Having been laid off a few days ago, after more than three decades as a "Broadcast Television Engineer" (IE: Tech-janitor), I've found that there aren't a lot of jobs out there any more, for a guy who knows which end of a soldering iron to grab.
Am I wrong about this? Is there still some niche job market somewhere, so I can stop applying at big-box home-electronics stores?
Sorry if this is a tad heavy on the drama. I'm having a little bit of trouble getting used to not being on 24-hour call, and I'm running out of things to fix around the house...
If you consider it being a janitor, I'm surprised they needed you. When I worked that field, there was always some piece of equipment needed attention, from minor adjustments, to a major rebuild. even my last job as a TV broadcast engineer kept me busy, because we didn't play the 'Pack & Ship' game. We did have to ship out one STL that suffered a direct lightning strike, but 90% of the electronics was destroyed.
Some defense contractors always need good production line techs or EETs to build prototypes for their engineers. That was my last job before becoming 100% disabled. I took the prototypes of new models that were hand built in Engineering, and cleaned up the rough edges before it was turned over to production
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You can\'t have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
In the event you've never talked to a big-box store employee about any of the store's products, I'm fairly sure that these stores don't want anyone that knows anything about the products, other than what they've been taught in their indoctrination.
Try asking almost any store employee.. is this (product) any good? The answer will most likely be.. we sell a lot of it.
Engineer seems to have many meanings today. A small station might have someone on call that has an appropriate FCC license. There are lots of 2-way radios that aren't for hobby use.. commercial shipping (fighting pirates) or personal yachts going to exotic places.
A degree in electrical engineering is a different matter. A friend finished his degree at a very good university a number of years ago, and owns a very profitable drywall finishing business. If you pursue the repair business, I'm fairly sure you don't want to be fixing people's household stuff. Most of it is all junk and very cheap to replace, and can be a nightmare to repair. You can't possibly imagine how many idiots will be expecting free work.
Selling high-end or high quality (not Walmart junk), repaired equipment on eBay would be much better/more rewarding than many jobs "out there" these days. If you're not willing to relocate or travel for service-rep type jobs, find surplus stuff in your local area to sell on eBay. New surplus stuff (auctions, liquidations etc) sells very well.. used surplus/liquidation stuff sells moderately well. The U.S. is the land of surplus, and some surprising opportunities are found regularly.
Finding a position in installation, servicing or repair of industrial, broadcast, aviation or medical equipment should be much more profitable and worthwhile/stable than retail stores. Lots of automated equipment in manufacturing isn't related to filthy, dangerous conditions, as so much of it was in decades past.
CNC machines, motion control and processing equipment often require good technical support. Some of the service tech support positions may require lots of flying from place-to-place.
In the UK more and more TV production companies are hiring to avoid having support engineering staff. The hire companies must have, though. Worth trying them?
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*Why is the word abbreviation so long?
Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.
In England this is certainly the case and has been for several years. It has got to the stage where most people don't know what a soldering iron is - or why you would ever want to use one.
Even if you had a good idea which would fill a niche in the market and thought of starting your own small business, you would soon realise that, in the electronics field, you could never cope with all the stupid bureaucratic regulation and European directives.
Sorry not to be more hopeful, perhaps others will come up with some more positive suggestions.
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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
There still is a need for that for people who are in the pre-seed stage of a start up. In plain English, it's when people have an idea and a trying to get funding for it by building a proof of concept unit or prototype. At this point in the growth of their business they are financing the operation from their savings, or credit cards.
They usually have a "day job" or were just layed off or retired. Not much money in it, but often you can get a small piece of the action (equity) for your work.
The downside is that there is a 75% chance the company won't last a year, and a 95% chance that it won't make any money. In either case, if you plan properly, you can get more money of of the ones that last beyond a year to more than offset any chance you have taken, and if you do enough of them retire a rich man.
Just because you are not in Silicon Valley, does not mean you can't find a startup, most of them no longer start there. Many start in small towns and if they are funded by VCs or get bought out move there. (Un)fortunately with the tax structure and regulations on venture capital recently enacted, plus the sorry state of California's economy, is keeping many of them from starting there.
One way to make contacts is to get a ham license if you don't already have one. Then you can talk to people with similar experience and interests locally.
Another way would be to put an ad in a local list, stating that you are an experieced electronics techician who would be willing to help a pre-seed startup. Use a blind (e.g. gmail/hotmail/yahoo) email address and post it in more approriate places than "looking for work".
Depending upon the device, and the need of the startup, there is often need for someone who does not actually "do" anything, but offers advice, and information.
Geoff.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
Electronics has been dumbified to the point that all they need is board swappers. Red light comes on---swap the board. A monkey can do it now. Maybe the board repair shop? Probably in China.
First off, if janitor became any part of your job description, no wonder you're screwed. Who would pay a janitor, tech wages?
I understand though. I was the last tech among shipping clerks as in OH-OH! doesn't work! Ship it to the factory! I had kept my niche by keeping turnaround time down for stuff that was supposed to go to the factory. Alas, the factory made them an offer they couldn't refuse so that personnel would have no knowledge of the equipment and thus compartmentalize the technical knowledge. So the answer was a contract with the factory for all unit service and replace all personnel with shipping clerk/para-techs. Problem with that, people in the field were no longer able to do anything but bread and butter installs so lost the customers with special needs. Like pulling the plug on the bathtub looking for the bottom line. It's inevitable though. Land-Mobile radio is a thing of the past because of cheap Chinese manufacturing. Nobody wants to spend more than the cost of FRS radios or the free phone with activation. You have to pity the poor people in China who seem to be going through an industrial revolution not unlike our own more than a century ago. Seriously co-dependent we are.
Ham radio doesn't bring the technology contacts like it used to. You can't compete with hobbyists who want to do stuff for free, or public service volunteers who demand technical support for free.
I do other things now.
My advise is to invent a new need that people will pay to have fulfilled.
Consumer electronics repair isn't what it was in the past couple decades.
Pro audio repair (amps, lighting, etc..) is still hanging in there because a lot of musicians (in this area) like to use vintage gear and will keep it going at all costs. It's not a huge market but a decent income supplement.
I guess working for a firm willing to train you that does several manufacturer warranties is the best way to go.
Check with local two-way radio shops - they may have need for part-time techs (but some work requires an FCC license). I did that some years ago when my wife wasn't working and we had two kids in school.
Sign shops may have a need - the various custom lighted signs must be built and repaired by someone ;-)
I did some PDA programming for a local (Atlanta, GA) startup four years ago. It was strictly by-the-hour payment (their choice), but I would have considered taking part of it in equity - especially as I just received an invitation to their 5 year celebration.
This company also needed assemblers who were comfortable with surface mount devices - I'd rather work with invisible software bits than barely visible hardware bits ;-)
I used the term "Tech-Janitor" because a small-market TV station is less specialized than some of the major ones. One wears many hats, and yes - when the company lays off its janitor, the Engineers are expected to pick up the slack.
My boss,the Chief Engineer, occasionally ran the carpet scrubber.
Me? I'm a tech-school man. No degree. FCC license with ship's RADAR endorsement, SBE certified CBT, Amateur "Extra" license. Most of what you good folks have told me confirms what I'd already suspected, but the ideas regarding start-up companies, and commercial music / entertainment equipment sound interesting. It's good to hear that industrial equipment is no longer the horror it was.
I'm hoping to avoid going back to my roots in 2-way radio repair and installation. Installing radios into garbage trucks loses its charm quickly. There's always cable-tv and satellite installation work, but that's a game for young men with strong backs.
I don't know, but maybe I'll try for an A+ computer certification, and see if I can make a living exorcising malware from people's computers.
I did a lot of that at the TV station, after all.
Thanks again! It's always good to get someone else's view.
After I retired (more later, maybe), I ran a very small computer sales and repair store. I didn't gain confidence in A+ training (I didn't go for it) when I encountered a Q and A about the 1 meg. resistor in a wrist ground strap and cord. Q was what it was for, and the answer was to make it work better. No mention of avoiding electrocution. I was wondering about the quality of the rest of A+ training.
As to soldering: I suspect that more than a few computer motherboards are replaced only because the soldered-in Li coin cell has gone dead. Of course, such a mo. bo. is outdated, but could still be useful in a home machine that isn't used for fancy stuff.
As to which end, these days, I wouldn't be shocked if a member of the general public who encountered a screwdriver might think it was an odd kind of hammer -- the handle being a massive "soft-face" working end.
Apologies for yet another reply; I like to reply as soon as I read an item that merits comment.
I'm now 73, and built an AM radio at age 6. That was before 7 and 9-pin miniature tubes came into use. Was inspired for life by the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series, especially Vol. 19. Will skip a real biography, other than to say I was a Navy FT, '54 to '58. The Rad. Lab. series (high school days) was fine advance training in fire control radar!
Never got an EE degree, altho. was an associate editor at Electronic Design, '77 to '79.
Made a living with ability to "test and troubleshoot to component level". As time went on, that was no longer enough, or even of passing interest. Not the least reason was vastly-increased reliability for a given degree of complexity.
After being laid off from Copley Controls, my last "real" employer, I job- shopped until 1998, when the only possible work was beyond public transportation, and I was not smart enough to get a good used car. I was
62, and went for Social Security at 2/3 of what I would have had if I'd been able to hold on to 65.
It's encouraging to know that even now, the situation isn't hopeless, just that one has to be very smart about finding work.
Indeed most get junked nowadays just because a fan gets noisy or some software conflict or because of trojans downloading all the very latest spyware toolbars and flashing bells and whistles. The deals on new keep dropping and useful junk is all around. This very desktop machine is a P4 with 855D chipset and 1g ram running 98se and has been upgraded with all kinds of third party solutions that everyone says can't be done under 98. I can't stand to wait for a quad core with 980 something chipset 4g ram to do in Vista when this machine can do it faster. Yes, I run Vista and XP in other machines too.
I heat up the iron for my own stuff, but customers so badly want the latest gizmo, they are actually disappointed if you fix something unless you make it much better than when it was new for a fraction of the cost of NEW. Even then it has to LOOK new.
I do more with free junk that people threw away because they didn't know how to configure it because they would rather buy a new one than admit they were stumped.
It is irksome though, that paper pushers and retarded garbage collectors can make so much money that they can afford to throw away stuff that I find useful. I should've gone to Med school, because only when people HURT do they want it fixed.
I guess $3,000+ Project 25 radios are not selling and that the local public safety organizations should be communicating with FRS/GMRS/MURS radios. Methinks not.
I've been working for myself since about 1983, so I can't offer any useful advice on finding a technician job. However, I can offer a general clue. Go to where the money is. In radio/RF, it seems to be in fighting terrorism, VoIP radio, and mobile data, this week.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Sounds like you do all your gam>most MBs that have soldered-in batteries
Ah. The M$-centric view. It's NOT the *hardware* that's the problem. The problem is the "modern" software
--specifically the useless eye candy.
Ask the folks who had apps working just fine under an old flavor of Windoze and when they tried to run those under M$'s "modern" Vista, they found those apps broken. There is a zero-cost solution, however: Invariably, those folks with the "broken" apps found that they ran just fine under WINE (in turn, under Linux).
formatting link
NE
...and outside of gaming, most folks don't use the horsepower they have. Now, if it's WORK you want to do, you can still get a lot of service out of old boxes
--just pack those suckers with all the RAM they'll hold. The first step is to turn to a Free Software OS: (There are some REALLY light configs) e.g.
You can't be working for yourself and do the high end stuff. And it's no business to be in if no one is covering your back. Not sure where the money will be next, now that the DHS has been repurposed to monitor Right-Wing extremist, Christians, anti-communists, anti-Muslims, pro-life sympathizers, Homophobes and anyone who has a problem with our historic election..
I'm a (1930s) Depression baby, and hate to see functional, or even salvageable stuff discarded. Every microwave oven has some very nice permanent magnets that might cost $10 each if you bought them, and that's only one of countless instances.
Well, what with the current economy, there surely seem to be fewer such people, although, what with $1 billion bonuses, the makers of $250,000 mechanical wristwatches (I'm not kidding) are probably not hurting much.
Used to be that discards were a nice source of parts. These days, if you salvage surface-mount parts from a modern circuit board, you might not know which type of component they are, because they are too tiny to mark economically, and requiring a good microscope to read markings isn't practical. I've come across component identifiers that decide which type a given SMD is, and then measure it, but those are rather out of hobbyist range (although, imho, not too costly for what they do.)
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Nicabod =+= Waltham, Mass.
Some people are hobby,
others hobbier, but we are the
hobbiest of all! (Try "hobbyist".)
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