Job Hopping To Success

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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jon_banquer
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See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer
Reply to
Proctologically Violated©®

Like Neil J. ?

Reply to
ff

Hmmm...

This IS interesting.

I didn't read the whole article; but one of the first paragraphs caught my eye:

?I started machining for a neighbor when I was fifteen years old,? he says. ?He had a little shop in his garage next door to our house. I learned all I could from him, then went out and got a job sweeping floors in a machine shop. I was soon setting up and operating CNC machines. I learned what I could there and moved on. Each time I moved I gained more experience. I probably worked at fifteen different shops around the Phoenix area before I decided to jump out on my own. The good thing is that I got to see all kinds of machining problems. I got to use a wide variety of CNC equipment, and I saw how different shop management systems worked and how the owners bought and used their equipment.?

It seems to me that this is a perfect example of one of the things that's nearly killed the US machining business, and has helped to cripple our manufacturing economy in general.

No, I'm not kidding. Let me try to explain.

Each of the people that this person worked for invested time and money, either teaching him things on purpose, or paying his wages while he learned on his own. Most likely, it was some of both. Then, just when an employer was about to start getting a return on that investment

- in other words, just when the guy was getting to be skilled enough that he could actually do the company some good - the guy would jump ship and head down the road. He left each of his past employers with the never-to-be-recovered costs of training someone, and also with their own trainee (and his knowledge of their methods, customers, and companies) to compete against in the community where they lived, worked, and scrambled for business.

Of course, this person isn't unique. This has been going on for a long, long time. And over that period of time, employers have gotten tired of it. I know too many shops that simply will not train people, period. They have their core of skilled folks that they either trust or pay so much that the folks will never leave, and then they have a second tier of people who know very little, and who will never know very much, and whose only real job is to do what the skilled folks tell them.

The result of this, over the long haul, is a serious decline in the number of people actually learning machining skills (compared to a time when apprenticeships and other OTJ training programs were common) and an equally serious increase in the number of people working in shops who's only skill is pressing green buttons with index fingers.

I'm not in the mood to fire up the verbositizer and type another couple megabytes; but I could. I suspect, though, that the members of this group can extrapolate, and can figure out for themselves all the ways that this trend, and people exactly like the one described in the article, have hurt us all.

And, I suspect we can all guess how pissed this guy is going to be when his own protege's start taking HIS skills and walking with them.

There IS such a thing as justice.

KG

Reply to
Kirk Gordon

Kirk Gordon wrote:

Kirk:

This is a post from a survey back in February (Survey: Employment Work History).

================================================================ BottleBob wrote: > To All: > Do you think it is advantageous for an employee to have a varied > work history for experience (a lot of different employers), or a stable > work history (just a few different employers).

On further thinking about it, this question is a little more complex & difficult to answer than I at first thought. I believe the answer largely depends on the type of machining position that is to be filled. For an operator, or setup job, a varied work history encompassing many different machines/controls would probably be a plus factor. For our prototype job-shop BOTH a varied AND stable work history would probably be advantageous, at the right time and/or in the right order. Since we're not a production shop we don't really have designated operators or setup people per se. The programmers setup and run the jobs they are assigned. There are some exceptions for long running jobs, where one of the manual guys are drafted to run the CNC's but that's not the general rule. If someone has had a number of different jobs early in their career (jobs that increased and varied their setup and machining knowledge), but in later years tended toward long term employment stability - THAT would be a plus factor for us. It takes something like 6-9 months of working/training for someone to become really productive in our shop. Which means we'd be looking for someone for the long term that can be a team player plus get along with, and help, the others in the shop as we all now do. It's also important that someone be flexible and open to trying new programming techniques, new & varied tooling, unique setups, and pushing the envelope on efficiency. So someone that was a job hopping gypsy that changes jobs for simply $.25 an hour more in pay, OR changes jobs every couple of years on general principle... well they would NOT be considered advantageous to us. We've tried training a couple of intelligent machinists to be programmers to do our type of work (in which I was the designated trainer due to having more patience than some of our other programmers), but after getting them up to speed toward being productive, one left supposedly because of increasingly high commuting costs, and another left for a less stressful job. So the time we spent on training was pretty much flushed down the toilet, at least from our shop's standpoint.

An afterthought. If someone had served a formal 4 year apprenticeship early in their career THAT would be a plus factor, since it would indicate a pattern of goal setting & achieving, perseverance, and loyalty. But in today's job market it's increasingly unlikely to find people with Journeyman cards. =================================================================

Reply to
BottleBob

Well, welcome to the adversarial fuckyou world.

There is a great great quote from some historical notable, who observed, in apparent amazement, that shit works as well as it does with billions of muthafuckas operating in blind self-interest.

I thought I had that quote somewhere, but I can't find it. Would appreciate a headsup if anyone knows it.

Of course, some are just blind, like jb, which makes his self-interest pretty much harmless. I'm sure amc and ccs get the brunt of it, anyway.

What did you think of this guy's fairytale ascent to NASA success?

Reply to
Proctologically Violated©®

=============== The new reality is that all employment is temporary, and loyalty is an archaic word in the dictionary. Loyalty is a two way street, and when labor is regarded as a commodity this is one of the results of the neo con ideal of "employment at will."

Welcome to the "new world order." What goes around comes around. If long term employment was a consideration why didn't you draw up a contract?

What you are seeing is the opposite side of this coin: =============

After a lull around Thanksgiving, December has seen some of the biggest layoffs in the tech industry yet since the economy entered its tailspin in the fall. Our Layoff Tracker is now past

100,000 lost jobs (109,629, as of this writing) across nearly 300 different technology and media companies both large and small. To put this in perspective, Citigroup alone announced 52,000 layoffs in November, and across the U.S. economy, just counting September and October, there were nearly 500,000 unemployment claims as a result of mass layoffs (data isn?t in yet for November or December).

------------------------

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and

"Bank of America Corp., the third-largest U.S. bank, said yesterday that it plans to cut as many as 35,000 jobs because of the weak economic environment."

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Unka' George [George McDuffee]

------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

Reply to
F. George McDuffee

Folks, we have a winner. Someone in this newsgroup who has clue when it comes to the mentality you need to get ahead in the machining job shop world rather than be stuck working for =93coolie wages=94 making in the low twenty dollar rage after 20 or more years of dedication to machining. Just pathetic.

Damn the truth hurts and the truth also cuts right through the flag Captain Kirk loves to wrap himself in to protect himself from the total b.s. he often spreads.

Now who's going to be the first one to point out to complete idiots Joe788, Barney Rubble, Cliff Huprich, Sitting Duck, etc. that World Press who hosts my blog doesn't count my own visits to my blog and their counter can't be screwed with like say Google star system can or like other blog software can. I hate to state this fact because morons like these have been wasting away hours refreshing my blog page because they are so stupid they think they can screw with World Press's blog counter.

The level of stupidity in this newsgroup continues to grow but once in awhile its nice to see a post like this showing someone has a clue.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

"Proctologically Violated©®" wrote in news:4945edf3$0$20289$ snipped-for-privacy@cv.net:

Probably Milton Friedman. "Nobody can make a pencil."

These sell for 16 ? 40 cents.

If you are really clever, you could make this! 72 needed ? but this is just ?art? ? someone must make the pencils.

But: Nobody Can Make a Pencil !

No one knows how to make a pencil. Here is a description of contents of ?Mirado? brand pencils: Material: California Incense Cedar. Finish: Glossy black with gold lettering. Ferrule: Red-banded brass. Eraser: Genuine Pink Pearl. Core: Waxed-ceramic/graphite composite. Available in #1/B, #2/HB, #2.5/F, #3/H. Markings: ?USA/Mirado Black Warrior/HB/[two hearts].? Packaging: Varies from open-stock, to packs of eight or ten, to boxes of a dozen. Origin: Made in Lewisburg, Tennessee, United States by the Sanford Corporation. Availability: Widely available in office supply stores, art supply stores, university bookstores, department stores and online.

Step One: ?California Incense Cedar?

Here one is. You paid the owner for the right to cut it down to get

the wood you will need.

You will need:

Big chain saw, big truck, a saw mill, and other equipment.

But wait?who makes all those things? They require steel, machinery, buildings, trained workers. And the workers need food, clothing, housing, transportation, etc.

We need the wood for the pencil ?

Your tree is one of these! Now get it milled down a bit.

And start sawing.

Of course?

precision is required if you

don?t want to waste valuable

wood and want to keep

costs under control. Keep cutting the wood smaller and smaller?but remember to kiln dry it.

If the wood is not dried, quality of the pencil will be

bad & you lose customers.

So the wood get put in

a kiln drying machine.

This one claims to be good.

So you get little pieces of wood.

Also consider: poplar - Turkey, pine ?

Russia & basswood ? China.

Next: Glossy black (or classic yellow) finish.

The color is a lacquer applied to the pencil. Lacquer came from China and India originally?made from resin from the Rhus tree or squeezed from a bug (insect lac). Now, of course, we have factories to make this complex chemical. Previously it was quite toxic, now it has been made fast drying and safe. Colors come from many sources of dyes or pigments added to the lacquer (another industry).

Side Note: Why yellow?

In late 1800s?a Frenchman exploring Siberia near the China border found the highest quality deposits of graphite ever. Hence, the pencils made with that graphite were the best. Yellow in China is associated with royalty, so the pencils were colored yellow as a signal of the highest quality in the market.

Put your name on the pencil.

Then the company name or your logo must be

embossed on the side.

Here is one machine that

will do that.

But anyone can make this

machine, so lets get to the more technical stuff about pencil making.

Lead pencils?

There is no lead in pencils.

The inner stuff is a mix of clay that comes from many places and graphite. Sri Lanka and China are the leaders.

The number on the pencil (hardness)

depends on the clay/graphite mix.

First good quality pencil factory in the

U.S. was the Thoreau factory?founded by brother-in-law of Henry David Thoreau.

Side Note: Colored Pencils

You can get pencils that draw in red, green or whatever. That stuff in the pencil is a mix of clay (called china clay because it dries hard), pigments, and wax. There are other specialty pencils?charcoal pencils for drawing; eye-liner pencils for makeup, etc. But back to the main product??

Erasers

Get your vocabulary right?plugs, not erasers.

First patented in 1858.

Standard in the U.S., but not Europe (go figure).

Today?synthetic rubber or vinyl is used?get the right consistency and an extruder machine squirts out long ribbons of plugs. When cool, cut to size. And then, because we like soft edges, hundreds of pounds of them are tumbled in a tumbler to get softer edges.

New word for the day: Ferrule

That is the little band, made of zinc and copper (and mixes of other metals) that hold the plug to the end of the pencil (too complicated for Europeans). Traditionally?the ferrule put on first, then plug shoved in after some glue put inside the ferrule. Thermoplastics now commonly used. Put on by ?ultrasonic welding.? So you need to figure out how to get all those machines and parts.

Ready to go!

Now we have the simple pencil made?so put them in boxes you get from somewhere and then get the boxes into cartons and on to trucks to get them to distributors and stores.

Reply to
D Murphy

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

Reply to
brewertr

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

For starters Jon doesn't live in San Diego he lives in Chula Vista

Reply to
brewertr

How many conflicting versions will you be "Publishing"?

Reply to
brewertr

See the Jon Banquer blog and get the truth that you won't get in this newsgroup from those who work for "coolie wages".

You also won't ever get the truth from slimeballs who post anonymously to prevent getting sued with all the lying they do.

Jon Banquer San Diego, CA

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Reply to
jon_banquer

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