Mustard?

I suppose that I should be happy today. The company I work for, in a product line that I work in, has just pulled in about 75 millions dollars worth of business. Yet, I’m not so elated. There’s a big party tonight and everyone is already making their hotel reservations because they know they’ll be too drunk to drive. I’m focused on my one account that may pull in 1.6 million. I was shocked when one of the managers just told us flat out that he was getting drunk tonight and there was no way he was working tomorrow. This company is just weird. I aspire to work where we’re all closet alcoholics instead of public alcoholics. Is that too much to ask?

Yesterday I sat down with my manger (let’s call him Bob), and his manager (Let’s call him Bob’s brother), and reviewed my position w/in the company (lowest of the low) and my pay (lower yet). Normally I would just talk with Bob, but I dragged Bob's brother in because I've had six different managers in the past five years. Bob's brother has been the single constant management entity during my time here.

I was pondering just how I’ve managed to end up at the bottom of the pile when my years in the industry and time served at this company should put me much closer to the top of the dog pile. I was somewhat amused when Bob’s brother was explaining to me how much better it was to be lower paid because that “means you have more promotions and money ahead of you in your career”. I wanted to bonk him on the forehead with the heel of my hand. I wanted to tell him that he selected the response he has memorized for demoralized new college grads instead of the response for burned out, middle aged, dirt in the eye employees.

No one denies that my qualifications are equal and that I’m at least as qualified (if not more) than those in the other department with higher rank/pay. The root issue seems to be that my department is smaller than the other department so “He who has the gold makes the rules”. (Another one of Bob’s brothers gems.) This place has never heard of equal dividing of the promotional pay and pay raise? The people in the other department do exactly the same job I do.

I swear it just makes me want to toss in the towel and sell hot dogs on the street corner. Naturally I don’t want to allow my customers to use any condiment on the dog except mustard. Anything more is simply barbaric.

I’ve been working in what used to be referred to as the “Silicon desert” for a few days this week. The industry used to be broken down as “Silicon Valley, Silicon Forest and the Silicon desert.” I fear the desert is in the process of reclaiming its own. Much that was, is no more. Much that is, will soon be gone.

“Welcome to Wal-Mart, would you like a shopping cart?”

A new career with great benefits beckons us all

I remember

Tomorrow is my youngest daughter’s sixteenth birthday. I suppose I could go down memory lane and talk about days past, but perhaps I can just summarize and say, I remember.

Happy birthday my youngest daughter. I miss you.


I remember.

Monday Monday....

It’s 4:45PM. My medium sized project isn’t finished and I need to present it to the customer tomorrow morning. Guess I’m working tonight, which is ok I suppose since Grace has friends coming over. I can hide in my office and turn on the radio and work to my hearts content. I think I’ll have about three hours in which to wrap up the project.

I was talking with a co-worker today about the future of our industry. Like so many other industries, we’re begun to sell our souls to the devil and out source a lot of our manufacturing overseas. I think historically this has been a huge impact for blue collar employees, not so much of an impact (although my programming buddies would disagree) for white collar. Times are changing. China is just starting to come on-line with semiconductor manufacturing. One look inside any Wal-Mart tells us exactly how much consumers will support products manufactured in the US.

I’m not predicting the death of my industry, just the death of large scale semiconductor manufacturing in the US over the next decade or so. Looking at what’s happened in the industry in the past decade is eye opening. The wafer fabs have shut down at a much faster pace than they start up. There may be 50 or 60% less semiconductor companies in the US today than 10 years ago. Ditto for Europe. What looked like a limitless industry a few years back is now starting to look like a four or five horse industry.

My co-worker is 57 and can ride it out until retirement. I have no such illusion. I have 20 years until retirement (if I play my cards perfectly). In reality, I expect to be outsourced from my own industry within a decade if I don’t return to school and pick up a MBA that will give me a bit of latitude to slide out of the technical and into the business aspect of the industry. Having already spent years going to night school for my first degree, I’m hesitant about doing it again. Years slip by in a haze when going to night school. Sure you can take the summers off and relax, but that just adds more time to the overall timeline of how long you’re giving up your life for. Work/eat/school/repeat.

I’ve sufficiently depressed myself enough to go cook dinner.

Home-but lost

Last year I was on the road (this defined as not sleeping in my own bed) for 176 nights. (This equates to 72% travel. The year before was 79% travel.)

So now I’m home for a few days. My wife Grace doesn’t shop for food too often, (she can eat rice and beans every day and be very happy.) so I usually find that there isn’t much food in the house when I get home. So as a result we tend to eat out a lot when I’m home. I eat out on the road, I eat out when I’m at home….it’s all the same, but the company is better at home. I’ve developed an allergy to food from Applebee’s and the like. It’s all pretty much the same at most places where the food is under $20 a plate.

So here I sit in my home office, with a medium size project sitting in front of me on one of my laptops. (Yes, that’s plural. I was concerned that my back didn’t bother me nearly enough so now I carry two laptops with high hopes landing myself with a severely twisted spine at some point in the not too distant future.) I need to finish this project by next Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I’ll present the report to a customer and ask them (in my most subservient tone) to please buy equipment from my company, for the measly sum of 1.6 million. So I have serious work to do…yet…I’m like a moth to the flame looking out my office window. The sun is shining, the weather is great, and I’d rather be doing anything except sitting here working on the report. I think this report will take me about twenty to twenty five hours to put together. Tick tock, tick tock…I don’t have time to waste unless I’m willing to swap time today for weekend time, which would make me very unpopular with Grace.

Being at home for the first few days during the work week is pretty weird. I have no routines at home for weekdays. I have a company official “office” about thirty miles from my house but I try not to go there. My productivity stinks when I go there. It’s rare for me to go there, so I end up socializing instead of working. I can be four or five times more productive at home, after acclimating for a few days. It’s these first few days that are hard. I usually end up cleaning up my desk and straightening up my home office for a day. (Mind you, it’s unusual for me to be home, so my desk gets kind of back logged with all the junk that I’ve brought home from all the trips between the last time I was “home” and “now”. Receipts that I need to file away, receipts I need to destroy, foreign currency, local currency. (I try to keep work money separate from home money.) Random reports, magazines, airline tickets….

I’m sitting here writing this blog instead of working on my report. I may as well just toss in the towel and go to the real office and flush the rest of my day and get it over with and hope that tomorrow is more productive.

Training escapades

Days on the Road YTD: 41

I’ve just spent a week working with two brand new customers at my companies training facility. Typically I’ve meet and established a solid working relationship with our customers before they show up for training. In this case, I had not.

The customers were fresh out of college. Fresh as in “zero” industry experience. Now there’s a place for fresh engineers, but that place just isn’t in my training course. These customers have been on a tour-de-world training mission; my course was their fifth or sixth in a row. What a waste of my time. Five or six training classes back to back simply equates to the customers having long since passed their mental super saturation status.

While my company racked in about $10,000 from this little training escapade, I found myself just depressed to be teaching a class to students who were just too green to understand very much of what I spoke of and unable to put the information into the correct technical context. The customers own management handed them a severe disservice and they were just too young to understand the scope of the disservice yet.

Sigh.