Embedded Electronics Design Engineers wanted...

Interestingly, it appears from the OP's IP address that s/he is in New York...

Name(s) and details, please.

At Indian pay rates presumably.

Great to see the harware jobs going overseas too. :-(

Graham

Shipping R&D overseas as well as manufacturing was a major factor in the demise of a (once) dynamic medium size company I used to work for.

yes

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yes

How about Malaysia?

Checkout Ltd, a privately owned company making a gross profit of some 10%-20% on a turnover of around $30m. Later revamped by 'real''professional' managers to XN Corporation who pissed it all away by getting rid of all the people who had made Checkout a success. I was part of the R&D team around the time the outsourcing began. In my 30yrs experience in the industry it was the most productive R&D dept I have ever worked in, with world class people. R&D plus manufacturing was outsourced to Singapore, at what eventually became enormous cost as problems cropped up.

The old R&D dept could take an idea and have it in production within 6 weeks, with prototypes in the customers hands. For example, four of us designed an entire POS terminal in around 3 months and had it in production.

Of course, this was not the sole reason for the destruction of the company, but it was a very major error. Another, probably bigger mistake, was ignoring existing 'small' and domestic customers in the hope that big international sales would compensate. Wrong. There were so many mistakes with product that these never really materiualised. Good ideas could not be implemented fast enough because of the separation of manufacturing, R&D and management in Britain. In the 'good old days' everyone worked in the same building. If a problem cropped up it was being fixed within hours. That doesn't work when the three functions are separated by thousands of miles and many time zones.

Checkout is now gone.

for the 'official' story.

Here is the hype and bullshit that sank the ship. I was there.

Brian Shepherd, CEO of Xn Corporation, was appointed by the major shareholder and former CEO Ed Dyan (who made Checkout such a success.) Shepherd stayed long enough to preside over the new Titanic before leaving for reasons which might seem obvious.

I hear it was very Dilbert towards the end of that era. Ed Dyan tried to recover after 'the management' had gone, but obviously did not make it. Still, no need to shed any tears for Ed. I hear that in one of the good years he paid himself $3m. Just shows you how well screwed Checkout became under 'the professionals'.

As Dilbert would say: "The CEO predicts massive improvements in profitability next FY. Unfortunately for personal reasons he has to leave the company so will be cashing in his options before the windfall."

Ken

It's quite an interesting post, as there are two major players in the field who have New York engineering offices. I work for one of them, in fact.

As an afterword... A major reason why the R&D at Checkout was so productive was that it answered only to Ed, and was run as a 'Skunkworks' (although he did not know the term).

I've worked in the same sort of environment too. Isn't it a buzz?! Funny how that's just the sort of productive environment that gets the most out of people, and the one that 'managers' hate....

Cheers.

Ken

Yes. No project plans, timescales, budgets, bureaucracy... just "I want something that will do this ASAP".

I would guess that once the R&D was outsourced to Singpore Checkout (by then XN Corp.) spent more money on airtravel and hotels for managers sorting out problems than it cost to run our old R&D dept.