Concerned About Miller Quality

[Franz©]

Hate to say this but graduating in 2019 with Zero Debt may present a disadvantage with many employers.
The wonderful folks in HR love new ires wh are deep i debt and scared smitless to miss a payment and ruin their credit score. They can be driven hard, put up wet and driven hard 10 hours later.

My young associates in engineering tell me they are supervising older engineers with less skill making more money and when they bring it to the attention of management & HR they are informed they lack age and years on the job to jump up another level on the pay ladder. The kids simply don't know how to put an argument together, and for at least 6 years of their education they have been taught to never argue, just accept. The only one of the group who will and does argue is the 28 year old female mathematician. She just points out how many with her qualifications exist in the company, and she can start at U of R tomorrow for the same money and benefit package. She also can in minutes calculate cost to her employer to replace her and loss of profit from her not being there since she alone knows the projects in her house.

Harris brings in train loads of new engineers twice a year, and sheds 75% within 6 months. It's cheaper to ire 4 and shed 3 than it is to hunt the 1 you really want in the open field. Lochede does the same using a slightly different program. Both are headed for a world of problems in 2023-4 when the old farts who actually know the programs retire and the kids have nobody to answer their questions.

We have way too much Team Think and Team involvement, and the people actually doing the work and accomplishing the goal aren't being identified and rewarded. Add in EEOC and you got a nightmare.

[Auto_Tech]

Folks -- ITW still makes around 28.8% margins on their Miller boxes, although growth in sales has been in a downward trend. Lincoln Electric makes around 16.9% margins on the boxes and their organic sales have been in free fall.

One would think Miller given its higher margins would be willing to add some add'l quality / reliability in the product given they have margin discretionary to "plow" back into R&D, product reliability enhancement................that appears not to be the case..........

Reality is the space is now over-crowded and the cheaper **** is displacing quality and manufacturers of quality products in the marketplace...

[Scottneh]

I am always happy and willing to pay a premium for for premium equipment.

What pisses me off is when a company known for being premium rides on that reputation and delivers a box where the Chinese writing has been scrapped off.

I'm just trying to figure out that if there is so much good luck with Miller out there than why did I buy four pieces of equipment and end up with four warranty claims. I'm not running it overly hard...at least I don;t think i am...never got any warnings or faults or any indication I was pushing anything too hard until the board just failed.

Maybe it doesn't matter, everything will go to inverter based and the problems will just roll in. best bet might be to just buy one miller and one Lincoln so I have a back up when the other has a warranty claim.

[jjohn76]

Franz, I think I sense a bit of sarcasm in your "less skilled" comment. My "industry" accounts for a pretty heavy attrition as well, where the 20 year "management" ladder dwindling down to 8% of the initial entry work force. I would say "less skilled" is very subjective, and new employees often don't understand or buy in to the organization's values (which informs their value to the organization seen in the paycheck). If they're supervising engineers, then part of their value comes from leadership and negotiation, and the other part comes from their ability to apply their knowledge to develop skills relevant to the organization (technical and interpersonal). The mathematician seems to understand the business' tangible/financial values though at some point I would imagine for her to climb the pay ladder any further, she would need to demonstrate her worth to the cultural values of the organization. It doesn't sound like she has a succession plan, as the basis of her argument is her company needs her to stay exactly where she is. That promotes neither growth nor efficiency. Clearly I don't have a completely informed opinion, but just my thoughts...

[Franz©]

John the mathbabe hasa plan, and a list of employers wanting to hire her. We have U of R, RIT, and a few smaller colleges in a 20 mile radius, and other defense contractors as well. Harris made the mistake of bringing her into a HR project where she ran numbers for them to extrapolate new hires, retention & benefits. HR was sure the girl with the calculator couldn't possibly understand what the numbers actually related to. She did and does.

When corporations reach a certain level of bodies, too many models and dynamics come into the shop. I been watching since the 50s when Deming wet to Japan and US manufacturing went to minimally trained interchangeable low skill employees. I made good money replacing people with machines, and if I hadn't someone else would have.
I'll flat out tell you I'm a mercenary. You pay I play, you don't pay I Can't Hear You.
I well remember the pension plan rapes of the 50s & 60s where employers sought to stay in business by spending future employee pensions on new product lines. Remember Hickock? They were so sure they'd own the automotive seat belt market they spent every pension dollar and borrowed more so they could learn they made wallets and pants belts, not car seat belts.
How about Wonder Bread, originally Continental baking, then part of ITT, then down the slow road to Bankruptcy. Plenty of employees sold out by the Bakers Union along that 20 year path.

Industry changes and no job is forever any more. Employees either learn & grow by and for themselves, or get ground to dust.
You ever hear of a company called Kodak? Sold down the river by their major institutional stock holders for quick return. 70,000 jobs gone bye by. How about Xerox? Born in Rochester, grew to a major industry in Rochester, built acres of buildings in Rochester and died in Rochester from poor management decisions. Xerox even patented the first computer mouse. X encouraged employees to invest their retirement $$ in X stock and blew the $$$ right into the pockets of Ursula Burns & her pals. Employees were encouraged to cut their own throats and did while Ursula got rich.

Any employee with loyalty to a company beyond the paycheck is flat screwed.

[jjohn76]

That's depressing...

[aametalmaster]

And Singer, for the most part gone. Just a name now selling less than good products...Bob

[tackit]

John the mathbabe hasa plan, and a list of employers wanting to hire her. We have U of R, RIT, and a few smaller colleges in a 20 mile radius, and other defense contractors as well. Harris made the mistake of bringing her into a HR project where she ran numbers for them to extrapolate new hires, retention & benefits. HR was sure the girl with the calculator couldn't possibly understand what the numbers actually related to. She did and does.

When corporations reach a certain level of bodies, too many models and dynamics come into the shop. I been watching since the 50s when Deming wet to Japan and US manufacturing went to minimally trained interchangeable low skill employees. I made good money replacing people with machines, and if I hadn't someone else would have.
I'll flat out tell you I'm a mercenary. You pay I play, you don't pay I Can't Hear You.
I well remember the pension plan rapes of the 50s & 60s where employers sought to stay in business by spending future employee pensions on new product lines. Remember Hickock? They were so sure they'd own the automotive seat belt market they spent every pension dollar and borrowed more so they could learn they made wallets and pants belts, not car seat belts.
How about Wonder Bread, originally Continental baking, then part of ITT, then down the slow road to Bankruptcy. Plenty of employees sold out by the Bakers Union along that 20 year path.

Industry changes and no job is forever any more. Employees either learn & grow by and for themselves, or get ground to dust.
You ever hear of a company called Kodak? Sold down the river by their major institutional stock holders for quick return. 70,000 jobs gone bye by. How about Xerox? Born in Rochester, grew to a major industry in Rochester, built acres of buildings in Rochester and died in Rochester from poor management decisions. Xerox even patented the first computer mouse. X encouraged employees to invest their retirement $$ in X stock and blew the $$$ right into the pockets of Ursula Burns & her pals. Employees were encouraged to cut their own throats and did while Ursula got rich.

Any employee with loyalty to a company beyond the paycheck is flat screwed.

We lost two major plants in our area and small businesses because of union negotiators not wanting to negotiate with companies who were being hard pressed by global competition.

[Franz©]

Bob it seems like Singer decided back in the 70s that the world need for sewing machines was falling off, and companies like Riccar and Juki were eating their lunch. Back then Singer had minimally 3 stores here and an under cover factory level repair shop with half a dozen sewing machine mechanics repairing and reconditioning trade ins. Stores didn't seem to last long into the 80s, possibly to large degree because women no longer made clothes or sewed at home.
Singer made a shift to electronics, and around 80 came up with the finest lead/acid battery monitor I ever saw. It sensed both voltage and specific gravity of 1 cell. Of course they must have hired an executive from McDonalds to run that show because Singer would only sell the monitor to Franchise Dealers.
Singer also got hooked up with Friden to produce office machines like FlexoWrter and mechanical calculators.

Definitely a strange vector rom path for te company that made mass production possible for the world.

The Kodak collapse here probably took down 150,000 jobs when you factor in small machine shops and injection molding alone.
I recall being in the checkout line at Homer Desperate one day listening to the cashier and a couple discharged Dakoids complaining about how they got screwed. They had no idea the U of R Business School clowns threw the switch that brought Ken Fisher from Motorola to kill Kodak for maximum bucks in 5 years. They could have gone to school of their choice on Kodak's dime for years, they had benefits I couldn't buy, they had vacation time I couldn't dream of, and the best medical coverage in town nobody else could get, but the company screwed them they even got termination and retraining packages averaging $50k but they got screwed. The rest of the world jumped in and swiped Kodak Patents without fear of litigation and it was game over. Across the river at the Big X Ursua just had her outplacement contractor escort people off the property with what they proved was personal property in a complimentary X box.

Now guess which President nominated Ursula and Antonio Perez the embalmer of Kodak to his job development team in the Swamp.

Should some cosmic event happen at Midnight, and all Kodak jobs come back, there is a huge shortage of buildings to do them in, and not enough electric generating capacity to turn all the lights on let alone wind up machinery. Rochester does have very generous welfare benefits though.

[Forced_Firebird]

My daughter is an avid sewer, her machines are not Singer, but are quite heavy for what appears to be a lot of plastic.

Growing up my mom had a Singer 27, it was the type with a big flywheel and foot pedal where the untit would flip down and it became a table with a leather rope as a "belt". When we were young, my brother and I would try to see how fast we could get the flywheel going which seemed to be innocent - until - the day she left the unit in the sewing position. The two of us had that flywheel rocking and he decided to put his finger under the needle! That thing punched through his fingernail/finger like it was nothing. My daughter's machine struggles with blue jean material.

[Franz©]

Back in ancient times when "Industrial arts" was part of education the school got a new Singer high speed to sit beside the ancient treadle machine. There was a long wait for the new machine, so I just used the treadle and knocked out my apron, laundry bag and handkerchief so I could move on. I did have to take a break one day when Mr SAFETY in hs shop coat and tie demonstrated how to wind his tie around the fishing bobber he was turning in the lathe and slammed his chin into the bed. Larry mashed the red STOP button, a couple guys compared pocket knife sharpness and cut the noose free from the teacher's neck. CPR wasn't invented yet so he just laid there breathing funny till he came to. I walked over to Nurse Nightingale's office so she could waddle to shop with her big bottle of Methiolate and some long handle swabs.


Last wife took up quilting and put some miles on my NewHome. Her 'daughter' took to shipping projects from Bama for mom to sew. After 30 dog pilow covers and a king bed cover to protect their quilt, I shipped the cow ledge educated girl a Singer from a garage sale after tuning it. Couple months later panic call, long distance from Bama. Seems Ms Degrees didn't know you gotta put a spool of thread on the machine. Good thing the book was with it so she and her Degreed hubby could watch the granddaughter thread the machine and get it running as I coached JJ by phone.

[jjohn76]

Are these stories real? How do you remember all of this?

[Forced_Firebird]

Are these stories real? How do you remember all of this?

Some people have a knack for memory. I site stories to my mother and get replies "how do you remember that?!?!?" My brother was born less than 3yrs from me, and I can tell you things that happened when he came home from the hospital, as well as the time he got up in the middle of the night and decided to open every container in the 'fridge, dump them on the floor, and wake mom up saying "I made you breakfast" when he was 3yr old.

Now, if you ask me where I put the 10mm socket, it may take a min to remember, specially seeing the giant toolbox has 15 of them in it. I get a picture of the place the socket is sitting, but get blurred by the memory of 1000's vintage BMW's that have come through the shop over the years.

[Forced_Firebird]

Back in ancient times when "Industrial arts" was part of education the school got a new Singer high speed to sit beside the ancient treadle machine. There was a long wait for the new machine, so I just used the treadle and knocked out my apron, laundry bag and handkerchief so I could move on. I did have to take a break one day when Mr SAFETY in hs shop coat and tie demonstrated how to wind his tie around the fishing bobber he was turning in the lathe and slammed his chin into the bed. Larry mashed the red STOP button, a couple guys compared pocket knife sharpness and cut the noose free from the teacher's neck. CPR wasn't invented yet so he just laid there breathing funny till he came to. I walked over to Nurse Nightingale's office so she could waddle to shop with her big bottle of Methiolate and some long handle swabs.


Last wife took up quilting and put some miles on my NewHome. Her 'daughter' took to shipping projects from Bama for mom to sew. After 30 dog pilow covers and a king bed cover to protect their quilt, I shipped the cow ledge educated girl a Singer from a garage sale after tuning it. Couple months later panic call, long distance from Bama. Seems Ms Degrees didn't know you gotta put a spool of thread on the machine. Good thing the book was with it so she and her Degreed hubby could watch the granddaughter thread the machine and get it running as I coached JJ by phone.

He was simply knocked unconscious, not dead lol. I wouldn't remember the invention of CPR, seeing I am a sapling compared to you, but I was 4 when Reagan was inaugurated, that memory is clear "how can an actor be president?!?!?". The Challenger explosion, Micheal Jackson's hair setting fire, and break dancing on cardboard at recess is very clear.

[Franz©]

Teacher's name was Hicks, really one of the good guys who would do all he could to help a kid.
He went on to become a Principle 15 years after getting KOed.

Remember it, I can close my eyes and watch it happen in color.

How I remember, best I can figure is it's a combination of genetics and my grandmother's teaching.
Her people had no written language so everything had to be remembered or relearned.

She spoke and understood her native language, Injun Spanish, Low German, a bit of french and English. She wrote very little, and walked 4 miles to where her daughter worked to show her friends the marvelous machine that put letters on paper, and how fast her daughter could make the machine do it.
Different world kids, sadly one you know little about.

First President I remember was F#%^&in Bas^(RD Roostershyt, followed by That Bas%$#%& Truman, followed by Eisencoward. 1st one I voted for was Eisencoward. There was a lot I and the rest of the people who voted didn't know about that scumball coward.
Yes, I know your teacher said, did she also mention he was scared spitless of Stalin, blackmailed by De Gaulle, or that he personally supervised loading Russian POWs onto US trucks for delivery to Stalin? Did that teacher mention the number of US POWs in German camps he let Stalin keep and haul to Russia?

Did your teachers ever mention the number of slaves Lincoln's Proclamation freed in the US? How many slave States existed in the US when Lee surrendered??