[Milsurplus] Re: Dead electronics

[Patrick Jankowiak]

Here's a short story of the decline of the electronics service 
industry. It's a narrow and jaded view, but representative I 
think. It's my ride on the bomb as it was dropped.

I began repairing TV sets in 1980, still alot of tube stuff, and 
modular, works in a drawer. I also rebuilt the modules. We used 
to replce the module, then rebuild it for the next job. I opened 
my own shop in 1984, and repaired stereos, TV's VCR's, microwave 
ovens, and started to repair personal computers. I also 
specialized in antique tube radio repair. In 1995, I sold the 
business to an enthusiastic young man with some money. He 
immediately raised the all the prices by 25% and was out of 
business in 3 years due to losing the customer base.

In 1995 I went to work for Sony's Business and Professional 
group, repairing broadcast monitors, analog and digital tape 
gear, high definition monitors, and analog and digital video 
effects switchers. All component-level troubleshooting. If you 
ever wanted to know how to trouble shoot a digital effects 
switcher to component level, see my little article:
http://www.montagar.com/~patj/dfs.htm

But I digress,
A year after I started there, they replaced the paper system of 
job tracking with a computer system. You ran a terminal program 
on a PC, which connected to a mainframe and kept the job records.

OOPS! An engineer could no longer bill out more than 8 hours a 
day and profits dropped drastically. Previously, we were told to 
bill what the estimate was approved for. Now, we had to use the 
computer to enter the 'clock' labor time instead of the 
'approved' labor time, and so it was impossible to work on more 
than one thing at a time (like of two or three), as we had done 
before.

Management tried to compensate by demanding more numbers of 
equipment fixed, but it changed nothing monetarily and decreased 
quality. Then they recanted, and we spent the appropriate amount 
of time on each job to restore the famous Sony Service Quality. 
My average repeat rate was 0.7% (which I am rather proud of by 
the way)

Two years after I started there, they decided to stop hiring 
experienced mature engineers and begin hiring what us old farts 
called "20-20's". A 20 year old with no experience and maybe 
still in the process of earning an associates degree, who would 
work for $20K/yr and like it.

I was pretty cheezed off when one punk kid and I both applied for 
a field engineer job. He got it (never mind my 20 years 
experience to his 9 months). So no big deal, managers are stupid 
sometimes, but if you recall the last Olympics held in Japan, and 
then something in Australia in the outback (huge contracts for 
Sony who leases and sets up all the gear for the networks, I mean 
a massive system), he refused to go, because he said was afraid 
of travel overseas due to religious and safety issues, and kept 
talking about Japanese geisha houses of sin, heathens, snakes, 
and scorpions. So it's not all the companies, it is the workforce 
that is becoming / has become defective. My manager admitted his 
mistake to me later and told me I was right, but I never did get 
the field job.

They also expected us to train the 2020's, and then secretly 
intended to replace us with them in order to cut their payroll to 
maybe 1/3 or so. One of us discovered their plan, (don't hold 
management concalls in a room next to the senior engineer's desk) 
and we stopped helping them do anything.

The evil plan thwarted, things went ok for us, leaving the 2020's 
to repair VHS recorders and standard video monitors, and 8mm 
camcorders (as befitting their level of experience) and even 
these they had alot of 'repeat' work with. Management tried to 
fix it by sending them (instead of us) to the more advanced Sony 
trainings, but it didn't really do any good because the goofy 
kids had an attention span about as long as their shorthairs. It 
proves you can send a monkey to class to learn to repair a 
digital betacam deck, but he'll never be able to do it because he 
has marbles for brains. This really frustrated the management.. 
When the 2020's would ask how to align something, we'd say, "I 
don't know, did you read the manual?" (yes the 5 of us 'old 
farts' agreed over a lunch, to withdraw our knowledge base from 
the children in order to protect our jobs in the face of the 
evidence -it's called survival)

I was pretty cheezed off when one punk kid and I both applied for 
a field engineer job. He got it. So no big deal, but if you 
recall the last Olympics held in Japan, and then something in 
Australia on the outback (huge contracts for Sony who sets up all 
the gear), he refused to go, because he said was afraid of travel 
overseas, kept talking about heathens and scorpions. I laughed in 
his face and told him to be a man. In front of the boss. So it's 
not all the companies, it is the workforce that is becoming 
defective.

Three years later Sony closed the service departments across the 
country and consolidated it all in Norcross GA.

Now, the Sony Norcross Service Center is what we call a 
boiler-room or a sweatshop. We sent a spy there and have images. 
They don't wanna see nothin but 10,000 square feet of a55#0135 
and elbows. Instead of a 15x20 work area with workbench, desk, 
computer, phone, and three 7' racks of test equipment per 
engineer like in Dallas, Norcross has half a desk per technician 
(which is also the workbench), no phones (phones waste time), a 
3' rack with a video monitor and cheap scope and signal generator 
that sits on the desk, and a computer that only runs the work 
application (no internet or research -it wastes time). There is 
real test gear, but it is rolled around in a few racks and shared 
10-1. Oh yeah, they work shifts, so you hot-seat with the next 
guy, and share the provided hand tools with him and everything 
else including his diseases and biohazards. So-called 'team 
leaders' go around and show the unwashed masses what to check 
next as they ignorantly swap out boards until the thing works (it 
is not allowed to component-level troubleshoot. that is a waste 
of time.) -So they keep 'em dumbed down, and basically they're 
trapped in Norcross at a dead end job.

I declined the Sony offer to move to Norcross and have not 
regretted it. It would be like moving from the taj mahal to a 
cardboard box, and someone kicking the box.

So is partially chronicled my bumpy ride with Sony Service as 
they suicidally lost sight of quality and became no better than 
Panasonic Service.

This year I hear that Sony is going to open up some service 
centers, and try to recover their reputation. Too late probably. 
They'll never get the good engineers back that they lost (nor the 
big money customers).