Time spent on component search vs. real work?

LOL!

My dear friend, The customers need their problems solved. Nobody cares about the brilliant ideas. It is your problem of how are you going to approach the customer problem :) The only thing which counts is if the problem is solved on time and for good.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Vladimir Vassilevsky
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It's not clear to me who the 'you' is or what the habits are.

But for the avoidance of doubt the story was told to me by two separate people one of whom was an ex-employee who was a party to performing the deed.

One scam which I was involved in was in following a directive which came down from the MD. This was to interview some people from a competitor and try and find out what they are developing as he was thinking of making a bid for them.

tim

Reply to
tim.....

I would not call that a scam.... it's called business..... fair game to try and get intel on your competitors!

Reply to
ElderUberGeek

I don't think the interviewee who took a day off work to visit us, would see it that way :-)

tim

Reply to
tim.....

Ok, maybe you don't live in the US for too long yet. Or maybe you do but engage mostly in pure problem solving. Which BTW is also >50% of my work. Out here one of the most powerful tools of a consultant is the proposal. Bottomline it works like this: You write a proposal suggesting a totally or at least mostly different approach. For example, how to build their XYZ device for half the cost. Or build a new one that will blow the competition out of the water.

Sometimes nobody ever calls back, other times they are almost bombarding you. The best one from me was in 1996. I got an immediate call back from their CEO. He said "I'd like you to build this but you'll have to move here and run the company because we want to build a subsidiary around that new product". Writing that proposal had cost me about 50 unpaid hours but these turned out to be the most profitable hours I ever invested.

I guess what I am saying is that people do care about brilliant ideas. At least the successful ones do. Else we wouldn't even be able to write our posts here because there wouldn't be any Internet. And no telephones. And no electric light. Also no television but that might not be such a bad thing ;-)

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
Reply to
Joerg

One thing I learned from the experience: the more they want to proceed to the real business, the less BS and paperwork will be involved. The opposite is also true. If it feels like they really don't want to go, don't waste your time on proposals. The other common case is when the client don't have any idea of what he is getting into, but this is a different story...

What I am saying 99.999% of so-called ideas are pretty trivial and obvious to anyone skillful enough. Also even the best idea is nothing as itself, it is the implementation which takes all of the effort and makes the idea any useful.

:))) No.

All of above mentioned things are the pure utilities. I.e. there were particular small problems to solve, and the problems were solved somehow. Internet was never intended to be global network, Windows was designed as the universal printing utility, telephone is the improvement to the telegraph and so on.

Also no television but that might not

I do not watch TV since ~20 years ago :)

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

Well, with larger corporations nothing at all will happen without tons of paperwork. Especially not in heavily regulated markets such as medical electronics where I usually work. There has to be a seemless and detailed enough paper trail from conception of an idea to product. Otherwise the FDA waltzes in and shuts the place down. Which it has done numerous times.

Then it seems one can do pretty well on the other 0.001% :-)

Seriously, many of the ideas I have presented over the last 20 or so years were received with the comment "That's impossible". A lot of that impossible equipment can now be found in hospitals. Can't remember one that was trivial. Of course, all that carries the risk that something will indeed turn out to be impossible. But you don't know unless you try.

Small problems? That's rather easy to say today but Edison had to overcome a whole lot more than figuring out how to make long lasting filaments. He had to figure out a way to produce bulbs in an economical fashion. Not easy at all. Oh, and then he faced the minor issue that there was no power generation to speak of and not distribution wiring. IOW he was what many engineers aren't but should be: Engineers plus business thinkers. Not either or.

Good! You haven't missed much. We only watch the evening news and even that only until the weather forecast is over.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
Reply to
Joerg

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