Seriously, Tektronix?

And who writes these?

There is the problem. I did have a say in writing procedures and also wrote procedures myself. A lot.

Try to answer this: Who is allowed to write these procedures?

As a consultant I did. Not as an employee. I abhor bureaucratic hurdles such as the ones you obviously have to deal with. There are large corporations that are smart about this and others that aren't.

ISO doesn't help corporations much. What does help them are overzealous environmental roadblocks such as WEEE in Europe. That is geared to snuff out the little guy, it's a perfect example of bad legislation.

I found the world that caters to people like me, who like efficiency and abhor red tape. I work in that world and make a living in it.

You just don't see that all this matters because you probably never worked in a position with P&L responsibility. I have.

Someone who was here when they were written, one presumes.

I did (at least at the beginning of ISO) at IBM, too. Not here, which is the point of this section of the thread.

I have no idea, nor do I have *ANY* desire to be the one the finger gets pointed at. I have enough work to do without volunteering for any bottomless pit that stinks that bad.

So the answer is that I'm right. I abhor bureaucratic windmills too. You're wrong. All large companies are the same. It comes with being large. It's also one of the reasons the federal government is so bad at everything it does.

Certainly it helps them. That was its whole point. Its original purpose was to be more bother than it was worth so those outside the EU wouldn't do it (i.e. a barrier to the market) but it backfired. They underestimated how much money large companies are willing to flush for such things. Small companies can't afford it.

Again, you're wrong. You're insignificant. You don't think IBM, or Ford, or GE make money?

Frankly, I don't care. That's a completely different issue. When we come to a thread on bean counting, by all means tell us how to count beans.

So you are just putting up with red tape instead of doing something about it? That ain't my style, never was. Yeah, I've got my scars from those efforts but it was worth it.

Then why are you working where you are now?

Absolutely not.

That has other reasons. One being unions.

I have no ISO cert for my biz and it works quite well. I do have procedures in place though, which I created myself.

Quote "These small enterprises account for 52 percent of all U.S. workers, ..."

Insignificant?

They are largely past prime. IBM was great until the 90's. Then they started hemorrhaging really good engineers. I was among the pilferers ...

It is absolutely the same issue. The thread was about the purchase of used equipment where you said it can't be done in a large corp. That has a profound and detrimental effect on the bottomline of big corp. There are reasons (but more than one) why, for example, our li'l company brought a very large corporation down to its knees in our market. In the end big corp threw in the towel. Back then I felt proud but after meeting a few who lost their jobs in the wake, not so much.

You bet! Fighting red tape gets to be career limiting. The pile is way too deep for anyone's scissors to cut, much less the "new" guy. Any Quixotic passions I ever had are long gone. I have real work to do.

Nope. Not even close. I long ago learned to pick my battles.

Because I like what I do? Because they pay me? Because I like where I live? I could go on. Life is never perfect and if they want to blow

You're wrong as you've ever been. They are, by their very nature, bureaucratic money wasters.

"one of"

Your biz works for you because you're insignificant. Roaches live quite well on scraps, too. Perhaps the leech is a better metaphor. ;-)

Please understand what's being talked about before making such irrelevant arguments. Yes, each one is insignificant.

They changed businesses in the '90s. They're no longer an engineering company so they don't need them all. Are you saying that the $100B/yr is a loser? Did you bring in $100B last year?

Not at all.

You really think a few thousand dollars is "profound"? Good grief! Control and processes are *required* in large enterprises. That's part of the problem of growing and why so many companies fail in the transitions.

I used to buy second-hand stuff at IBM all the time. They weren't too keen on eBay, but paying $5k for an 11801C from a refurbisher was fine. Still a lot cheaper than new. I also got a bunch of demo units, including a TDS 7704 7-GHz 20 Gs/s scope. (It ran XP.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not really true, they would only have to share changes to the linux kernel (and any other GPL software they make use of). Their "application" can remain secret. It is perfectly possible and indeed common to have proprietary linux software. See e.g. valves gaming offerings and the ~1 million Android "apps".

That's exactly what I meant. Some companies are smart about this and others are not. There is a huge difference between corporations, even large ones.

That has never fazed me, ever. I just don't put up with red tape. If they want to fire me for striving towards higher efficiency, fine, so be it.

"Real work to do" is exactly why I fought red tape. Because afterwards I and scores of other engineers could do our work more efficiently. Someone has to stick out his neck and risk the flak, and that was often yours truly.

I think we are very different personalities in that respect.

I picked my first professional red tape fight 6 months into my first job as a freshly minted engineer. And won. From then on we were no longer bound by "established distributor channels" and could buy components overseas if we so desired. This sped up projects and most of all production ramp-up, big time.

That wasn't my first red tape fight in life, plenty happened before that.

Well, I have a different philosophy on that. Maybe that's why I am so happy being self-employed. I am not opposed to being an employee but the only way I'd agree to that status is "no red tape". That part of employment is not negotiable with me. Never was.

Let me give you a very easy case: Do you honestly think there is no significant difference between UPS and Fedex?

And now you know a core reason for the answer to the question above. Or maybe still not ...

Oh, yeah, that's why my clients send me checks. Right.

You don't seem to understand what it is that made America a technological leader in many areas. Most of the time it's the little guy's ideas. The days of big labs like Bell are over, gone, finito. They ain't coming back. Well, at least not unless the whole country would turn socialist and in that case we'd lose technical leadership positions galore.

$100B with 400,000 employees is $250k/employee/year. The companies I usually deal with can do better than that. Now I don't want to diss this result, it's a respectable number. But technological leadership, to a large extent, went out the window around 1992 IMHO. I think it was finished when they screwed up OS/2 as a product. That was hands-down the best OS back then. IBM engineers were among the best and probably still are, the problems were much higher up.

I don't have to. Again, I do not believe that large corporate structures are the best way to do business. Because it usually isn't. I enable other companies to bring in the big dough, and get rewarded for that.

Times the number it happens per year, it is very profound. Because when R&D expenses are consistently way above 10% of revenue without commensurate results shareholders can become impatient, quickly.

Strangely, the ones I was/am involved in as an employees or consultant don't. And that's dozens. They understand that it's largely them who can write procedures for control and processes, and they do so. They do have to stick by the rules of agencies and they often use me to guide them through that.

You never worked for a large company, either. You'd never get anything done (hardly efficient).

If my work isn't done, I don't have a job. I'm not paid for what other people do. Or don't.

No, I think you're talking about something with which you have no experience.

Again, you obviously have never worked for a large company. There is reason for an "approved vendor list" and good reason people aren't allowed to deal with any Tom, Dick, or Harry.

Yes, we are obviously different. I'm not telling you how you work.

Difference, sure. Do they waste bucketloads of money? You bet! I'll bet their pilots can't even buy fuel at the 7-11 of their choice, either.

No, it's not the core reason. If that were true, non-union government entities would be efficient. Clearly, that's not the case.

$100B? Yes, sorry to burst you bubble, but you are.

Again, you show that you can't read.

It's nice that you prove my case for me.

OK, so you admit that I'm right. You are insignificant.

Utter nonsense. $1000 for every scope they've ever bought wouldn't pay the groundskeeping for a year.

They don't have processes and procedures? That's *really* strange!

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Read the above again. I've underlined it for your convenience.

Well, after seeing results from a client with the Hantek scope I have to agree. I suggested that they return it for refund. The 20MHz/48MSPS USB scope is clearly sub-par in performance.

At the shop we have a Hantek hand held, the one with the AB generator in it. It works very well actually.

I've seen a few PC USB scopes not do so good. Part of which I think is the fault on the PC side, software included. As for a 20Mhz scope, well, that is kind of hitting the bottom isn't it?

Jamie

IBM is a loser. They stopped being an engineering company because they'd been doing the wrong kind of engineering, trying to lock their customers into a sub-optimal style of computation and computer management.

They used to be one of the companies like HP was and Apple is now, who could charge half-as-much again for their hardware as their competitors could, because they had a reputation for selling hardware that worked well.

They threw that away trying to lock their customers into good but old-fashioned hardware.

What they've managed to salvage is still worth $100B per year, but the company is a shadow of its former self.

It isn't the few thousand dollars that's profound, but the freedom (or lack of it) to go out and buy cheap equipment now, from wherever it's available, as opposed to having to get your equipment through a buying department, from qualified suppliers.

Cambridge Instruments did very well out of selling IBM "specials" - bits of gear built to an unrealistic specification which had to be constructed as one-off's at about $1M a throw.

Sure. But "control and processes" can become ends in themselves, and strangle the company, or a least make it so slow-moving that everybody else can eat its lunch.

As I said, it all began to slowly unravel when they screwed up the marketing of OS/2.

Exactly. I have seen projects that did not come off the ground at all because XYZ Corporation had a policy not to buy at auction but the budget would not allow to buy new. It's a foolish policy. This is one reason why I declined an offer working towards a Ph.D. and hightailed it away from my university the millisecond I had my degree in hand.

But isn't Cambridge Instruments also a shadow of it's former self now?

You need controls and processes. But mostly it is no some obscure external power that writes those. Some people fail to understand this but it's usually people in your own company that write them. ISO then requires that you stick to those procedures. I work a lot to procedures here at my office (I usually work alone) and most are set by me.

Of course, it goes without saying that procedures must be written in a responsible way and by people who know what they are doing. They also must stick with the law. For example, to my amazement, even some engineers do not understand that in many fields you must create a design history file set. In med tech the FDA will become very unfriendly if some company doesn't adhere to that. That can go all the way to padlocks on the door (seen that at a competitor).

Sure, but to check serial comms of uC port pins and minor analog stuff it has good enough specs. On paper. In reality we had serious overshoot and offset. My 40 year old 10MHz Hameg oscilloscope that I donated to a school performed flawlessly in all those respects. Why is it that so many young engineers fail to learn from their forefathers?

Spoken like the real loser you are, Slowman. They've only doubled in value over the last five years.

They were an engineering company.

Clueless, as usual.

Matters not, as long as the keep paying me for nothing.

Cambridge Instruments went bust in 1968 and got taken over by the Kent Inst ruments group. The rump company I joined in 1982 had been a loss-making fra gment that Kent Instruments floated off in 1975 (when I was working for the m) when they - in turn - got taken over by Brown-Boveri.

That rump - now even smaller - has a new name Carl Zeiss Microscopy Ltd, 50

If the brand name Cambridge Instruments had been worth anything, they'd sti ll have it.

I know at least one brilliant engineer (at EMI Central Research) who didn't have a clue about that. He used to work late, and the more junior engineer s working with him had to spend their mornings documenting (or - frequently - undoing)the undocumented changes he'd made to the gear they were working on.

I'd been originally been slated to be the lead engineer (under him) on that project, but I had been so rude about the technical idiocy of the whole pr oject that he'd got me thrown off (to my enormous relief). I note that I po sted about this in here in 2012.

...

Having ceased to be what they used to be in 1990's. That they are now succe ssful at being something else is fine, but scarcely relevant.

wrong kind of engineering,

The usual krw claim, that might have been credible if backed up by rational argument, which isn't something that krw seems to be able to manage - ther e certainly no evidence that he can produce rational argument, and a lot of evidence that he can't process it when he sees it.

Krw dismisses what he can't understand - including most of what gets posted here. He's dim enough that even the other right-wing nitwits recognise tha t he's unusually dumb.

You most likely are the one that made all the bad undocumented changes that had to be corrected!

I can picture you now walking into a professional establishment waving your paper work around and saying "I know more than any one here, the only difference is, you guys have been here longer" That just sums it up, don't it?

Jamie