Author Topic: Electronics companies should stop killing themselves  (Read 7183 times)

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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #50 on: July 08, 2023, 10:46:49 pm »
When sifting through piles of CVs it amazes me how many people are deeply impressed by CVs showing a long string of jobs. When you point out this means the candidate offers poor stability they have to agree, but with great reluctance.

Do people really think that? Twits.

When I started it was a common belief that you could reasonably leave a job within 1 month or after 2 years. In between was an orange flag worth investigating.

Nowadays we have the wretched "gig economy" and "hire-and-fire".

It is reasonable for consultants to have had 40 clients, but not employees to have had 40 employers.

Yeah. There's a matter of proportion though.

Many recruiters make generalizations, and like all generalizations, these are flawed. But I've certainly seen what coppice described.
- For people having had only one or a couple employers: recruiters may see this as a sign of someone inflexible, stuck to a routine, possibly not looking for challenges, in turn possibly hard to manage. And in a world where staying in the same job your whole life is now an oddity, may be seen as a sign that the candidate just had trouble finding another job.
- For people having had many jobs, sure on one hand it shows instability, but OTOH it shows that many other recruiters have chosen the candidate, so it gives social proof. Social proof is an important part of recruiting in general. On top of giving some social proof, it shows that the candidate may be more flexible and easier to get rid of if needed.

Of course none of this says if a candidate would be a good fit for a given job, but that's relatively common shit, especially for HR people, who care less about the technical aspects and more about how easy a given person will be to handle.


 

Offline coppice

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #51 on: July 08, 2023, 11:32:26 pm »
Treez/ocset/faringdon appears to be an excellent exemplar of something described by Isaac Asimov in 1957. His novella "Profession" is still worth speedreading.
https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

The points in that resonated with me when I was a schoolkid, and significantly and positively benefited my career and outlook on life.
Are you sure you read that story? You seem to keep referencing it in contexts where it doesn't fit. The whole point of that story is the vast majority of people are incapable of doing anything really interesting, and the small number of truly creative are hard to recognise. There is nothing the vast majority of people can do about their lot in life. Only the small number of truly creative people can do anything about their lot in life, and really need to, as they can so easily be screwed by the clueless.

Incorrect.

For a start, the protagonists did recognise the truly creative George - because they were specifically looking for that. George didn't recognise it in himself, but that is a completely different issue.

More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
  • aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
  • aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditions
In other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.

The key section is about 70% of the way through
Quote
... said Trevelyan. “... They've been saying for weeks that the Beeman machine would be used. All the wise money was on Beeman machines. The damned Education tapes they ran through me were for Henslers and who uses Henslers?
...
“Don’t be a fool. They’ll tell me my brain was built for Henslers. Go argue. Everything went wrong. I was the only one who had to send out for a piece of equipment. Notice that?”
...
If it had been a Hensler, I would have known I was right. How could I match up then? The top winner was a San Franciscan. So were three of the next four. And the fifth guy was from Los Angeles. They get big-city Educational tapes. The best available. Beeman spectrographs and all. How do I compete with them? I came all the way out here just to get a chance at a Novian-sponsored Olympics in my classification and I might just as well have stayed home. I knew it, I tell you, and that settles it. Novia isn’t the only chunk of rock in space. Of all the damned –”
...
George said, “If you knew in advance that the Beemans were going to be used, couldn’t you have studied up on them?”

“They weren’t in my tapes, I tell you.”

“You could have read – books.”
...

Faringdon resembles Trevelyan, and seems to be incapable of thinking of being a George.
Most of the protagonists didn't recognise the creative people. They churned the handle in a system designed to automatically flag the creative for special treatment. The weird part of the story is the slow and clumsy way they do the final filtering, to ensure they have truly identified the creative. The poor suckers really go through hell feeling they have failed. Telling expectional people they are amazing every day is quite destructive, but this seems to swing to the opposite pole.
 

Offline tggzzz

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #52 on: July 09, 2023, 01:02:02 am »
Treez/ocset/faringdon appears to be an excellent exemplar of something described by Isaac Asimov in 1957. His novella "Profession" is still worth speedreading.
https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

The points in that resonated with me when I was a schoolkid, and significantly and positively benefited my career and outlook on life.
Are you sure you read that story? You seem to keep referencing it in contexts where it doesn't fit. The whole point of that story is the vast majority of people are incapable of doing anything really interesting, and the small number of truly creative are hard to recognise. There is nothing the vast majority of people can do about their lot in life. Only the small number of truly creative people can do anything about their lot in life, and really need to, as they can so easily be screwed by the clueless.

Incorrect.

For a start, the protagonists did recognise the truly creative George - because they were specifically looking for that. George didn't recognise it in himself, but that is a completely different issue.

More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
  • aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
  • aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditions
In other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.

The key section is about 70% of the way through
Quote
... said Trevelyan. “... They've been saying for weeks that the Beeman machine would be used. All the wise money was on Beeman machines. The damned Education tapes they ran through me were for Henslers and who uses Henslers?
...
“Don’t be a fool. They’ll tell me my brain was built for Henslers. Go argue. Everything went wrong. I was the only one who had to send out for a piece of equipment. Notice that?”
...
If it had been a Hensler, I would have known I was right. How could I match up then? The top winner was a San Franciscan. So were three of the next four. And the fifth guy was from Los Angeles. They get big-city Educational tapes. The best available. Beeman spectrographs and all. How do I compete with them? I came all the way out here just to get a chance at a Novian-sponsored Olympics in my classification and I might just as well have stayed home. I knew it, I tell you, and that settles it. Novia isn’t the only chunk of rock in space. Of all the damned –”
...
George said, “If you knew in advance that the Beemans were going to be used, couldn’t you have studied up on them?”

“They weren’t in my tapes, I tell you.”

“You could have read – books.”
...

Faringdon resembles Trevelyan, and seems to be incapable of thinking of being a George.
Most of the protagonists didn't recognise the creative people. They churned the handle in a system designed to automatically flag the creative for special treatment.

In other words that is a reasonable reflection of reality :(

Quote
The weird part of the story is the slow and clumsy way they do the final filtering, to ensure they have truly identified the creative. The poor suckers really go through hell feeling they have failed. Telling expectional people they are amazing every day is quite destructive, but this seems to swing to the opposite pole.

It is a story, a work of fiction.

Asimov set up the situation to enable him to write a story; don't read more into it than that!

Asimov did the same with his three laws of robotics: they are set up as a means of enabling his Susan Calvin stories.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 
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Offline coppice

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #53 on: July 09, 2023, 07:28:15 pm »
More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
  • aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
  • aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditions
In other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.
If you are from the UK, and old enough to have been through the grammar school system, this really resonates. In the 30s and 40s people on the left realised the way to expand opportunity for smart working class kids was to enhance an existing system which developed their inherent creativity. They took older grammar schools, and removed the economic impediments to poorer kids attending them. Then some idiot looked at schools in the US, which were explicitly modelled on a Prussian system for raising mindless military drones. Except in the US is was to produce mindless industrial drones. They thought this was fantastic, for its one size fits all egalitarian style. So the pushed, and got a lot of buy in from the wealthy. They were pissed off that grammar school kids were competing too well with their expensively educated public school offspring. This new idea for schooling the plebs was a perfect response. So, in the late 19060s a broad range of people converted the UK education system to the useless mess it is today. In the end, it has also hurt the public schools. They need to target the same GCSE and A level public exams as the state schools, and these exams have been massively watered down. So, they don't need to push the kids very much. Now, nobody in the UK gets a good education.

 
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Offline tggzzz

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #54 on: July 10, 2023, 12:17:34 am »
More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
  • aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
  • aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditions
In other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.
If you are from the UK, and old enough to have been through the grammar school system, this really resonates. In the 30s and 40s people on the left realised the way to expand opportunity for smart working class kids was to enhance an existing system which developed their inherent creativity. They took older grammar schools, and removed the economic impediments to poorer kids attending them. Then some idiot looked at schools in the US, which were explicitly modelled on a Prussian system for raising mindless military drones. Except in the US is was to produce mindless industrial drones. They thought this was fantastic, for its one size fits all egalitarian style. So the pushed, and got a lot of buy in from the wealthy. They were pissed off that grammar school kids were competing too well with their expensively educated public school offspring. This new idea for schooling the plebs was a perfect response. So, in the late 19060s a broad range of people converted the UK education system to the useless mess it is today. In the end, it has also hurt the public schools. They need to target the same GCSE and A level public exams as the state schools, and these exams have been massively watered down. So, they don't need to push the kids very much. Now, nobody in the UK gets a good education.

My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 
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Offline coppice

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #55 on: July 10, 2023, 01:50:16 am »
My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)
You must be younger than me, as ITA is from the 60s, and I could read before that. We were not inflicted with insanity like the "whole word teaching" of English reading either. So, even the weakest kids in the school learned to read fairly quickly. Your school must have turned comprehensive quite late. Lucky you. Where I grew up (Enfield, North London) I was in the last year of grammar school admission. It had no impact on us, and little in the following few years, but things gradually went downhill.

1960s grammar schools didn't work well across the entire UK. That's something I didn't really appreciate until later in life, talking to people from various places who had mixed views of these schools. The solution was not to tear the system down, though. It was to learn from the best, and spread that more evenly across the UK.
 
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Offline coppice

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #56 on: July 12, 2023, 08:07:47 pm »
My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)
You must be younger than me, as ITA is from the 60s, and I could read before that. We were not inflicted with insanity like the "whole word teaching" of English reading either. So, even the weakest kids in the school learned to read fairly quickly. Your school must have turned comprehensive quite late. Lucky you. Where I grew up (Enfield, North London) I was in the last year of grammar school admission. It had no impact on us, and little in the following few years, but things gradually went downhill.

1960s grammar schools didn't work well across the entire UK. That's something I didn't really appreciate until later in life, talking to people from various places who had mixed views of these schools. The solution was not to tear the system down, though. It was to learn from the best, and spread that more evenly across the UK.
I've been looking at ITA. It seems like it didn't get that much traction, unlike the crazy whole word or look and say approach. However, it looks like it was in the same vain as whole word. That is, a system designed to minimise the effectiveness of schools in teaching basic reading skills. Its seems there is no limit to how far some people will go to give their own kids an edge over others.
 

Offline tggzzz

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #57 on: July 12, 2023, 09:06:40 pm »
My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)
You must be younger than me, as ITA is from the 60s, and I could read before that. We were not inflicted with insanity like the "whole word teaching" of English reading either. So, even the weakest kids in the school learned to read fairly quickly. Your school must have turned comprehensive quite late. Lucky you. Where I grew up (Enfield, North London) I was in the last year of grammar school admission. It had no impact on us, and little in the following few years, but things gradually went downhill.

1960s grammar schools didn't work well across the entire UK. That's something I didn't really appreciate until later in life, talking to people from various places who had mixed views of these schools. The solution was not to tear the system down, though. It was to learn from the best, and spread that more evenly across the UK.
I've been looking at ITA. It seems like it didn't get that much traction, unlike the crazy whole word or look and say approach. However, it looks like it was in the same vain as whole word. That is, a system designed to minimise the effectiveness of schools in teaching basic reading skills. Its seems there is no limit to how far some people will go to give their own kids an edge over others.

Wow. That would be one hell of a conspiracy!

It is much easier to believe ITA was a well-intentioned cockup concocted by a few academics in a mutual-admiration support group - and which rapidly sank when its idiocy was exposed to daylight :)

I have no idea what the "whole word" and "look and say" approaches might have been. As I have said, learning to read is one of my earliest memories, so even if they existed I would have ignored them and continued reading the newspapers (family lore says I was doing that when I entered school; I can't remember either way).

Watching my daughter's primary school arithmetic lessons were interesting, and markedly better than when I was at school. She wasn't taught there was One Way to Multiply and Divide. She was taught that there are many ways, all based on how numbers work. Example: to multiply X by 99, it is easier to multiply X by 100 and then subtract X.

Mind you, the algorithms I was taught turned out to be useful when I had to implement floating point arithmetic on a 6800 during a vacation job in 1976 :) The only thing I had to ask was how to implement sin() and cos(). They spent 30mins introducing me to CORDIC algorithms, which made perfect and beautiful sense :) IIRC a sin/cos pair took about 30ms to compute on a 6800.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Offline coppice

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #58 on: July 12, 2023, 09:24:52 pm »
Wow. That would be one hell of a conspiracy!
Why does everything have to be described as a conspiracy. There are simply things where some idiot proposes a dumb idea, it fits the needs of various groups for various reasons, and they all run with it.
It is much easier to believe ITA was a well-intentioned cockup concocted by a few academics in a mutual-admiration support group - and which rapidly sank when its idiocy was exposed to daylight :)
There's usually a good reason why stupid ideas aren't nipped in the bud. They suit enough people to keep them moving forwards.
I have no idea what the "whole word" and "look and say" approaches might have been. As I have said, learning to read is one of my earliest memories, so even if they existed I would have ignored them and continued reading the newspapers (family lore says I was doing that when I entered school; I can't remember either way).
Look and say is the system the phonics people are still fighting against, which has wrecked reading standards in every English speaking country except South Africa, who did buy into it (at least that is my understanding). It basically turns learning to read English into learning to read "Chinese" by teaching kids to recognise whole words, instead of scanning them phonetically. This is based on only 80% of English spelling being close to phonetic. So, they even things out by making 100% of words hard to learn, instead of only 20%. If you can read Chinese you'll know that even Chinese isn't taught like that. Even in Chinese you break down the characters into parts (radicals) and recognise whole characters by parts that give phonetic clues, and parts that give clues to meaning.
Watching my daughter's primary school arithmetic lessons were interesting, and markedly better than when I was at school. She wasn't taught there was One Way to Multiply and Divide. She was taught that there are many ways, all based on how numbers work. Example: to multiply X by 99, it is easier to multiply X by 100 and then subtract X.

Mind you, the algorithms I was taught turned out to be useful when I had to implement floating point arithmetic on a 6800 during a vacation job in 1976 :) The only thing I had to ask was how to implement sin() and cos(). They spent 30mins introducing me to CORDIC algorithms, which made perfect and beautiful sense :) IIRC a sin/cos pair took about 30ms to compute on a 6800.
I wasn't taught there is only one way to multiply and divide. They taught us a standardised method and notation, then soon moved on to things like you described. I think they started with pointing out the pattern in the 9 times table, and how you can use things like that to reduce effort.
« Last Edit: July 12, 2023, 09:28:40 pm by coppice »
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: General Analog Electronics companies must stop killing themselves
« Reply #59 on: July 12, 2023, 09:36:12 pm »
The ITA scheme assumed that learning to read and learning to spell English were different subjects.
My mother taught ITA to second-graders in the 1960s, and understood that it was a variation on phonics (sounding out words from the spelling), without the irregular rules found in real English.
The parents hated it, since they couldn't read the new notation.
The reading instruction went to phonics with regular English spelling after the introduction through ITA.
She found that students that had transferred into Minnesota schools from other states that used "look-say" instruction were far behind the local students in early grades.
 


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