Easy money...£200k/yr job in electronics?

[ocset]

Hello,
I  have been invited to join  a  potentially very lucrative  “electronics  company”  on a £200k/yr salary.
Should I take the job?

The idea is that we “produce” architectural lighting products, eg “wall-washers” , color changing lights etc etc.
The idea is that we design a few prototype products ourselves, and then show these to politicians, heads of innovation funds, potential investors,  etc etc.
They will then give us the innovation funding that we need to live……..them thinking that we are a real British Designer company......big up the British (corrected spelling) electronics design sector etc etc!!

At this point, we can then take our products to trade shows, where we can meet our potential customers…
When we have the customer contact details, we then bring in our associated  Chinese Lighting Designer company…….they will design and make the actual products for us…at a price that the customers won’t be able to refuse. Since we  will  have the customer  contact details, we can then  match the European customers with our  associated Chinese  company….we then sit there and get well minted…making a fortune!!...just middle –manning the products through!

Perfect isn’t it?

Some say that the Chinese are actually, at this point, mainly interested in knocking out European Electronics design capability by flooding  our market with cheap Chinese products, so that means that the Chinese company won’t even be interested in making much profit….so that means more profit for us !!!

Because I have  formal electronics qualifications, I am needed to kind of make  the British company look like a bona fide electronics company…which of course it will not really be….it will simply be a “middle-man”...

When we have domination of the architectural lighting market, we can then further our engineering contacts in China, and then extend our ploy into other areas like electric car chargers etc etc.
The Chinese products are of excellent quality, since the Chinese are now the world’s best power supply engineering designers. …And when we have shipped millions of products to millions of happy European customers, we can use this to attract even more customers...

There is one worry, and that is that we will have to visit China regularly in order to assure that our products are being manufactured in a  suitable quality way. There is fear that we could contract coronavirus…..or even that the British government will in future ban travel to China….but we believe that COVID19 will blow over…and has already been totally eradicated in China(?)…China  is now the world’s safest place for COVID19(?)...and the chinese  markets where livestock are slaughtered  on site and result in virus spread will simply close now?
What do you think?
Should I take the job?

[tggzzz]

Yes, you should take the job.

It will occupy you so completely that you won't have time to post on this forum.

[Zbig]

After all this coronavirus thing (hopefully) settles up, you should really see a mental health specialist. Obsessions and paranoia are often successfully and relatively effortlessly cured e.g. with antidepressants. While we, the forum members, are free to give your threads a pass right after noticing your nick, it seems to really suck to be you. For the sake of your own well-being and those close to you, please seek the help of a specialist.

[mzzj]

This has to be a troll post. Obviously you take the job.

Then, you leak all of the corporate plans from the company. You watch it crash and burn, whilst still collecting your ridiculous salary. You help the British industry by badmouthing "your" company behind their back.

Then, after the company is bankrupt in five years, you walk away and go work for someone good. Unless you have already acquired the 'rona.

Get Treez or his "imaginary friend" to work in this imaginary company and its in (imaginary) bankrupt automatically. 
Haven't figured it out if he is just stupid, trolling or plain nutcase. Or all of the mentioned.

[Zero999]

I like his posts and find them entertaining.

Yes, the Chinese might forbid people from any covid-19 affected area from entering the country.

Of course he should take the job, if it's that easy, silly question really.

[donotdespisethesnake]

This reminds me of the ads "I earn $20/hour working at home trolling internet forums" 

[ebastler]

So you will be the token EE. If you also have

• someone who does good industrial design,
• someone who oversees prototype manufacturing,
• someone who does a credible job talking to investors and funding agencies,
• someone who is good at selling your products to customers,
• someone who identifies and manages offshore contract manufacturers, and cracks the whip to ensure quality,

this might actually work. And all of you might find that you are doing actual work to earn your money.

[ocset]

So you will be the token EE. If you also have

    someone who does good industrial design,
    someone who oversees prototype manufacturing,
    someone who does a credible job talking to investors and funding agencies,
    someone who is good at selling your products to customers,
    someone who identifies and manages offshore contract manufacturers, and cracks the whip to ensure quality,

this might actually work. And all of you might find that you are doing actual work to earn your money.

Thanks, many have done this kind of thing with the above skills only possessed in very  small quantitys.

..the main point is your one about "someone who is good at selling your products to customers,"...that is key...absolutely.

[jmelson]

Thanks, many have done this kind of thing with the above skills only possessed in very  small quantitys.

Why, yes!  Check out the topics in this general chat section on Elizabeth Holmes and Meredith Perry, for instance.
They did something quite like this, but it is not likely to end up so well for them.

Jon

[SiliconWizard]

I  have been invited to join  a  potentially very lucrative  “electronics  company”  on a £200k/yr salary.
Should I take the job?

If the offer is serious, sure. It may be just a 2-3-year job though, so be prepared for that. But that's good money, and you seem so fed up with the company you work at that it would do good to your health anyway.

There is one worry, and that is that we will have to visit China regularly in order to assure that our products are being manufactured in a  suitable quality way. There is fear that we could contract coronavirus…..or even that the British government will in future ban travel to China….but we believe that COVID19 will blow over…

Nobody really knows, but I'm pretty sure either the crisis will be over and things will get back pretty much as they were before, so no worry there, or it won't and if any serious business with China (and possibly other parts of the world) becomes severely compromised in a lasting way, the virus may become the last of our concerns eventually.

[Johnny10]

"They will then give us the innovation funding that we need to live"

I don't understand?

Who would be writing your paycheck every week?
That's all you need to know.

If you are paying yourself until money starts to come from an unknown source at an unknown time than that is not a job.

[MK14]

Easy money...£200k/yr job in electronics?

(1) Money doesn't grow on TREEZ's, £200k/yr sounds like nonsense and/or a scam.

(2) Does TREEZ's stand for:
TRolling
EEvblogerZ's
Some/All of the time ?

(3) Saying stuff like..

There is one worry, and that is that we will have to visit China regularly in order to assure that our products are being manufactured in a  suitable quality way. There is fear that we could contract coronavirus…..or even that the British government will in future ban travel to China….but we believe that COVID19 will blow over…and has already been totally eradicated in China(?)…China  is now the world’s safest place for COVID19(?)...and the chinese  markets where livestock are slaughtered  on site and result in virus spread will simply close now?
What do you think?
Should I take the job?

Would seem to be further evidence of trolling attempts.

them thinking that we are a real British Designer company......big up the Brish electronics design sector etc etc!!

That is very TREEZonous.
Is your spelling of "Brish" a freudian slip, i.e. a sign of something ?
Maybe, that you are trying to troll us ?

[ocset]

    them thinking that we are a real British Designer company......big up the Brish electronics design sector etc etc!!


That is very TREEZonous.

Thanks...that...is the modus operandi of  a massive number of UK electronics co's, as well as many in the Western world.
Nobody does anything about it.

[MK14]

    them thinking that we are a real British Designer company......big up the Brish electronics design sector etc etc!!


That is very TREEZonous.

Thanks...that...is the modus operandi of  a massive number of UK electronics co's, as well as many in the Western world.
Nobody does anything about it.

If a company, can buy perfectly good components (not made in the UK, e.g. China), that meet their specifications, and are basically reliable and durable. At considerable cost savings. Then that is typically where companies will source their components from.
It has been like that for hundreds of years.

E.g. The Raspberry PI 4, is designed and manufactured in the UK (if I remember/understand correctly), and costs around £35 retail.

Presumably (some of its parts are from China), but if ALL of its parts had to come from the UK only.

It would probably be considerably more expensive, and significantly worse.
E.g. Because the best UK manufactured microprocessor/microcontroller chips (if there are still any), would probably be significantly slower and more expensive, than the one they currently use.
(Although ironically, because it is ultimately an 'Arm' based cpu, it is basically 'British' designed, although some other countries are also involved).

I'm not sure of the latest/last/best 'pure' UK manufactured cpu.
Perhaps it is the Inmos Transputer cpus ?
From a very long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

tl;dr

Would people prefer a powerful/useful £35, somewhat UK/British Raspberry PI 4 ?

Or would they buy a £150 (guesstimate), pure UK manufactured, 8 bit, 1 MHz cpu, 4K Ram version ?
(Call it the RaspberryZX82).
Which is 0.00000000000000000001 times faster, has 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 times more Ram.
A hex keypad, so you can type in the monitor every time you boot it up, as it has no (UK availability) for ROM flash storage .
Uses 10 times more power.
And runs, the latest version of Linux, Interpreted Basic, hand assembled machine code.

[madires]

Has that company already mentioned the £20k consulting fee you have to pay to get the job?

[andy3055]

You should probably inform the British Intelligence service whoever they are as this sounds like industrial espionage! I am appalled that you are even thinking of this and discussing it in a forum where EE enthusiasts gather to solve each others' problems and teach/help in the process. Unless you are a Chinese national floating the idea to gather what kind of response you could get, you should be scared. Just my opinion.

[ebastler]

You should probably inform the British Intelligence service whoever they are as this sounds like industrial espionage!

You must have misunderstood treez' "business model". Clearly no industrial espionage, since no UK techology is involved, let alone transferred to a third party. But good old subsidy fraud, at least to get things started. 

[Koen]

I've seen this one. They'll use you for your extensive knowledge of the british street light industry then they'll shoot you and your wife in front of a theater when you aren't of use anymore. Your kid will be raised by your butler and, one long dark night where street lights were cut off by a crime syndicate, be bitten by a coronavirus-carrying bat. He'll then use all the power supply technology you left behind to fight crime and bring back justice to North Cheshire.

There's also a sassy sidekick and a cat but that's for another issue.

[tggzzz]

I'm not sure of the latest/last/best 'pure' UK manufactured cpu.
Perhaps it is the Inmos Transputer cpus ?
From a very long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

The modern descendent is the XMOS xCORE embedded microcontroller devices running xC.
32 core 4000 MIPS (espandable) chips with hard realtime characteristics unlike any other processor. The IDE examines the optimised code and specifies the min/max code execution times - none of that hit and miss "run the code and hope we notice the worst case" rubbish
They are are effectively MCUs which are halfway towards FPGA characteristics.

Occam is now xC, and coupled with the comms fabric and processors, they are a delight to use.

Commercially successful, buy them at DigiKey and elsewhere https://www.digikey.co.uk/products/en?keywords=xmos

[SiliconWizard]

You really enjoy those xCORE chips, don't you?

[tggzzz]

You really enjoy those xCORE chips, don't you?

Yes, I do! I also like removing ignorance

Using them is surprisingly easy and fun, in a way I haven't experienced since the 80s Better that than fighting errata and weird corner cases found in many modern chips. What's not to like about that!

[MK14]

The modern descendent is the XMOS xCORE embedded microcontroller devices running xC.
32 core 4000 MIPS (espandable) chips with hard realtime characteristics unlike any other processor. The IDE examines the optimised code and specifies the min/max code execution times - none of that hit and miss "run the code and hope we notice the worst case" rubbish
They are are effectively MCUs which are halfway towards FPGA characteristics.

Occam is now xC, and coupled with the comms fabric and processors, they are a delight to use.

Commercially successful, buy them at DigiKey and elsewhere https://www.digikey.co.uk/products/en?keywords=xmos

For some real-time/embedded applications, that feature, can be very useful.

E.g. Some kind of Robot, 3d-printer, multiple-MEMS-Microphones, or multiple high speed motors, with Quadrature sensing. May find the independent cpu cores and hence predictable, low latency interrupts and other operations. Allow better real time embedded software systems, to be created.

Because, in some application areas, 2 to 120 microseconds worth of interrupt latency, can make the difference between the system working, very smoothly and glitch free.
As opposed to, a significant latency, of perhaps 100 micro seconds. Which is too long for some applications.

FPGAs, although tending to be very fast as well. Can present a very steep, long and somewhat expensive, learning curve. The parts can be pricey, as well.
Whereas, microcontrollers, can be programmed by, potentially more plentiful software/electronics engineers.
I.e. Proper/experienced FPGA engineers, tend to be in much shorter supply, and potentially more expensive to employ. The code tends to be less portable, and more time-consuming to create, as well.

On the other hand, there are things which can convert C(/C++ ?) or C like languages, into FPGA code (VHDL/Verilog), and ASICs, can be a cheaper alternative to FPGAs.
Also, if your production volumes allow it, and you can afford the high initial engineering costs (NRE), and extra time it takes, to get it to market. Then ASICs could be the way to go.

But, opinions do vary. Some think that FPGAs, are as easy as mcus (microcontrollers).

[tggzzz]

The modern descendent is the XMOS xCORE embedded microcontroller devices running xC.
32 core 4000 MIPS (espandable) chips with hard realtime characteristics unlike any other processor. The IDE examines the optimised code and specifies the min/max code execution times - none of that hit and miss "run the code and hope we notice the worst case" rubbish
They are are effectively MCUs which are halfway towards FPGA characteristics.

Occam is now xC, and coupled with the comms fabric and processors, they are a delight to use.

Commercially successful, buy them at DigiKey and elsewhere https://www.digikey.co.uk/products/en?keywords=xmos

For some real-time/embedded applications, that feature, can be very useful.

E.g. Some kind of Robot, 3d-printer, multiple-MEMS-Microphones, or multiple high speed motors, with Quadrature sensing. May find the independent cpu cores and hence predictable, low latency interrupts and other operations. Allow better real time embedded software systems, to be created.

Because, in some application areas, 2 to 120 microseconds worth of interrupt latency, can make the difference between the system working, very smoothly and glitch free.
As opposed to, a significant latency, of perhaps 100 micro seconds. Which is too long for some applications.

FPGAs, although tending to be very fast as well. Can present a very steep, long and somewhat expensive, learning curve. The parts can be pricey, as well.
Whereas, microcontrollers, can be programmed by, potentially more plentiful software/electronics engineers.
I.e. Proper/experienced FPGA engineers, tend to be in much shorter supply, and potentially more expensive to employ. The code tends to be less portable, and more time-consuming to create, as well.

On the other hand, there are things which can convert C(/C++ ?) or C like languages, into FPGA code (VHDL/Verilog), and ASICs, can be a cheaper alternative to FPGAs.
Also, if your production volumes allow it, and you can afford the high initial engineering costs (NRE), and extra time it takes, to get it to market. Then ASICs could be the way to go.

But, opinions do vary. Some think that FPGAs, are as easy as mcus (microcontrollers).

Yup.

Effectively there are no interrupts in xCORE processors: you simply dedicate a core to an i/o port and (if necessary) it sleeps until the input has arrived. The language has primitives indicating the clock cycle on which output will occur, or capturing the clock cycle on which input did occur.

To a useful approximation inter-core comms is the same as i/o: messages to/from other cores are identical to "messages" to/from i/o ports.

I'm far from being an expert in xCORE or xC, but it just worked as I wanted it to work, as stated in the documentation and as I would expect it to work. Stunningly pain-free, unlike other MCUs with their strange i/o config registers etc

[MK14]

Someone seems to have stolen your thread.

https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/threads/great-idea-for-chinese-importation-business.404674/

Also, someone there, seems to already know you. (Around the 6th post, User called 'MY OFFICE IN CHINA').

Delusional.

Hello,

I have been invited to join a potentially very lucrative “electronics company” on a £200k/yr salary.

Should I take the job?

The idea is that we “produce” architectural lighting products, eg “wall-washers” , color changing lights etc etc.

The idea is that we design a few prototype products ourselves, and then show these to politicians, heads of innovation funds, potential investors, etc etc.

They will then give us the innovation funding that we need to live……..

At this point, we can then take our products to trade shows, where we can meet our potential customers…

When we have the customer contact details, we then bring in our associated Chinese Lighting Designer company…….they will design and make the actual products for us…at a price that the customers won’t be able to refuse. Since we will have the customer contact details, we can then match the European customers with our associated Chinese company….we then sit there and get well minted…making a fortune!!...just middle –manning the products through!

Perfect isn’t it?

Some say that the Chinese are actually, at this point, interested in knocking out European Electronics design capability by flooding our market with cheap Chinese products, so that means that the Chinese company won’t even be interested in making much profit….so that means more profit for us !!!

Because I have formal electronics qualifications, I am needed to kind of make the British company look like a bona fide electronics company…which of course it will not really be….it will simply be a “middle-man”.

When we have domination of the architectural lighting market, we can then further our engineering contacts in China, and then extend our ploy into other areas like electric car chargers etc etc.

The Chinese products are of excellent quality, since the Chinese are now the world’s best power supply engineering designers. …And when we have shipped millions of products to millions of happy European customers, we can use this to attract even more customers.

There is one worry, and that is that we will have to visit China regularly in order to assure that our products are being manufactured in a suitable quality way. There is fear that we could contract coronavirus…..or even that the British government will in future ban travel to China….but we believe that COVID19 will blow over…and has already been totally eradicated in China(?)…China is now the world’s safest place for COVID19(?)...and the chinese markets where livestock are slaughtered on site and result in virus spread will simply close now?

What do you think?

Should I take the job?

[MK14]

Yup.

Effectively there are no interrupts in xCORE processors: you simply dedicate a core to an i/o port and (if necessary) it sleeps until the input has arrived. The language has primitives indicating the clock cycle on which output will occur, or capturing the clock cycle on which input did occur.

To a useful approximation inter-core comms is the same as i/o: messages to/from other cores are identical to "messages" to/from i/o ports.

I'm far from being an expert in xCORE or xC, but it just worked as I wanted it to work, as stated in the documentation and as I would expect it to work. Stunningly pain-free, unlike other MCUs with their strange i/o config registers etc

For some application areas, that sounds really good. It reminds me of the Propeller processors (by Parallax), at least in the concept of having many cores, for easy/good embedded use.