing it on a "they pretend
to pay us, we pretend to work" basis?

Also, remember the early Nineties, when lotsa stuff was exported
to be done in Bangalore. Didn't work out then and faster email
is probably not sufficient to make it work out this time.

> Bob Cain wrote:
>
> > It isn't just manufacturing that this is happening to. Ask
> > any design engineer in embedded control, electronics or DSP
> > that has found himself looking in the last few years.


--
Les Cargill

[Les Cargill]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
>
> steve <steve@nospam_please.com> wrote:
> >At six Indian software engineers to one American (management rule-of-thumb), all
> >our jobs are going there. Shipping is basically free. Email latency is 24
> >hours, so my schedule is impacted until the entire group is in India (ie, I can
> >see me unemployed from a company that *bought* me and my software 4 years ago).
> > But it's so cheap that I can hear that giant sucking sound; wish I could get
> >it on tape.
>
> My experiences watching outsourced software development is that what you
> save in hourly wages you lose in the ability to work directly with developers
> and in quick turnaround. But let us face it... computer software is the first
> industry where quality control really hits rock bottom.

You can't sell quality in software to anybody. It effectively has no
demonstrable market value. When DSC took Nynex down, there was a
flurry of activity, then it abated.

> And again, it is
> because the customers don't demand reliable software. It's true that
> Microsoft has certainly reduced people's expectations of software reliability,
> but that's no excuse not to demand a higher quality product.

But that's no fault of Microsoft, which has actually done a good job
of conforming to customer expectation. People simply will not
pay extra for stuff that works well, unless they have legal requirements
to do so. Not that good code has to be more expensive - quite
the opposite - but it *appears* to cost more.

The software business has been abused to "get the kids jobs". That's
a laudable goal, but it is at cross purposes with making things work.

The HR deprtment wants freshly scrubbed 28 year olds. A 28 year old
is marginally at the good end of the journeyman phase of learning
software development, assuming a graduation age of 23. And you're
back to healthcare and pension liability for the 28 year old
figure.

There needs to be some age diversity. You can't really replace
the old guys as an influence on the younger guys. With all due
respect, they don't know much coming out of school.

> --scott
>
> --
> "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."


--
Les Cargill

[ryanm]

"Les Cargill" <lcargill@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3F4E4A14.75FD41B9@worldnet.att.net...
>
> The HR deprtment wants freshly scrubbed 28 year olds. A 28 year old
> is marginally at the good end of the journeyman phase of learning
> software development, assuming a graduation age of 23. And you're
> back to healthcare and pension liability for the 28 year old
> figure.
>
> There needs to be some age diversity. You can't really replace
> the old guys as an influence on the younger guys. With all due
> respect, they don't know much coming out of school.
>
Ah, you see, but the model has changed. A 25-28 year old with a piece of
paper form a school is worthless, you should already have 5-7 years industry
experience by the time you're 25. I learned BASIC at 11, C at 14, C++ at 16,
OOP at 17, and got a job at American Airlines at 19 working on the Sabre
reservations system, which the "experienced" guys had turned into a freakin'
horror show because of an unwillingness to learn and adapt to new tech. If
you don't already have a skill when you enter the workforce, you're already
behind. No time for college, buy a book, learn it on your own, and be ready
for a trial by fire before you're 20. It can be argued that the
"experienced" guys know the process and have been through several
development life cycles, etc, but by my second year at Sabre I had been
through full cycles on a half dozen apps, knew (and improved) the coding
standards, and was more flexible than any of the old school programmers they
had. When they decided they needed to do the new version in Java, I took a 1
week class and came back ready to rewrite large chunks of the reservation
system in Java. Of course it didn't happen that way, but then the dead
weight and wasted budget at companies like Sabre and AA are legendary.
Unfortunately for me, about 1998 I started getting offers for double or more
what I was making at Sabre, and Sabre was talking about eliminating flight
benefits for non AA employees, so I took another job, rode the dot com wave
up to almost quadruple what I started at Sabre for, until it dropped right
out from under me. Now I'm an independent contractor trying to get my own
business going, which really sucks in this economy.

However, back to the point, I'm 28 now and have 9 years of real world
experience in software development (mostly lead developer positions) and
project management in large companies (AA, Sabre, Verizon, etc), as opposed
to your idea of a 28 year old who is barely a journeyman. The real problem
is that the offshore programmers this work is being outsourced to *are*
competent and generally write good code. They are highly educated in all the
new technologies compared to your average 20-something American programmer.
And they will work for 1/4 of what American programmers are asking.

ryanm

[Bob Cain]

ryanm wrote:
>
> The real problem
> is that the offshore programmers this work is being outsourced to *are*
> competent and generally write good code. They are highly educated in all the
> new technologies compared to your average 20-something American programmer.
> And they will work for 1/4 of what American programmers are asking.
>

The man is corrrect. That's why this is such a problem.
It's not artificial, it's not a case of lousy ethics or
underhanded dealing or reducing quality. It's good
economics coupled with global increases in the production of
of well educated people and nearly a step function increase
in their interconnectedness. The U.S. technical work force
is in a seriously difficult adjustment period. Those of us
who are well over 50 realized this problem when it was still
on-shore economics that began turning us invisible 10 to 15
years ago.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein

[James Kidwell]

The wage scale in the US is so skewed that the average person has to do
(buy) the cheapest thing.
The gap between the rich and poor is growing.The music business is
probably the the worst
offender.While the anointed ones make millions,actual trained musicians
play for dirt.
In case you didn't realize it, you just chipped in to pay this dude a
rdiculous sum:
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059479361616&p=1012571727088
JK

[William Sommerwerck]

Good economics are almost always bad ethics.

Morons like Miss Fathead (I can't think of her name and don't want to) scream
about liberal treachery and lack of patriotism.

What could be more unpatriotic than US businesses sending US jobs overseas?

We're only a few decades away from one-world government -- by business.


> It's not artificial, it's not a case of lousy ethics or underhanded
> dealing or reducing quality. It's good economics coupled with
> with global increases in the production of well-educated
> people and nearly a step-function increase in their
> interconnectedness.

[Arny Krueger]

"William Sommerwerck" <williams@nwlink.com> wrote in message
news:vkukn1dh2rdn92@corp.supernews.com

> Good economics are almost always bad ethics.

There's a natural tension between economic decisions and ethics, but that is
hardly unique to economics.

> What could be more unpatriotic than US businesses sending US jobs
> overseas?

Wasting money keeping jobs in the US when they are more efficiently done
overseas, would be a very unpatriotic, even unethical thing to do. Besides,
history shows that it just doesn't work in the long run.

History shows that there are natural laws. They are often very complex. We
may know them very imperfectly, but they are out there and they control our
lives and the universe. In the short term it is possible to apparently
reverse or violate natural laws, but in the long run natural laws come
around and assert themselves unmistakably and sometimes even
catastrophically. Ethics is one view of natural law as it applies to human
behavior. Economics is another view of natural law. We must seek to find a
natural balance between our activities and the natural laws, or we will
suffer the unhappy consequences.

> We're only a few decades away from one-world government -- by business.

That would be a one world until there was just one business.

[Arny Krueger]

"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@hotpop.com> wrote in message
news:We2cnWLNzug8xdKiU-KYuQ@comcast.com

> That would be a one world until there was just one business.

Correction:

> That would be one world government if there was just one business.

[Your Add Here!]

One of my problems with this is that the Chinese state benefits from
these deals and they are without question one of the most brutally
oppresive governments in human history. And how about the US
politicians that are lining their pockets with Chinese $ while making
these trade deals?

"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@hotpop.com> wrote in message news:<wKWdnXR5KsZFbNCiU-KYgw@comcast.com>...
> "William Sommerwerck" <williams@nwlink.com> wrote in message
> news:vkqjm2rot4riad@corp.supernews.com
>
> > I visited Mackie a few years ago. It was all One Big Happy Family.
> > Really. Or so it seemed.
>
> > Mackie was highly automated. It's hard to believe the cost of labor
> > was so high a percentage of the final cost that it justified the
> > change.
>
> > I hope their shift to off-shore production will result in lower
> > prices. I mean, if you're going to screw people out of their jobs, at
> > least have the common decency to pass the savings along to the
> > customers.
>
> This suggests to me that someone thinks that people are somehow "owed" their
> jobs. Maybe in a true socialist state this could be true, but it's violently
> anti-capitalistic thinking.
>
> I think that in our heart of hearts most of us would like the world to run
> in a purely socialistic manner - everybody puts in what they could, and
> everybody takes what they want. Regrettably human nature isn't compatible
> with this, as has been proven again and again, since no later than the time
> of Christ.
>
> When I started looking at production consoles at all seriously, I was struck
> with how uncompetitive Mackie seemed to be in year 2003. Since this was
> their historic bread-and-butter, I suddenly grasped how dire their
> circumstance really was unless they made some striking changes.
>
> Go into a pro audio store and start turning over boxes and opening boxes
> looking for something that DOESN'T have heavy content made/assembled in
> China. Contemplate the meaning of (consumer) electronic brands like Apex
> that seem to be 100% designed&built you-know-where.
>
> The handwriting seems to be on the wall - the only part of the audio that
> the U.S. still does better-faster-cheaper than everybody else seems to be
> the basic business of making and producing recorded music.
>
> I think the moral of the story is don't get to hung up on where the tools
> are made, just devote yourself to benefiting from them the best you can.

[Andrea]

Les Cargill <lcargill@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<3F4E477E.40DCCB4B@worldnet.att.net>...
> steve wrote:
> >
> > At six Indian software engineers to one American (management rule-of-thumb), all
> > our jobs are going there. Shipping is basically free. Email latency is 24
> > hours, so my schedule is impacted until the entire group is in India (ie, I can
> > see me unemployed from a company that *bought* me and my software 4 years ago).
> > But it's so cheap that I can hear that giant sucking sound; wish I could get
> > it on tape.
> >
>
> I wish 'em good luck. I've tried to get my employers to think
> carefully about the cost of software development for 18 years.
> This always comes down to "let's not do anything unnecessary".
>
> Hasn't worked - the funny money thing wins every time. Rather
> than do things to reduce headcount, which can
> be shown to speed things up and reduce cost, it always ends up
> "we need more people".
>
> Would you really want product developed by people who *know*
> you're colonializing them and only doing it on a "they pretend
> to pay us, we pretend to work" basis?

We had a local telemarketing facility which employed hundreds of
telemarketers in Fredericksburg Virginia close up that was in the
business of pitching credit cards. I thought good now that I've signed
up for the Federal Do not call list, and they laid off all of those
telemarketers, that company won't be calling me any more...

Boy was I wrong, It looks like they killed two birds with one stone,
I've been getting telemarketing calls for credit cards and insurance
policies that sound like they are coming from outside the United
States, and the people calling have indian accents and speak the
queens english(formal colonial) very good.

So now the marketers get cheaper telemarketing labor, and get around
the do not call list by routing thier calls through another country
like India.

When the do not call list takes effect in October I have 2 choices, I
can sue the american companies that use oversees telemarketers to call
me, since thier business is in the United States and bound by U.S laws
and regulations...

or I can make it not very cost effective to use oversees outsourced
marketing.

Thank god that the United States is such a cultural melting pot, with
hundreds of local accents, dialects, and versions of English...

I could run up the telemarketing firms phone bill by keeping the
foreign "queens english" marketer on the line and confused, by mixing
up as many american language styles all at once,speed up or slow down
parts of words, change thier accents(like the art dealer in Beverly
Hills Cop 2 Movie) I could mix eubonics with Texan, with New
England,hill-billy, autioneer speed talk, Engrish, piglatin,baby-talk
and plain old made up words. I could use a script or improvise, Hey
the people calling me have a script in front of them, it's fair play.
Andrea
http://www.andrearogers.com

[Analogeezer]

"William Sommerwerck" <williams@nwlink.com> wrote in message news:<vkukn1dh2rdn92@corp.supernews.com>...
> Good economics are almost always bad ethics.
>
> Morons like Miss Fathead (I can't think of her name and don't want to) scream
> about liberal treachery and lack of patriotism.
>
> What could be more unpatriotic than US businesses sending US jobs overseas?
>
> We're only a few decades away from one-world government -- by business.
>
>
> > It's not artificial, it's not a case of lousy ethics or underhanded
> > dealing or reducing quality. It's good economics coupled with
> > with global increases in the production of well-educated
> > people and nearly a step-function increase in their
> > interconnectedness.


Did you see Rollerball (the original, not the gawduawful remake),
that's what they had, one corporate government.

"The Game" (Rollerball) was invented to provide people with a sense of
nationalism, to keep them from going back to "countries".

Pretty cool movie IMHO (well the overall concept some of the execution
was sorta violent) and a lot of it is coming true.

I like how the people with steady jobs and health insurance always
seem to think anything to do with capitalism = patriotism.

Analogeezer

[Les Cargill]

ryanm wrote:
>
> "Les Cargill" <lcargill@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> news:3F4E4A14.75FD41B9@worldnet.att.net...
> >
> > The HR deprtment wants freshly scrubbed 28 year olds. A 28 year old
> > is marginally at the good end of the journeyman phase of learning
> > software development, assuming a graduation age of 23. And you're
> > back to healthcare and pension liability for the 28 year old
> > figure.
> >
> > There needs to be some age diversity. You can't really replace
> > the old guys as an influence on the younger guys. With all due
> > respect, they don't know much coming out of school.
> >
> Ah, you see, but the model has changed.

Reality doesn't change a whole lot, and the realities
of this have never changed, not in fifty years if
not fifty centuries.

> A 25-28 year old with a piece of
> paper form a school is worthless, you should already have 5-7 years industry
> experience by the time you're 25. I learned BASIC at 11, C at 14, C++ at 16,
> OOP at 17, and got a job at American Airlines at 19 working on the Sabre
> reservations system, which the "experienced" guys had turned into a freakin'
> horror show because of an unwillingness to learn and adapt to new tech.

New tech means squat. It's all old tech. Knowing
what you're doing means something. And I mean *knowing*,
not guessing. And that's no respecter of age.

No question there's better tools and methodology out
there, but that does not change the fundamental nature
of engineering products and projects.

No doubt you're representative, but this sure explains
why things are moving offshore. This isn't your fault; it's
the way things have moved.

"A piece of paper from a school is worthless"? Perhaps, but
you cannot operate as a professional without at least
covering the subject matter thoroughly, and you won't get
that directly from reading books by yourself. A few
talented people can teach themselves the deep concepts, but
not the vast majority. Not even all the top 10%.

I've seen it firsthand, Ryan, and it's abuse of the process,
and a generation will be lost to it.

<snip>
>
> However, back to the point, I'm 28 now and have 9 years of real world
> experience in software development (mostly lead developer positions) and
> project management in large companies (AA, Sabre, Verizon, etc), as opposed
> to your idea of a 28 year old who is barely a journeyman.

It's not my idea. I'm merely repeating it. You skipped a step.

> The real problem
> is that the offshore programmers this work is being outsourced to *are*
> competent and generally write good code.

Good code is approximately 5% of the total problem-space.

> They are highly educated in all the
> new technologies compared to your average 20-something American programmer.
> And they will work for 1/4 of what American programmers are asking.
>

Yet another opportunity to demonstrate that you get what you pay for.
Hope it works out for 'em. It didn't, last time.

> ryanm


--
Les Cargill

[Scott Dorsey]

ryanm <ryanm@fatchicksinpartyhats.com> wrote:
>"Les Cargill" <lcargill@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
>news:3F4FBA5F.85071F43@worldnet.att.net...
>>
>> New tech means squat. It's all old tech. Knowing
>> what you're doing means something. And I mean *knowing*,
>> not guessing. And that's no respecter of age.
>>
> I both agree and disagree. I definately agree that the "older" (meaning
>more experienced rather than older) guys are needed to bring understanding
>of the process and a better idea of the big picture into it, but there's no
>reason why the "older" guys can't be 25-35 year olds who simply started
>earlier. But the tech changes so fast these days, and in ways that directly
>affect implementation, that the guys with 10 years experience in one
>particular methodology are actually at a disadvantage. My advantage is that
>I learn each technology as it comes out, which means I only have to deal
>with it a little bit at a time.

If this is such a big deal, why are people constantly reinventing the
wheel? Microsoft only recently figured out how to do real demand paged
memory (1965 technology), and a huge number of programmers out there
don't seem to have a concept of input verification (something Project MAC
was very aggressive about indicating was critical).

There is a whole body of research on how interactive systems need to work,
and so much of it is being reinvented all the time.

Incidentally, Saabre is an interesting example, because Saabre was in
many ways the pioneer transaction processing system. A lot of the lessons
learned in the early implementations appeared in ACM publications and a
lot of what we know today about how realtime systems need to work come
from that.

Today, the constraints that made the weird coding schemes used in the Saabre
user interface no longer exist, but a lot of the other stuff does. And the
folks implementing new stuff on top of the old system don't seem to have
any concept of the original constraints on the system and why many of the
original decisions were made.

I remember taking apart pieces of Saabre when I was in college and
transaction processing technology was a hot field of research. And
now, a friend of mine helped guide USAir over to the system and has
horrifying things to say about how a clean and well-designed system
has turned into a shambling nightmare.

>Guys going into college with no idea what a
>ternary conditional might be have to learn 20 years worth of tech in 2
>credits worth of classes, which just ain't enough.

There is no time to tech technology in college. In college, you need to
teach the basic theory, so that it's possible to learn the technology quickly
and thoroughly in the real world when you get out. If you just teach the
technology without teaching what is behind it, you get students who are
worthless three years after graduation.

Teaching every detail of a particular filesystem is a bad idea.... learning
every piece of how the ntfs or the Berkeley ffs works is nice, but it's not
as useful as learning how filesystems work and what constraints go into the
design of a filesystem.

> Do you really think a couple college level computer science classes and
>a C++ class cover the subject matter thoroughlly? I don't think that piece
>of paper qualifies you as "knowing what you're doing" (we agree on that),
>but I do think that industry experience in a code-monkey type position
>qualifies you better than just having gone to school.

No, but it can cover the background so that it's possible to learn the subject
material later on. I hope they don't teach any C++ classes in school. They
can teach a programming class that uses C++, a data structure class that
uses C++, a file processing class that uses C++ and so forth. Understanding
algorithms and data structures is essential.

If you understand the basic underpinnings, you can learn the programming
languages in an afternoon or two.

I used to brag about being able to write any assembler language without
any preparation, just with the code card in front of me. If you learn to
program and you learn something about computer architecture, you can write
in any assembler, whether it's a RISC box or a stack machine. Maybe not
optimally, but enough.

> A lot of my generation skipped that step. It got to the point that
>getting a degree would literally never pay for itself, not in a single
>lifetime, so people stopped getting them and started learning the stuff
>themselves and then starting out at the bottom of the totem pole and
>learning that way.

A lot of those guys JUST know the technology and don't know any of the
basic underpinnings behind them. There are a whole lot of those guys
in the audio world too. They can get stuff done, but they aren't very
versatile and that's a big deal in a world where the technology changes
so quickly.

I say this as someone who recently had to explain elementary graph theory
to a professional programmer recently. He had a vague notion of trees
but no concept of traversal algorithms.

>> Yet another opportunity to demonstrate that you get what you pay for.
>> Hope it works out for 'em. It didn't, last time.
>>
> And that is always true, however, I've worked with a lot of
>middle-eastern and Indian programmers who really know their stuff and are
>entirely too enthusiastic about work.

As far as India goes, a lot of this has to do with the college system
there.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[ryanm]

"Les Cargill" <lcargill@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3F4FBA5F.85071F43@worldnet.att.net...
>
> New tech means squat. It's all old tech. Knowing
> what you're doing means something. And I mean *knowing*,
> not guessing. And that's no respecter of age.
>
I both agree and disagree. I definately agree that the "older" (meaning
more experienced rather than older) guys are needed to bring understanding
of the process and a better idea of the big picture into it, but there's no
reason why the "older" guys can't be 25-35 year olds who simply started
earlier. But the tech changes so fast these days, and in ways that directly
affect implementation, that the guys with 10 years experience in one
particular methodology are actually at a disadvantage. My advantage is that
I learn each technology as it comes out, which means I only have to deal
with it a little bit at a time. Guys going into college with no idea what a
ternary conditional might be have to learn 20 years worth of tech in 2
credits worth of classes, which just ain't enough.

> "A piece of paper from a school is worthless"? Perhaps, but
> you cannot operate as a professional without at least
> covering the subject matter thoroughly, and you won't get
> that directly from reading books by yourself. A few
> talented people can teach themselves the deep concepts, but
> not the vast majority. Not even all the top 10%.
>
Do you really think a couple college level computer science classes and
a C++ class cover the subject matter thoroughlly? I don't think that piece
of paper qualifies you as "knowing what you're doing" (we agree on that),
but I do think that industry experience in a code-monkey type position
qualifies you better than just having gone to school.

> It's not my idea. I'm merely repeating it. You skipped a step.
>
A lot of my generation skipped that step. It got to the point that
getting a degree would literally never pay for itself, not in a single
lifetime, so people stopped getting them and started learning the stuff
themselves and then starting out at the bottom of the totem pole and
learning that way.

> Good code is approximately 5% of the total problem-space.
>
True, but software not being a physical object that has to be shipped,
it's just as easy to have phone conferences as it is to have meetings.
Especially with the advent of tech like NetMeeting, with internet
whiteboards, slideshows, etc.

> Yet another opportunity to demonstrate that you get what you pay for.
> Hope it works out for 'em. It didn't, last time.
>
And that is always true, however, I've worked with a lot of
middle-eastern and Indian programmers who really know their stuff and are
entirely too enthusiastic about work. I left Verizon because of this. My
boss was a Moroccan who came here for the job, and the only people in this
country he knew were his co-workers. He also lived across the street, so he
worked from 6am-2am every day, walked across the street to sleep for a few
hours and then came back to work (*not* an exaggeration). And he expected
his team to do the same. I was on a 180 day contract to permanent, and when
they offered the permanent position I turned it down because I couldn't keep
up the hours. The guy got stuff done, but I have kids that would like to see
my face occasionally, and I just couldn't keep those hours. I made a
ridiculous amount of money at $45/hour working 100-120 hour weeks (the term
"weekend" meant nothing to this guy), but it just wasn't worth it. I took a
job at $35/hour with half the hours just to get away from it. Now, I'm not
opposed to working long hours to meet a deadline, even a deadline that was
arbitrarily set by upper management who had no idea what was involved in
meeting the deadline, but it was every single day for this guy. But when you
get a group of these kind of workers together, you can get a whole lot done
in a very short time for a ridiculously low amount of money. Even less money
when they're outside of the US and have different income standards.

ryanm

[ryanm]

"Scott Dorsey" <kludge@panix.com> wrote in message
news:bioigk$jdq$1@panix2.panix.com...
>
> If this is such a big deal, why are people constantly reinventing the
> wheel? Microsoft only recently figured out how to do real demand paged
> memory (1965 technology), and a huge number of programmers out there
> don't seem to have a concept of input verification (something Project MAC
> was very aggressive about indicating was critical).
>
This ties in with what you're talking about below, with unavoidable
constraints during development that dissapear later, and then everyone asks
"Why did they do it that way?"

> Today, the constraints that made the weird coding schemes used in the
Saabre
> user interface no longer exist, but a lot of the other stuff does. And
the
> folks implementing new stuff on top of the old system don't seem to have
> any concept of the original constraints on the system and why many of the
> original decisions were made.
>
I got there after it had already been made into a mess, so maybe I was
seeing symptoms of the very problem you're describing. Incidentally, I ended
up working almost entirely on web interfaces for the res system (the first
com objects to allow sites like Travelocity to work, etc), which seemed like
a piddling waste of time to me, extending an already hopelessly outdated
system that was a huge, hacked up mess. Don't get me wrong, Sabre was an
impressive Brontosaur in it's time, but now it looks more like the bones of
a Brontosaur with a bunch of cattle duct taped to it to make it look
"alive". Or it did as of about 1998, when I left, anyway. There are actually
far better res systems available, but Sabre still owns the market, so they
win. For the time being.

> There is no time to tech technology in college. In college, you need to
> teach the basic theory, so that it's possible to learn the technology
quickly
> and thoroughly in the real world when you get out. If you just teach the
> technology without teaching what is behind it, you get students who are
> worthless three years after graduation.
>
Unfortunatly, that seems to be what we're geting these days. The kids
want to know what they need to know to start a job when they come out of
school, which requires teaching the current tech, otherwise they might have
to actually *contiune learning after school!* (god forbid)

> A lot of those guys JUST know the technology and don't know any of the
> basic underpinnings behind them. There are a whole lot of those guys
> in the audio world too. They can get stuff done, but they aren't very
> versatile and that's a big deal in a world where the technology changes
> so quickly.
>
That's true as well, but there are a great many of those guys who can
and do learn the new tech as it comes out, and are able to keep up. Without
the schooling that was previously thought necessary.

ryanm

[TAPKAE]

"Andrea" read this in the National Enquirer :

> or I can make it not very cost effective to use oversees outsourced
> marketing.
>
> Thank god that the United States is such a cultural melting pot, with
> hundreds of local accents, dialects, and versions of English...
>
> I could run up the telemarketing firms phone bill by keeping the
> foreign "queens english" marketer on the line and confused, by mixing
> up as many american language styles all at once,speed up or slow down
> parts of words, change thier accents(like the art dealer in Beverly
> Hills Cop 2 Movie) I could mix eubonics with Texan, with New
> England,hill-billy, autioneer speed talk, Engrish, piglatin,baby-talk
> and plain old made up words. I could use a script or improvise, Hey
> the people calling me have a script in front of them, it's fair play.


I usually get exceedingly rude and sort of make their experience
uncomfortable then tell them to find a job they can really love.


--

TAPKAE
http://tapkae.com

"We're the cleanup crew for parties we were too young to attend"
(Kevin Gilbert)

[Mike Rivers]

In article <bioigk$jdq$1@panix2.panix.com> kludge@panix.com writes:

> Today, the constraints that made the weird coding schemes used in the Saabre
> user interface no longer exist, but a lot of the other stuff does. And the
> folks implementing new stuff on top of the old system don't seem to have
> any concept of the original constraints on the system and why many of the
> original decisions were made.

"Because we did it that way last time" makes a strong case in some
instances, right or wrong. I'm in the process of revising a
specification for the FAA, and I'm getting what I think are good ideas
vetoed because we asked for something different last time and that's
the way the manufacturers know how to design it. Many of the
requirements go back to the days of tubes and mechanical modulators
and simply don't apply to modern digital waveform synthesis, still we
specify audio frequency tolerances that are far too wide and with high
levels of distortion (because that's as good as they could do with the
hardware available at the time the specs were originally written). If
you tighten up the tolerances, the mucky-mucks are afraid that the
manufacturers will question why.

The latest was that we required a temperature sensor in the shelter
building with an accuracy of +/-4 degrees because that's what could be
done the first time we asked for it. I suggested that more useful
(since equipment no longer generates enough heat to warm up the
building) would be to put a temperature sensor inside the cabinet,
with a alarm threshold and tolerance set by the manufacturer to warn
us of when things were getting too hot. Sure enough, this suggested
because there's nothing to which the requirement for measuring the
internal cabinet can be traced.

> There is no time to tech technology in college. In college, you need to
> teach the basic theory, so that it's possible to learn the technology quickly
> and thoroughly in the real world when you get out. If you just teach the
> technology without teaching what is behind it, you get students who are
> worthless three years after graduation.

Isn't this the problem with those "Learn to be a recording engineer in
six weeks" (or months) programs? And why so many people are attracted
to those programs? You learn to be a ProTools or SSL console operator
without ever learning how to set a level, interface two devices, or
know how to find a musically sensible edit point.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers - (mrivers@d-and-d.com)

[Kurt Albershardt]

William Sommerwerck wrote:
> I visited Mackie a few years ago. It was all One Big Happy Family. Really. Or so
> it seemed.
>
> Mackie was highly automated. It's hard to believe the cost of labor was so high
> a percentage of the final cost that it justified the change.

Don't forget benefits (part of the total labor cost) and environmental
regs (or lack thereof.)

[Kurt Albershardt]

Arny Krueger wrote:
> "Roger W. Norman" <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote in message
> news:bikupf$a4c$1@bob.news.rcn.net
>
>
>> With all that shipping one wonders if it's the numbers that play with
>> people's heads.
>
>
> I think you just stumbled over one of the ways how we've arrived where we
> are today: cheap, fast shipping.

See the 1940's which brought the advent of refrigeration (for home and
truck) and the rise of the trucking industry. Voila! Massive growth in
interstate commerce, tough times for local farmers and breweries.

[Kurt Albershardt]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Roger W. Norman <rnorman@starpower.net> wrote:
>
>> You ever worked with wood, nuke? I believe, after some 4 years during high
>> school and summers, that my experience at a custom cabinet shop qualifies me
>> to say that people working with wood, in old factories with the right jigs
>> and the right hand tools, could do a 100% better job than any automation.
>> You want automation, go buy Ikea. You want cheap labor, go buy Pier One.
>> You want Thomasville, buy from NC antiquated furniture factories (although
>> they are usually called shops).
>
>
> Right, but that's the issue. People don't want to BUY Thomasville. People
> want to buy Ikea.

Some of us want REAL furniture. Today, that means either one-off
craftsman stuff or (on the inexpensive end) Shaker factories doing
excellent repro work. When you look at the cost of this stuff, antiques
start to look like an incredible value...

[Kurt Albershardt]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

> Good economics are almost always bad ethics.
>
> Morons like Miss Fathead (I can't think of her name and don't want to) scream
> about liberal treachery and lack of patriotism.
>
> What could be more unpatriotic than US businesses sending US jobs overseas?
>
> We're only a few decades away from one-world government -- by business.

See Greg Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."

[Kurt Albershardt]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
>
>> Guys going into college with no idea what a
>> ternary conditional might be have to learn 20 years worth of tech in 2
>> credits worth of classes, which just ain't enough.
>
>
> There is no time to tech technology in college. In college, you need to
> teach the basic theory, so that it's possible to learn the technology quickly
> and thoroughly in the real world when you get out. If you just teach the
> technology without teaching what is behind it, you get students who are
> worthless three years after graduation.
>
> Teaching every detail of a particular filesystem is a bad idea.... learning
> every piece of how the ntfs or the Berkeley ffs works is nice, but it's not
> as useful as learning how filesystems work and what constraints go into the
> design of a filesystem.
>
>
>> Do you really think a couple college level computer science classes and
>>a C++ class cover the subject matter thoroughlly? I don't think that piece
>>of paper qualifies you as "knowing what you're doing" (we agree on that),
>>but I do think that industry experience in a code-monkey type position
>>qualifies you better than just having gone to school.
>
>
> No, but it can cover the background so that it's possible to learn the subject
> material later on. I hope they don't teach any C++ classes in school. They
> can teach a programming class that uses C++, a data structure class that
> uses C++, a file processing class that uses C++ and so forth. Understanding
> algorithms and data structures is essential.
>
> If you understand the basic underpinnings, you can learn the programming
> languages in an afternoon or two.
>
> I used to brag about being able to write any assembler language without
> any preparation, just with the code card in front of me. If you learn to
> program and you learn something about computer architecture, you can write
> in any assembler, whether it's a RISC box or a stack machine. Maybe not
> optimally, but enough.


Very well put, and something many "programmers" I've hired have failed
to understand.





>> A lot of my generation skipped that step. It got to the point that
>>getting a degree would literally never pay for itself, not in a single
>>lifetime, so people stopped getting them and started learning the stuff
>>themselves and then starting out at the bottom of the totem pole and
>>learning that way.
>
>
> A lot of those guys JUST know the technology and don't know any of the
> basic underpinnings behind them. There are a whole lot of those guys
> in the audio world too. They can get stuff done, but they aren't very
> versatile and that's a big deal in a world where the technology changes
> so quickly.

Read this twice, aspiring recording school students.




>> And that is always true, however, I've worked with a lot of
>>middle-eastern and Indian programmers who really know their stuff and are
>>entirely too enthusiastic about work.
>
>
> As far as India goes, a lot of this has to do with the college system
> there.

See IIT (and be afraid, very afraid.)

[Glenn Dowdy]

"Kurt Albershardt" <kurt@nv.net> wrote in message
news:1062557067.657152@nnrp2.phx1.gblx.net...

> > As far as India goes, a lot of this has to do with the college system
> > there.
>
> See IIT (and be afraid, very afraid.)
>
My manager is an ITT Bombay grad. He's extremely sharp.

Glenn D.