As you can probably guess from the title… I’ve been laid off from my mechanism controls position. My company had been doing layoffs for about 3 ½ years at this point so I lasted pretty long.

I’ve worked in the Aerospace industry for over 11 years now and there are some things I just don’t get.

“You can’t cut your way to growth”

During a down turn for a company they often times go into a serious cost cutting mode. Typically this means you pick up more of your health insurance, the cleaning crews stop coming, and the admins are no longer allow to provide napkins and plastic forks in little kitchenettes. Usually it also means layoffs, small raises and no promotions.

Obviously when the company is making less money it makes sense for that company to cut expenses. However, there’s an adage in business though – “You can’t cut your way to growth.” In other words you can’t just cut costs and expect to grow. Sure most companies are a little fat during good times so some targeted layoffs at the beginning of a downturn makes sense. But deep cuts in staffing don’t make sense from a long-term business standpoint.

Thoughts to consider when cutting staff

My premise is that a certain level of staff cutting is detrimental. And most people would probably respond with a “DUH!”

In my experience, in the Aerospace industry, most companies cut way too many people. Companies cut and cut and cut and cut and… Until they get profitable again. But the cutting rarely has anything to do with why the company (at least in the Aerospace industry) became profitable again. Typically the company has devoted a lot of resources to winning new sales and when it rains it pours. The company wins a big contract or a couple of them and now they don’t have the capacity to fill that contract without hiring. Now with each contract/sale won new people need to be hired.

New people require training and even when they walk into a job pretty much ready to go there are still processes and people to learn. Your older engineers, who are often in a position to define the direction and design of new products, are the only real exception. But the cost of hiring new people isn’t the only cost to be considered.

When companies cut too many people they lose capabilities. Those capabilities are lost both in the here and now and in the future. Not only are those capabilities lost but they have moved – most likely to a competitor. Along with the skills that those engineers have the company also loses all those half formed thoughts for new products or a better way to build or use an existing product.

Slow times are an opportunity – an opportunity usually squandered

In the Aerospace industry most of the products take years to develop. When times are good for the company is going gang-busters making what they promised to make. However, everyone is busy so who has the time to devote 10/20/30 hrs a week to a program that might fail? Ever work on one of those during busy times? I have and at best it seems you are ignored for your failure. At worst it harms your reputation within the company. Never mind that you put in lots of unpaid hours chasing a new product that is often someone else’s brain child – someone who doesn’t bother to stick around long enough to implement it.

Slow times at a company are an opportunity to improve processes, explore new technologies, and pursue more higher education. At my last employer I advocated using the slow time to allow senior engineers the opportunity to pursue their pet projects or more education while splitting their duties on current programs with junior engineers. That way the junior engineers can be brought further along and made more capable. The senior engineers can pursue projects that lead to future products. Everyone wins, the company has new products to sell, new capabilities to market, and the engineers’ career continues to move forward. The usual alternative is to give small or no raises and very few promotions. In this case, everyone loses it’s just a matter of degrees.

Source:  http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/29317#newcomments

Hello Members,

Please go through this BBC story of the Chinese built/launched communications satallite for the Nigerian government. Here http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7726951.stm

The satellite was launched about two years ago and it is confirmed packed up.

Apart from the indicated power problem, what could be other causes of the satellite failure?

Cheers,

ethobil

Observations

The BBC article stated that the Nigerian satellite

1. … was limited because the type of frequency it used was disturbed by clouds in the atmosphere, and did not work properly in Nigeria’s rainy season or during the Harmattan, when clouds of dust blow down from the Sahara, he said.
2. … also operated on frequencies already allocated to other companies and interfered with other providers’ equipment.
3. … controllers shut the satellite down because it was having problems with its power supply, the government announced.

The observations in #1 and #2 are items that I learned to look out for before I graduated with my Bachelors.

Background for Observation #2:  Operating a satellite on another satellite’s frequency is both extraordinarily rude and stupid.  Interference from the satellite assigned that frequency will make both satellites useless for significant portions of their design life.  Obviously this is to be avoided and there are agencies to regulate these frequencies.

Background for Observation #1:  This is amatuer hour stuff.  Anyone with satellite TV or satellite radio knows that weather interferes with transmissions.  The thing is, the impact of weather can be minimized if not eliminated if you pick the correct frequency.

You may be asking why I addressed #2 first and then #1.  The answer is this, Observaton #2 shows that the Nigerians didn’t do even the most basic homework and contact the proper authorities.  Observation #1 reinforces this notion through an ignorance of basic satellite operations and limitations.

Observations #1 & #2 demonstrate that on the Nigerian customer (at least those in charge) didn’t know the first thing about what they were buying.  Questions about operations, lifetime, and weather are pretty basic and I learned to ask those questions before graduating with my Bachelors.

The final Observation

Observation #3 is that the satellite was shut down for power problems.  This could be something like a battery failure, power subsystem failure, solar array failure, or ADCS failure (which could point the arrays or the whole satellite the wrong way).

Given that the Nigerians didn’t do their homework – to know which frequency to use for their communications satellite, nor did they do enough homework to contact the correct regulatory agencies – before buying an expensive piece of hardware it only makes sense that they didn’t do their homework regarding system testing.

My guess is that the Chinese bid cheap re-using a satellite they designed for someone else.  This is common practice to reduce cost and risk.  But there are always custom changes when requirements change or new, updated hardware is added to the design.  If you don’t test the integrated system properly the chances of failure are high.  The Nigerian satellite was probably a recycled telecom satellite from another customer and some component of power system (like bateries) or the ADCS system (like attitude sensors or thrusters) was replaced.

An example of what I’m thinking…

An ADCS sensor, lets use a gyro for now, is replaced.  The new sensor comes from the same manufactuerer with the same power, size, and mounting requirements.  However, this new sensor provides its output in a different coordinate system such that 2 of the 3 axes (X & Y) are identical to the previous sensor but the 3rd axis (Z) is -1 of the original.  Without thorough design effort and proper integrated system testing, this -1 is easy to miss.  Then the whole satellite ends up pointed away from the sun and runs out of power.

The Nigerians missed the easy stuff, why would we assume they got the hard stuff, like proper testing, correct?

This time Phoenix stays dead…

Where the Phoenix lander is on Mars it’s winter.  Phoenix ran out of power recently.  The 2 rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have to fight for their own survival every Martian winter.  Why?  Because they use solar arrays.  Solar arrays that degrade with time.  Solar arrays that degrade with the deposition of dust.  Solar arrays that don’t produce much power when the Sun isn’t very high in the sky.

Power constraints have hampered interplanetary probes in the past.  The problem is that once a probe gets out near Jupiter there just isn’t enough sun light to do much.  Even large arrays can’t entirely overcome the problem of “not enough light”.

We have $100 million missions that end because of power

We have missions to Mars and Jupiter and beyond.  Some like Cassini use nuclear power.  Others use solar power.  Some missions, like Phoenix, have ended not because of mechanical failure, communications failure, or a lack of good science that still needs doing but because they have too little power.

A lack of power has not stopped the Voyager missions decades after their launch.  A lack of power doesn’t need to kill or maim anymore Mars missions.  A Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) is the answer.

Next post: What is an RTG?

Next Next post: Why people are scared.

Brain Drain

For decades now the US has been the place for the best and brightest from other countries to study.  I sizable chunk decide to stay especially in engineering.  As a result when various companies and the US gov decided they needed more engineers they simply imported them.

God forbid we

1. actually pay and treat engineers like they are professionals
2. give them something to do other than shuffle paper work and dodge management

And yet some people still lamented the lack of native born engineers graduating from our schools.  Some were so blind as to wonder why so few were graduating.

Well it’s time to start paying the bill…

India’s Space Program

A large chunk of our imported engineers come from India.  Often they come here because opportunities are limited in India for people born to the wrong caste.  So the people that can get to the US come over, study engineering, and stay.  But it is harder and harder for them to get jobs in Aerospace since most of the Aerospace companies have chosen to pursue defense work.

Now India has started its own space program while the US program slowly decays.  A number of those Indian engineers that stayed here are asking if there are jobs in their home country working on the space program.

The economy in the US is tanking making jobs harder to come by.  The US space program and surrounding Aerospace industry is less welcoming than it used to be.  And many would like to go home if they can find good job opportunities.

Reverse Brain Drain

The emerging space programs of China and India are a serious threat to the US technological superiority.  It may be years before the programs show a string of years with real funding and enthusiasm at home.  However, once those programs are established a much larger percentage of those foreign born engineers that come here to study will go back home when they are finished.

We will have fewer engineers in the coming years.  Without something inspirational to bring native US kids back into engineering it will only get worse.  I’ve complained about the pay and nature of the business where companies lay off large numbers of people every time their sales hiccup for a quarter but that’s not really the problem.

We can’t keep expecting to drain the brains of India and China

The problem is a lack of inspiration and vision.  As India and China demonstrate space programs that are a point of national pride they will become a more and more appealing career prospect.   As such it will become harder and harder to keep young foreign born engineers from going back to their country of origin.  However, the US lacks any serious goal for aspiring engineers to tackle.

There are inspirations out there, just no one with vision AND money

I’m a fan of space exploration and I think serious exploration – not just toy cars on Mars – would inspire.  But so would serious nano-tech, artificial intelligence, robotics (like Honda’s Asimo), alternative energy, and several other fields.

Instead we have risk averse companies who have reduced their R&D to incremental improvement shops.  The gov is just as risk averse and every satellite/R&D program is just 1 baby step better than the last.  In Aerospace the holy grail is propulsion.  In propulsion we’ve barely invented the wheel let alone an automobile.  Until the X-Prize was won almost no company spent any money on even incrementally better propulsion.  Even today the total dollar amount is a pittance.

If we want to continue to lead the world in technology (and by extension the world economy) then we need to get serious.  We need to choose 1 or 2 major project that can change everything – like alternative energy, Sci-Fi style propulsion, etc.  We need to get serious about real basic scientific research and serious engineering R&D.  You don’t make great leaps forward with risk averse baby steps.

Thankfully there’s at least DARPA, if only we could get about 1000 more of those going…

Here’s the article that inspired this rant:

Source Article

This is obviously off topic but it’s a big issue in the US.  The bailout and how to pay for it?

US Bank Bailout

After years of making ridiculous profits and providing obscene compensation to CEOs, the US taxpayer is being asked to bailout our mortgage industry.  One story after another points to 2 factors for the shear number of bad loans: #1 – lying loan officers; #2 – an unrealistic belief that everyone is entitled to a single family stand alone home.

The banking industry based their risk decisions on an ever taller more unstable house of cards – financial models the business side of the company didn’t understand.  The model builders should have known that their models can extrapolate but the predictions are questionable at best – they are incompetent if they did not.

We are still working on a bailout plan.  As of this point, the bailout is lots of dollars going directly to Wall Street.  Shouldn’t it go to individual home owners?  The biggest problem for the Wall Street firms is the uncertainty of the quality of the loans they made and how much do they own.  Secure the underlying home loans and the uncertainty becomes much smaller.  As a result you keep people in their homes, prevent whole neighborhoods from hurting because of a few foreclosures, help individuals instead of mega-corps, and free up credit.

How to pay?

Obviously any bailout will be expensive.  I am believer that we owe the Iraqis something for getting them into this mess.  I also believe that we in the US will suffer, long term, consequences if we leave before the country is semi-secure.

The question, with this bailout, becomes this: the Iraq war is putting wear and tear on our military equipment and men, where does the money come from to pay for bringing our military readiness back up to the proper levels?  The bailout sucks up any “extra” the US may have had or could borrow.  The longer the US is in the Iraq, the more expensive the military rebuilding will be.

We can’t afford to pay for both.  The longer we stay the larger the chance is that the US will have to pull out quickly because of money.  The sooner we begin to pull out the more smoothly we can accomlish the pull out and the more stable we can leave Iraq.

Large sums of money…

Large sums of money are going to Wall Street and Iraq.  Neither place is the right place for our money right now.

Layoffs suck…

I work in the Aerospace industry.  It used to be a 7 year cycle of ups and downs.  Thankfully the 7 year cycle doesn’t appear to be sync’ed in time between the different Aerospace companies.  Unfortunately the 7 year cycle appears to be more like 3 or 4 years now.

During the down side of the Aerospace business cycle layoffs happen (also read s**t happens).  Over this last year my company has been in a constant state of trickling layoffs.  My employer has stated that people with the correct skill set will be kept.  The reality appears to be that dumb luck defines who stays and who goes.

A state of constant layoffs drives morale into the basement.  As a result most people who can find a satisfactory replacement job have done so.  That isn’t to say the rest of us are unemployable by another company but many are looking for a job in just the right place with the right salary and several other factors.  There’s no need to take just any job so long as you still have your current job.

Morale after over a year of constant layoffs

The morale in any company after over a year in a state of constant layoffs is always terrible.  There is no other way to describe it.  After a year, every employee

1. has lost faith in their upper management to fix the situation. 
2. is sick of waiting for things to get better on their own. 
3. is sick of the revolving door of hirings, firings, adn reorganizations at the top. 
4. has had their hopes for a promotion in the near future quashed.
5. has gotten no raise or a crummy raise.
6. has watched a lot of friends leave or get the pink slip.
7. feels unappreciated.
8. is ready to move on. 

So who’s left?

 After a year of layoffs, who’s left?  You can probably answer that for yourself but it boils down to the people with no ambition and the people looking for another job.  The people looking won’t just stop looking when things get better.

Do layoffs payoff?

Layoffs happen.  After a couple of years of good profits most companies have some deadwood.  Short targeted layoffs are probably worth doing every so often.  Long, drawn out layoffs just drive everyone to look for alternative employment.

In engineering, there is a “coming up speed” time that every new employee goes through.  New employees have to learn the ins and outs of the company’s processes.  New employees have to learn the people involved.  New employees have to learn the already developed tools and the tools that still need development.  Replacing an engineer is not cheap but the true cost doesn’t appear to be recognized by the guys at the top.

MATLAB Pricing

MATLAB is a great tool.  I use it every day and have few complaints.  However, I’d like to use it for personal purposes.  The price of MATLAB makes its use for personal purposes cost prohibitive.  As of Sept. 14th, 2008 the prices are

• MATLAB: $1900
• Simulink: $3000
• Control System Toolbox: $1000
• Signal Processing Toolbox: $800

This is the basic MATLAB package I’ve always had as a professional.  Sometimes I have other toolboxes but I always have at least these.  Can most of us afford $6700 for personal use?

The MATLAB Monopoly

If MATLAB had any real competition, would the price still be $1900 for just MATLAB?  There are 2 competitors that I know of and neither is really a true competitor.  The first competitor is OCTAVE a free MATLAB like program.  In my brief examination of OCTAVE for use on my website I found it to be lacking most of the functionality of MATLAB.  The second competitor I come across is SimApp.  I’ve been in contact with a marketing person here in Colorado for SimApp and the price I was given was $500.  They have several licenses but I haven’t dug around the site to see what license you get for $500.  SimApp is a much smaller application with much less to it than MATLAB.

The purpose of SimApp is to offer only what we need most of the time and to do so at a reasonable price.  Mathworks offers items in toolboxes for the same purpose – at I assume that’s why.  However, their prices aren’t reasonable.

Is there justification for MATLAB’s price?

Like Microsoft, Mathworks is the only game in town and they set whatever price they want.  The price is high and I don’t like it but is it justified?

The Mathworks updates MATLAB about twice a year.  For the most part it is bug fixes and minor improvements.  Very rarely is there serious new functionality included in these updates.  For MATLAB 2008a the major upgrade is in Object Oriented programming.  The new interface is light years better than the old but the functionality isn’t new.

Most of the improvements I heard of over the last couple of years have involved improved plotting tools.  Some tools are new like a GUI interface to allow for interactive regression on the plot.  The other plotting improvements are bug fixes in my opinion (i.e. bugs like the aspect ratios not remaining fixed in certain uses of the saveas function).  After all these years, they still haven’t gotten the bode plot right in my opinion.

Conclusion

This latest round of installations for MATLAB 2008a really made me and a lot of my coworkers very angry.  There was a lot of extra work to get it installed.  And the only reason for our having the extra was that Mathworks didn’t do the work themselves.  In essence Mathworks let the users do beta testing of the MATLAB 2008a installation process on a full release version.  Kind of like every new Microsoft operating system, this program wasn’t ready for general release.

Since many of us who use and love MATLAB have long been cranky about the price for an individual license, there is some latent hostility and strong beliefs about knocking the chip off Mathworks’ shoulder.

MATLAB is a great program and every company has a right to set their own price to maximize profit.  That doesn’t mean users have to happy about it.  Companies with real competition worry more about irritating their customers.  That or they go out of business.

P.S.: 64 bit MATLAB

I have a 64 bit Quad core PC.  I installed 64 bit MATLAB on it.  However, anything in Simulink that requires a compiler doesn’t work.  Mathworks doesn’t ship a compatible compiler.  The only compiler compatible with Simulink on a 64 bit installation is a special installation of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Professional.  It seem kind of silly to install a $300 program just for the compiler.

Obviously, Mathworks should have included a compatible compiler.  The tech support was very helpful in this but only after I got nasty with them.  And the first level tech suggested more than one incorrect fix and this got to be time consuming.

Wikipedia Links: Removal of Links by Over Zealous Users

Wikipedia is beginning to get a bad reputation for over zealous users. These users usually have some pet peave and go about eliminating that pet peave with a single minded focus. These aggressive users removed a bunch of edits and links I’d posted to Wikipedia (my experience). Obviously Wikipedia does no one any good if it becomes a link farm for spammers. However, I feel that these users are chasing away quality content with their over zealous removal of others’ edits. Especially in technical fields they know nothing about.

Wikipedia Links: Removal of Quality Links

Wikipedians that followed my links were on my site for an average almost 3 minutes and viewed approximately 3 pages.  Many of my current user list are Wikipedians that followed my links.  I feel like my site stats justified my links on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Links: Getting around over zealous Wikipedia users

So I’ve decided to help you get around these irritating users.  If you have a quality site with quality content using the following steps for posting Wikipedia links:

1. Create multiple users for posting links – harder to remove all of your external links
2. Create templates for you external links – consider incorporating the Extlink template into your link posting template – this hides your external links from over zealous users
3. Post some text before and after the external link – this makes it harder for those previewing you posts (contributions) quickly to see that you included a link

Wikipedia Links: Guidelines for external link posting

Guidelines:

1. Post no more than 3 links per each of your user per day
2. Do not post from each user each day
3. Post external links to content on your site that directly relates to the Wikipedia page you are posting to – someone will get angry, for good reason, if you just post to a generic page
4. Since you are limited in how many quality links you can really provide think carefully about which pages will serve your purposes best and only post once on these targeted pages

Wikipedia Links: Link to honest, quality content

If you link to a link farm or to garbage then word will get around.  You external links will go down before you can post another one.  Your site will get a bad reputation.  Your multiple users will immediately be recognized as sockpuppets.  You can’t get around 1000s of people looking to remove any sign of your existence from Wikipedia.

I’ve used MATLAB for my day-to-day tasks for over 7 years now.  If you include the time I’ve spent using MATLAB in school I’ve been using it for close to 10 years.  In general I think MATLAB and Simulink are great products and the Mathworks has done a lot to develop an image as the industry standard tool.

MATLAB 2008a Installation woes

That said, MATLAB 2008a has a new installation and activation procedure.  This requires either an active internet connection or a lot of jumping through hoops.  We just love that when we consider installing it on classified PCs that, by design, have no internet connection.

On my unclassified PC I had no apparent problems with the MATLAB 2008a installation and activation.  It took a little bit of time for the Mathworks server to get to provide my PC with the necessary go-ahead commands but that didn’t bother me.  At least until I couldn’t use MATLAB 2008a after the first reboot.  Yeah the license file includes the PC name in it – and that name appears to be case sensitive – so on reboot our company network somehow changed the case and I couldn’t use MATLAB 2008a.

2008a Uninstall woes

On top of that our company license allows for MATLAB to be installed on up to 4 PCs and up to 2 PCs can run MATLAB concurrently under the same license.  I’ve got 5 PCs at work.  I tested 2008a on the oldest PC as the most of the newer ones were tied up doing some heavy duty data reduction.  I wanted to be sure that 2008a performed just like the previous versions did.  2008a performed just fine.  At least until I attempted to uninstall it.

Uninstallation requires a deactivation process.  Much like the activation process, the deactivation process did not work like it should.  In fact, it didn’t work at all for me.  I had to talk to Mathworks tech support who then killed the oldest PC’s activation on their end.  On about the 3rd try with support I was finally able to deactivate that installation.

2008a: The bottom line…

Don’t install 2008a unless you have a really good reason for doing so.  I’m one of the early adopters in my company and I’ll probably skip the installation 2008b.  I’m hoping that by the 2009a version that Mathworks will have it head out of its ass.

Mathworks has every right to dictate license terms.  They have every right to dictate installation procedures.  And I have every right to be pissed that their new installation process wasted a whole lot of my time.

I have only detailed the problems I’ve had.  Others in my company have had a whole slew of other problems.  These problems are ameturish and should not happen in a product as old as MATLAB.  Changing the installation process that worked just fine (as far as this user is concerned) should either (a) make my life easier as the user or (b) at least be no worse.  Unfortunately, the new process is terrible.  It is horrible and whoever let it get through the Mathworks QA dept. should be smacked with dogbert’s wand of wisdom.

I recently read a blog posting on CR4 that posed the question: “Science and technology change culture.  Are voters educated well enough in science and technology to assess who should be the US president come 2009?”

The replies to post immediately posed questions about God and religion.  I originally took this reply to be a joke.  But then every reply treated the original reply as serious and discussion worthy.  Besides being off topic, the reply annoys the hell out of me.

If you believe God gave you free will then you have a responsibility to educate yourself with respect to key issues.  If God did not give you free will then there is no harm in being educated on the key issues if only to help you understand God’s plan.  If you don’t believe in God then obviously you are responsible for your own actions and must be educated.

Technology is key to US national security.  Technology is key the US economy.  Bleading edge science in nanotech, genetcis, and computers are vital to growth of the US economy in coming decades.  Irresponsible use of nanotech could pose pollution style threats to our health.  How can we afford to be ignorant?