The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#22 – The Hard Work Hypothesis

We wanted to try out a title similar to the style of The Big Bang Theory…we love it!

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An early submission from @wa7iut:

Comments

  1. But Extech didn’t recall the killer meter, did they? And Microchip didn’t fix any issues with the PICkit 3, did they?

  3. About the salary of different people, in my country (Chile):
    – A technician (out from high school): 400 to 600 USD/month
    – A plain engineer (almost BS, like me): 1000 to 1200 USD/month
    – A grad engineer (BS or MS): 2000 to 6000 USD/month
    – PhDs, really don’t know, but mostly teaching at college and some research consulting: 2000+ USD/month

  4. What, no discussion about DIY ICs?

    It could well be that Dave already lost his “not in my lifetime” claim. These guys http://mrkimrobotics.com/ print transistors. If you get the PDF from that site and go to page 35, they are already going for a bistable inverter. Multiple transistors, fabed on one substrate, combined to provide a certain function, that is an integrated circuit in my book.

  6. Fascinating dialogs! Consider me a newly-found regular listener 🙂 I put this on in the background, and now I’m addicted, and have been listening to your other casts all day…

    Thanks for the dialog on OSHW, and my post on the End of the OSHW Cambrian Age. The Cambrian Age could have been characterized by the absence of competitive evolutionary pressures, and in that excess there was found surplus functionality and creativity. Arthropods with hundreds of legs, stomachs on the outside, long funnel mouths – funky, different, odd, wasteful?… but creative. Life had just exploded, diversity thrived uninhibitedly. Introducing competitive pressure (levels of the food chain and predators) may be akin to modern market cost pressure. Price pressure is like a trilobite with sharp teeth – it forces lesser animal variations to evolve to be competitive. Force the price of arduino shields lower and lower, to mass production, and their flexibility and functionality diminish. Experimentation is restricted, degrees of freedom reduced. A DIY’er is more likely to throw on an extra accelerometer – just for the heck of it – while a company says, shave that $15 off in the name of gross margin. Sad!

  7. @Dave… yeah the failure to cite you is a breach of Journalistic credibility. (I have a degree in journalism) Not citing you in that story is irresponsible journalism and not too surprising for NPR.

    • Agreed Eddie. I wonder how often NPR does this. My experience with them has not been good with them anyway.

  9. I saw the article in EE Times on “execs” divulging inside info as consultants. The titles of people mentioned in the article, though, are manager and director. There were no VPs or chief officers. My suspicion is that these information gathering companies pay modest “consulting” fees to rank-and-file workers at public companies. The people doing the gathering can piece together a larger picture out of the little bits of info the rank-and-file workers share.

    I have seen analysts try to do this while visiting a public company by simply asking workers probing questions. This consulting stuff is the same type of thing but obviously way over the line of propriety.

    If my initial suspicion is right, EE Times missed the point of this story by using “execs” in the title.