Evolution produces whatever characteristics are good for survival. This means you get a few people wired like Mother Teresa, but also a few people wired like Hitler.
Most people don't fall at either extreme, but somewhere in between.
It's the same story with risk threshold - there's lots of natural variation. It benefits the human race to have a few high-risk gamblers: the people who would take the huge risk of being the first person to try to chase a mammoth off a cliff, say. But those people also tend to die young, so it also benefits the human race to have a lot more people who are wired to play it reasonably safe, who are less likely to die at 18 years old while trying to play tag with a Great White shark or doing something else equally idiotic.
Looking back at the history of civilization, many of the greatest contributions came from people who didn't spend their lives taking huge risks. People like Archimedes, or Einstein, or Mozart, or Barbara McClintock. Or the Buddha, or Florence Nightingale, or Shakespeare. Clearly, it is entirely possible to live a good life and leave behind a great legacy without constantly seeking out risk for risk's sake.
It seems to be a recent American cultural phenomenon to think that wild reckless behaviour is the the only way for anyone to live a fulfilling life. That might be naturally appealing for a small percentage of people, usually young men with more testosterone than good sense, but it really doesn't apply to most of humanity. Most people would rather not juggle chainsaws for entertainment, and would prefer to arrive at old age with all four limbs still attached. 🙂
I suspect the supposed allure of continual recklessness is an idea deliberately perpetuated by marketing experts: if they can brainwash people to believe that it's a good thing to be reckless and overspend rather than cautious and careful with their money, the marketers make bigger profits.
Of course the far opposite end of the spectrum (being scared to take any risks at all) isn't healthy either. The incidence of crippling anxiety in young people is growing rapidly, and anxious people are unlikely to take even a normal amount of risk: Anxiety in Teens is Rising: What's Going On? - HealthyChildren.org
-Gnobuddy
Gnobuddy,
The great accomplishments of the scholars, poets, musicians, spiritualists, etc. were only possible because of millions of testosterone-filled risk takers.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
I think it is critical to never, ever forget this. We have one day per year dedicated to remembering it, and many don't truly understand what it means.
The great accomplishments of the scholars, poets, musicians, spiritualists, etc. were only possible because of millions of testosterone-filled risk takers.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
I think it is critical to never, ever forget this. We have one day per year dedicated to remembering it, and many don't truly understand what it means.
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It isn't the only way to live a fulfilling life, but it IS a shortcut to a high ranking YouTube channel, and the rewards that come with it. To many of our youngsters this is equivalent to the Rockstar dreams I had as a kid.
Coincidentally, YouTube stardom also brings the risks of burnout, failure, and other risks that come with having to outdo your last hit video, and keep up with, or ahead of whatever the current trend is......remember the Jackass videos and TV show. Was the fame and money worth it?
+ 1E06.
What to do next? Work on an exit strategy. My bosses are already on notice - with about a year and half, maybe two, to go. The corporate tax has just gotten too high lately, to the point where I don’t feel like I’m getting anything done anymore. Days spent in endless routing of convoluted ECOs constantly being rejected an reworked for idiotic reasons instead of being fixed once and for all, maintaining 12 or 15 documents instead of the two we used 10 years ago that worked just fine for ISO-9000-and-whatever, design by committee (and the lowest common denominator within), A3’s and 8D’s to solve problems whose root cause is as plain as the nose on your face (but requires a change to “The System” to fix), things just aren’t as fulfilling as they used to be. And no, I don’t really “need” the money anymore - more a matter of getting the ducks lined up and quacking.
Got a good buddy who is a college prof - on top of the the administrative bull, he has to put up with students who can’t solve quadratic equations anymore.
I don't think they need people that understand exponential growth and decay any more; at least in the US.
When I was still deluded enough to think that I was employable, I had a few interviews where the interviewer's eyes glossed over when I explained what I know and what I do. Then they tell me that my education is expired.
To me, they're just a bunch of posers. And employers don't want smart people any more. A good American is a stupid American.
It seems that there are a lot of people who don't have the common sense to know the difference between a small risk and a big, stupid one. The "outlet challenge" mentioned in the OP is a prime example of this.
Of course, there are also the type who feel that a Van De Graaff generator is "not worth the risk".
Clearly the people who experiment with legal-limit tube linear amplifiers in their basement or build guitar amps around an 833 fall somewhere in between.😀
In my basement, I have a scope tube in a frame I made for it.
And a shielded unfinished very high voltage power supply.
Transformer and caps.
The idea was to experiment making a scope from scratch.
Thinking of the over 1KV, I did not dare to go further on, aware I was not allowed a single one mistake.
May be this is why, I am alive, to tell you.
And a shielded unfinished very high voltage power supply.
Transformer and caps.
The idea was to experiment making a scope from scratch.
Thinking of the over 1KV, I did not dare to go further on, aware I was not allowed a single one mistake.
May be this is why, I am alive, to tell you.
I lasted 41 years at Motorola. I was in the cell phone design group for about 6 of those years. A stupid TV show called Survivor premiered in 2000, at the peak of the cell phone design frenzy. I learned a lot from that TV show. Life in a large corporate workplace works EXACTLY the same way. There are alliances of power, they may not always be obvious, but they are there. Know who they are, who their allies are, who they control, don't get in their way, NEVER threaten an alliance of power, and NEVER do anything that would make one of them look bad. This is important, but not so obvious when times are good. When there is a down turn and people are getting laid off, Follow those rules, or be "voted off the island."
Getting 40 engineers of varying disciplines into a room and trying to design, or even define a cell phone by committee brings a new dimension to corporate stupidity. The alliances of power in each discipline, electrical digital, electrical RF, mechanical, and software WILL make their presence known in these events, but you may not yet know who all the players are. Let them fight it out, and don't choose sides until you have no choice.
As in Survivor, there are often blindsides. Be prepared, and carry every possible document you may need to defend your design or position to every meeting.
We had a phone prototype pretty much working, but there were some technical issues. One was a simple act of incompetence by drawing 70 mA from a 50 mA LDO regulator, but the issue spanned two different disciplines.
I was in charge of the RF design, but we got a 5 volt supply from the digital circuitry that was too low and dirty because of the incorrect regulator. I had been red flagging this in my weekly report for about a month or more, but it was being ignored by management. A design review was held where one of my engineers stood up and said that his circuit couldn't work properly due to the bad power source. My boss immediately fired back that he had repeatedly asked me to look into it, and I had not.
In a rare display of career limiting behavior, I displayed 5 or 6 weekly reports where I had red flagged the problem directly to him. One of the senior managers declared there would be daily 5 PM meetings in his office for a progress report until this issue was fixed. I fired right back at him, NO, this is do simple I will have it ALL fixed in two days. One day was needed for Fedex to get me the correct part, and another day to put some in phones and test them.
This was the perfect example of how to lose your job, so I became pro active and found another job in the research group before the situation became unbearable.
Who wins the Survivor games. It's not the poor performers, since those who don't pull their own weight get voted off early. It's not the really good players (engineers) because they are a threat to the masses in the middle, and they fight among themselves to be on the top of the ladder. The winner is almost always a middle ground player that most can trust, who doesn't rattle cages and make people mad.
It helps to do one or jobs that nobody else wants. In my case I wound up making prototypes. I enjoyed that work, and nobody else wanted to do it. I didn't threaten anyone, but I never got promoted the entire time I was in that group. That was fine by me, since my "middle of mediocrity" pay grade was the last place the hatchet man looked at.
Still the plant had shrunk from over 5000 people to less than 1000 when I got the "letter that you can not refuse" (buyout) from the CEO. It offered me a big bucket of money to go away. I took it. About 300 people were laid off on the day that I left.
George, do you know if anyone is hiring RF engineers these days? Presumably they all want Masters degrees, but I'm mostly just curious to know since I'd like to have a backup area if physics research doesn't work out long-term, especially given how funding for fusion research has been the last few years.
The exact opposite; it was the testosterone-raddled risk-taker savages who constantly wanted to attack, slaughter, kill, rape, pillage, and destroy much more advanced, and much more peaceful, civilizations. All too often, they succeeded.
Nonsense. A quote only a rough violent man could have coined, to justify the awful world in which he lived.
Think about it, every country has rough violent men to stave off the rough violent men from elsewhere. If there weren't any rough violent men anywhere, we wouldn't need them.
(Sadly, that won't happen because we are a species that needed savagery to survive until very recently in our evolution - there were other savage creatures trying to eat us, and we needed savage humans to fend them off. Savagery is deep in our DNA.)
Are you familiar with Robert Sapolsky's work with baboons? Baboons usually have violent, thuggish societies, where high-status male baboons beat up, bully, and rape everybody else in the tribe - pretty much identical to most human societies through most of history. But Sapolsky happened to be studying a tribe of baboons in which the "rough violent baboons" were completely eradicated by complete accident. What followed is fascinating. Google should turn up the rest for you.
The people we honour on Remembrance Day are not the rough violent thugs, but the ordinary people who found themselves part of a hopeless, ugly, violent, tragic situation, created by the rough violent thugs who could not resist their urges to kill and conquer.
I would much rather have a day per year dedicated to remembering all the people who save lives (doctors, nurses, firefighters).
We are veering far from the thread topic, and too close to forbidden forum topics, so I've said all I'm going to say on this subject. People rarely change their views about core beliefs like this, so talking about it is usually a waste of breath, anyway.
-Gnobuddy
The bane of my career life, was in working for large organisations, this prompted by the neurotic fears to which I was subjected by my family.
"Get a secure job with the Civil Service, and a good pension"
The worst experience of my career was in my last job working for a Big Telecoms corporation, ironically paying more then the others.
The managers Hi-jacked the organisation, and ran things for themselves, were blatantly incompetent, even at the level of self expression; first manager wrote "Imformation" for information. He not only had another business, which was illegal under the terms of contract, but ran it from his office.
In my first annual appraisal I objected to 9 criticisms of me. I recorded the forst 45 mins of the interview on my Sony WMD6C, and the interviewer said to my point after 45 mins; "Wait a minute, yeah, wait a minute, yeah you're absolutely right"
Utter disrespect was shown towards paying customers, but playing football in the local park all Wednesday afternoons was the norm.
Meritocratic recognition was absolutely irrelevant, and qualifications almost looked down on, with appropriate(?) group disapproval.
"Get a secure job with the Civil Service, and a good pension"
The worst experience of my career was in my last job working for a Big Telecoms corporation, ironically paying more then the others.
The managers Hi-jacked the organisation, and ran things for themselves, were blatantly incompetent, even at the level of self expression; first manager wrote "Imformation" for information. He not only had another business, which was illegal under the terms of contract, but ran it from his office.
In my first annual appraisal I objected to 9 criticisms of me. I recorded the forst 45 mins of the interview on my Sony WMD6C, and the interviewer said to my point after 45 mins; "Wait a minute, yeah, wait a minute, yeah you're absolutely right"
Utter disrespect was shown towards paying customers, but playing football in the local park all Wednesday afternoons was the norm.
Meritocratic recognition was absolutely irrelevant, and qualifications almost looked down on, with appropriate(?) group disapproval.
Since I'm younger than most of you I think (I'm 41), I can tell you my experience has generally been short duration contracts with no benefits of any kind, and hourly timesheet style wages.
My main area was doing technical support.
At Bell mobility, I was contracted to provide third level technical support to a new product: "Digital Data". You could now use your cell phone as a modem and get 14.4kbps! I started on Tuesday. The product went live on Thursday. A customer would call first level, who would call second level who if they didn't know would call me. One bug was as simple as number formatting. Using a number like 555.1212 didn't work, but 555-1212 did. I had a great manager/boss who was himself a very technical guy, too. Actually enjoyed going to work in the morning... Fast forward 6 months. My job/department (3 others) have been moved to a new building, and now have a different boss (of the general customer service non-technical department). This one however, is technically illiterate, and couldn't understand what I actually do or why my position is even necessary.
Twenty years later, and their entire phone based tech support/customer service department level has been reduced to a bare minimum standard.
Similar things have happened in other places. I saved a company 10,000$ in 3 months but it made my boss look bad so they terminated my contract. You're welcome, Karen. (Yes, the woman was an actual Karen!)
It all reminds me of old saying: "If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us".
My main area was doing technical support.
At Bell mobility, I was contracted to provide third level technical support to a new product: "Digital Data". You could now use your cell phone as a modem and get 14.4kbps! I started on Tuesday. The product went live on Thursday. A customer would call first level, who would call second level who if they didn't know would call me. One bug was as simple as number formatting. Using a number like 555.1212 didn't work, but 555-1212 did. I had a great manager/boss who was himself a very technical guy, too. Actually enjoyed going to work in the morning... Fast forward 6 months. My job/department (3 others) have been moved to a new building, and now have a different boss (of the general customer service non-technical department). This one however, is technically illiterate, and couldn't understand what I actually do or why my position is even necessary.
Twenty years later, and their entire phone based tech support/customer service department level has been reduced to a bare minimum standard.
Similar things have happened in other places. I saved a company 10,000$ in 3 months but it made my boss look bad so they terminated my contract. You're welcome, Karen. (Yes, the woman was an actual Karen!)
It all reminds me of old saying: "If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us".
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I haven't done much job searching since I left Motorola in 2014. At age 67, nobody is going to hire me. The only offer I got in 3 years of searching was a maintenance man in a prison for $12/HR.
At that time Motorola, Blackberry, Foxconn, General Dynamics, and several smaller RF design companies were located in South Florida. All shut down within a year or two of each other leaving a lot of good RF talent in the area looking for work. The people that I followed on LinkedIn seemed to wind up on the west coast, mostly California or Seattle. Those who remained in South Florida, and many who left the area wound up in electronics jobs other than RF design, often for far less money than what Motorola paid.
The RF world has become so specialized that it's hard to find work in areas where you don't have much experience. I had an advantage there since I had some experience in just about every aspect of two way radio design and manufacturing. There are people who have devoted 20+ years to one small circuit, like RF frequency synthesis, or RF power amplifiers. They can't find work today, although a few became "accidental millionaires" by starting a chip company and selling out to ARM. Other than the 7 founders, the rest of that group wound up unemployed.
Some of the companies that make RF chips, especially RFMD and Triquint (now Quorvo) were snatching up Motorola's people as fast as we could lay them off. Not sure if that's still the case though.
Harris and BendixKing are still major players in the two way radio market, and looking at Motorola's 90% US market share. I know a few people who wound up there.
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People started giving me this advice the day I graduated high school. It seemed so mediocre at the time. I was interested in electronics and I thought that was my ticket.
I had four or five cops trying to talk me into joining the force - in Chicago in the 70s! I figured up I'd either end up shot, a raving alcoholic, or disgraced like most of the cops I knew. Not for me, I thought. But in retrospect, if I could have dodged the bullet (literally and figuratively) then I would be set for life by now, with a nice $70,000 a year pension. I could have retired for life ten years ago.
I never thought I'd be unable to get a decent job. In the 80s and 90s everyone I talked to begged me to work for them. I never even looked for a job in my life until I was 50 years old. What a rude shock that was.
It's easy to look back and make those kind of statements, primarily because they are TRUE. It's the usual talk among the EX-MOT retiree meetings and Facebook groups. I do not belong to either.
YES, I gave a lot to Motorola over 41 years, including 27 weeks of straight 7 day 12 hours of work for which I got 40 hours pay (salary). And many other crazy work type sacrifices.
There is the flip side. I walked in there with essentially zero formal electronics education, two years of experience in a TV repair shop at age 16 and 17, and two years running the service department at an Olson's Electronics store ( like a lower class Radio Shack) at age 18 and 19.
I started Motorola as an electronics technician making $3.57 /Hr assembling and repairing HT-220 walkie talkies as they came off the assembly line. I left as a "principal staff engineer" with two college degrees paid for by Mot, and a 6 figure salary. Sure there were moments where the job sucked (that happens everywhere) and moments where I was working for an idiot who didn't know an ohm from a gigawatt (again this happens everywhere), but over all I had fun, and had an entire factory full of neat stuff to play with when I ran the cal lab on the night shift. In general I moved around within the company every 3 to 5 years, primarily to learn new stuff, but I stayed in the cal lab for 10 years because of the "undocumented opportunities."
Here is an atypical, but not uncommon example:
I worked the 4PM to 12:30 AM shift maintaining the factory. The cal lab staff for that shift varied from one (me) to 5 people depending on the economy and product run rates of the times. There were two of us working at the time this happened. Typically I would get up in the morning, and be at Ft. Lauderdale beach by 10 AM, spend the day cruising the waters on my 14 foot sailboat, and get home around 3 PM to make it to work by 4. That was the case on this day.
I get home from the beach, and there is a message on my home phone (cellular was not invented yet) asking me to come into work early. I stuff some food into my face, zip through the shower and zoom into work at 3:30 to find a couple of "suits" in my bosses office waiting for me.
It seems that there is a problem with a semiconductor process line in Phoenix, so they sent some people with bad parts to Florida to use our electron microscope / mass spectrometer system. Unfortunately it won't start up, the company that makes it is in Boston and a repair guy can't get there for a week. Nobody in the building wants to fix a fairly new $400,000 machine, but the boss tells them that there is a guy on the night shift that "can fix anything."
I can still remember the look on the suits faces when I show up in shorts, flip flops and a tank top, and the boss tells them that I can fix it. At first it was "no way can we let this guy at our expensive machine." I say, "you guys figure it out, I have to make my factory rounds."
When I get back to the lab the suits have gone, bit the manager over the department with the fancy machine agrees to let me "look at it." Of course I need to hear about an hours worth of how easy it is to kill a diffusion pump, or otherwise mess up the machine. They only want me to find and fix the problem, DO NOT attempt to start up the machine. The left me all the manuals and several phone and pager numbers.
After finding an exploded electrolytic cap that was caused by a shorted diode, myself and some friends with hi-vac experience proceed to put their part in the machine, pump it down, and fire it up. the suits were not amused when I got one on the phone and told him to come back to the plant because I had their part displaying on the monitor screen.
The results from the all nighter that the suits and staff pulled provided the info (metal contamination) that they needed to eventually catch the guy who was dipping belt buckles in the gold bath on the semiconductor process line.
After that myself and some other friends who were part of the Motorola computer club got the latest MC6800 compatible chips sent to us through interplant mail long before they were available for sample through the regular channels.
Oh, and "Who you gonna call" when you need someone to change the output TUBE in the Perkin Elmer vacuum deposition / plasma etch chamber? It has an "RF power supply" that put out 3 KW on 27 MHz. It ran on 440 volts three phase and scared everybody. You need to "set the bias, blah blah...."
Both my parents were air traffic controllers. My mom quit when I was born, but my father HATED his job, and as I would find out later the people there were not so fond of him either. He was "a raving alcoholic, or disgraced."
Even so my father INSISTED that I get a job with either the state or federal government. Both of my brothers did wind up working for the State of Florida. Both are in better shape financially than I am, but money isn't everything.
I KNEW that electronics was my ticket, since it just came to me so easily. I worked fixing consumer electronics at an Olson's store next door to the University of Miami. Lots of money flowed through that neighborhood, and it was pretty easy to make lots of money fixing, building, or setting up stuff....except during the summer when the school population shrinks.
This was the seed that led to the breakdown in relations between myself and my father. I had no desire to do a job that I didn't like, but there was an ugly fight between us one day that resulted in me ripping the newspaper out of his hands one day tearing an ad out of the classified section for employment at Motorola. I wound up working there, just as an act of defiance. I had no intention of keeping that job for 41 years or turning it into an engineering career. That just happened.
I still visit the remains of the Motorola plant where I spent most of those 41 years every July. The building has been sold, broken up and leased out to several firms. Motorola Solutions still occupies a small corner of it, and my old research department is still there, and I now know that I would likely still be there if I didn't take the buyout. Did I make the right choice?
The department has morphed into an IC design center. It's mostly a simulation, calculation kind of place, where I wouldn't really fit, so I don't think it would be fun any longer....
Money isn't everything, and having a job where you don't dread getting up in the morning IS important to your HEALTH, which IS money.
I was lured away from engineering into the finance world. They love engineers! It was a wild ride and it all collapsed into a heap of ashes, in 2008. I was put out to pasture in 2009. I've been a de facto second class citizen since them.
The closest I've been able to get to engineering since then is as a consultant to plant engineering. It's strictly 1099 and certainly isn't a living. The most I've made in a year since 2009 is around $22,000 and that includes a part time McJob.
It's the new reality. If I were 30 I'd be living with my parents.
The closest I've been able to get to engineering since then is as a consultant to plant engineering. It's strictly 1099 and certainly isn't a living. The most I've made in a year since 2009 is around $22,000 and that includes a part time McJob.
It's the new reality. If I were 30 I'd be living with my parents.