Hi,
Has anyone realised how bad things are getting with regard to accomodation in UK?
This is severely impacting on Electronics engineers ability to travel and relocate to new Electronics jobs in different parts of the country.
The UK electronics industry is scarce, and so EE's need to relocate often to be able to stay in work.
But relocation in UK is getting harder and harder, and much more expensive.
There are plenty of empty properties around, but the problem's still just getting worse.
Back in pre-2006, when you relocated to another part of UK for a job, you would simply get
a landlord name from the local paper, go along, shove 2 months rent and a deposit in their hand, and you'd get
the keys to the flat or bedsit.
You could leave before the 6 or 12 month tennancy expired, and they just rented it out to someone else.
You would loose your depost and pre-payed rent, but that was by the by.
Now, if you leave an accomodation contract inside the 6 months or 12 months, they get a private detective to track you down
and threaten you with the courts if you dont pay the remaining rent.
A 6 month minimum term should be illegal, it should be 2 months max. After all, in UK, you often relocate to
an electronics company and find out that its really just a "token" electronics company, and not got real
electronics work at all. So then you have to leave and find somewhere else to work...which inevitably involves relocation
again to another different part of UK.
I relocated to one Electronics job, and when i got there, found that my job was just to be a "slave" to a new MSc Electronics graduate.
I was told to transfer all my Power Supply knowledge to him.
He wasnt even interested in learning electronics. His father (who owned an electronics company) was just paying
the company to give his son his first 2 years "experience" in electronics. The new_grad wouldnt take any of my advice.
He would sit on the lab bench, and so any work had to be done through him, but then he would just go on his phone, or
sit there making solder pools on the ESD mat....strirring the molten solder round and round...just wasting time.
One time we had these Push pull SMPS's that another engineer had screwed up....they made us hand re-wire the PCBs to get them working.
It all needed twisted pair wiring.....but the new grad refused to twist the wires as i requested....so the push pulls still didnt work.
I had to then come into the company for the whole weekend unpayed and re-do them so that they worked for a customer visit on the monday.
This kind of thing happened often.
This is just one example. I relocated to another company that said they had plans for loads of R&D work.....but when i got there this was not so.
They made a rubbish "token" product, just to make them look like an Electronics
company, but the gaffer was only interested in his "backroom" Electronics importation business. He imported massive amounts of
Electronics in from China. So again, you need to leave such places, and again relocate somewhere else.