catherd

SEEKING WORK | new product manufacturing launch | Remote only (occasional on-site OK) | Shenzhen, China

Looking for new products in need of high volume manufacturing in a short time period. I can go through your hardware design to catch manufacturability issues, find cost savings opportunities, and take it all the way through component manufacturing, assembly, and QC. Think of it as never needing to fly to Asia to fix a mess.

- 17 years experience in engineering and technical project management, last 5 years based in Shenzhen, mostly working on smart consumer goods

- extensive knowledge of manufacturing processes, both high and low volume production

- familiar with Chinese culture and manufacturing environment

- strong engineering background: mechanical, electrical, and firmware experience

ben@mzjtechnology.com

at a guess: because they tend to emit disturbingly high levels of noise, and most animals generally don't like that. not sure where that argument goes when everyone is sleeping, though.

Did a Kickstarter, got the money, now in China trying to finish it. Tried to send over a wire to pay for stuff and Chase's fraud detection algorithm cut off online access. Now they say I have to fly back to the US to unblock it. (Totally disrupting the project.)

Details in the link above. Feel free to jump on twitter and let them know what assholes they are being:

https://twitter.com/Hack_EDA/status/1139769365119684608

Chase bank has one of these as well. Pretty awesome to get a canned response (then ignored all weekend) when you get locked out of your bank while in a different country.

https://twitter.com/ChaseSupport/status/1139899780283469825

> 'Hi there. We're here to lend our support. Please DM us with your full name, zip code, and additional details regarding your concerns. ^EL'

Cash still works exactly the way it always has, (almost) nobody is going to turn down your business because you don't pay by an app.

Arriving to your destination not wet/frozen/soaked in sweat? Or with your luggage... through an area dangerous for walking... to a destination you aren't familiar with... because you are old or infirm.

Actually, we're a contract manufacturer based in Shenzhen and that's what we sell them for.

You probably made the right call, though, even if you had found a perfect supplier. Hardware projects funded by individuals almost always end in heartache if they try to go big.

Not sure who you were talking to or how big your widget is, but if it's a single piece that fits in a 15cm cube and doesn't use expensive tolerances or shapes you're probably looking at somewhere between $4-$15k for a Chinese injection mold. My company makes a few of these each month.

Not sure I agree with the hire a younger dev and start persuading option. In my managerial experience, it's almost impossible to change someone's core personality or their value system, either through words or through money. And even a temporary change takes monumental effort on my part. Better to find someone who's natural mode of operation fits this type of role.

I feel like the personal value system and personality are what drive long term performance. You can explain and cajole all you want, but inevitably a few months later the core personality starts coming back through. Establishing a culture around certain things will go a long way toward making those behaviors expected, but finding a person who has the appropriate temperament and skill level for a the types of activity needed for a role is so incredibly easier than doing everything the hard way.

Maybe I've been spoiled... I have a few engineers in other roles who do naturally get things done and don't need constant hand-holding to get through anything boring, but so far the programmers mostly just want to work on whatever they think is cool and turn into procrastination machines if I push too hard or give them an uncool task. I do have one older guy who I can leave to his own devices and the result will mostly make sense and happen without lots of my time pushing to finish. The other engineering roles with 'finishers' are mostly young guys, though, so I'm still hopeful any age could be this type.

They may not be equivalent, but for the purposes of this situation they are both worthy of identifying.

You're justifying the game plan of a certain type of programmer. I'm asking how to find someone who's professional toolbox includes the ability to knuckle down and manage the boring shit until it's done, over a project-level time period.

In this instance I don't want to hire an alphabet soup programmer who will move on to the next company as fast as the next resume update allows. If it's a side effect of kicking ass on a variety of projects, broad experience is a nice-to-have, but I need someone who will hang around long enough to internalize and take responsibility for business goals.

Yes, there's a big difference between someone who can target 'results' and someone who immediately loses all interest once they reach the transition point between figuring the system out and implementing the plan to finish.

I'm looking for the opposite of a person who leaves a trail of proof-of-concepts behind them without actually delivering anything real people can use.

A simple image gallery of past projects will get 80% of the point across.

A short explanation of the project and what the student's contribution was (if part of a team) would cover almost anything else a reviewer would likely care about. For someone with a little more experience, explaining what sort of roles they are a good fit for would be a good addition.

When I was applying to grad school I made a website that had all that, plus an outline of my work and school history, brief background and description of my motivations, copies of transcripts, and a few personal pics. My original goal was to make it as easy as possible for the people who wrote my recommendations to write good ones, but it ended up being helpful in a lot of unrelated situations later. It was hand-written HTML with a php image gallery. The particular hosting method is pretty unimportant.

Patents on algorithms are bad because any sane person would feel revulsion at the though of them? Is that the content of your argument?

If Euclid's algorithm was patented in a system similar to our modern one, he would have... cornered the marked in ancient Greek cryptographic protocols for 20 years or so before other ancient mathematicians were allowed join in?

I work with a team that spans native speaker to barely able to form English sentences, and communicating clearly in a mixed audience like that is really a completely separate skill from native language use.

For the ones with minimal English it's often clearer to use phrasing that a native speaker would say is obviously wrong, but matches their native language patterns. Or use simpler but not-quite-appropriate words.

And for the native speakers, the awareness (or self-regulation) to eliminate idioms and less common vocabulary is nigh-impossible for some people.

Are you saying that this guy should fall on his sword because he messed up once (and learned from it)? Or that, having messed up once, he's obviously not qualified to make firing decisions? I'm failing to find a charitable interpretation here that makes any sense at all.

Bad employees fail often, never try anything outside their comfort zone, and don't learn from their mistakes or take responsibility for anything. He didn't give an in-depth version of what he considered a bad employee to be, but it's fairly obviously implied by "not pulling their weight" to the degree that they eventually demotivate the rest of the team.

SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area/Shenzhen/Islamabad | Remote only

Team of 4: PM, Mechanical, Electrical, and Software. We build smart hardware: $35k/month for the whole team. Only take one project at a time. We have an opening in August.

We can design anything from a 35 foot tall custom CNC to a bluetooth earbud. We prefer to work on new ideas and original designs (something that hasn't been done before).

The team is experienced working together and is ready to tackle hard problems without a lot of ramp time. Everybody is in Islamabad except the PM (me). I bounce between Shenzhen, the Bay Area, and Islamabad. All the engineers are full time, and only work on one project at a time. I'm part-time. My background is in robotics, and I'm also experienced in bringing new designs into volume production in China if you need that later.

On-site project kickoff and check-ins are OK if you are in one of the areas above. We do not work on projects that are spread between multiple contractors, or that don't have a clear end-goal.

ben [a+] mzjtechnology.com

I automatically increase my bids by at least 30% if I learn there's a purchasing department involved.

Invoicing an engineering manager who needs things to happen tends to be the least friction from my side.

Even if it costs more on the purchase, inflexibility does help streamline business operations. Any business who can just mandate "this is how this process is going to work" and make it stick is going to benefit from not needing to make bespoke agreements with every little vendor they co-operate with. I believe WalMart is the classic example for this case.

It doesn't have to actually be right 100% of the time. The balance of downsides and upsides of any chosen solution just have to be more palatable than those of whatever alternate implementation you're considering, with a tradeoff between 100% correctness and ability to be implemented before the heat death of the universe being one of the axes to be considered, as well as the level of benefit provided over your whole user base.

In this case, dropping the extra control/ignoring power users is probably saving a lot of non-power users from shooting themselves in the foot in the vast majority of cases. Pilots (should be) 100% power users. The average operator of a browser is somewhere on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Any real system will have things go horribly wrong for some subset of users on a regular basis. It's impossible to be all things for all people for all situations, so you have to choose your battles.

Walmart generally allows it, but if local ordinances don't, you can't. You can't in the Mountain View Walmart, I assume for that reason. I ended up there once on an 8 month road trip and they asked me to leave.

But there are so few good places in the valley that they may have had to disallow it in order to not become an RV lot.

The current plan is to ship the basic model first, then add things like modems if the reception supports the development effort.

So far it looks like most people want 4G, even though it's quite expensive to add. I think too many marketing dollars have been spent convincing consumers that's what they need, so we may end up doing 4G before others. But you're right, 2G (or 3G) would both be cheaper and probably all you need for a dumb phone.

The nice thing, though, is unlike most phones it should be pretty easy for anyone with electronics skills to make a daughterboard that expands the phone hardware capabilities.

You might consider a WiPhone a few months from now once we're shipping them: (project preview link) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/338898127?re...

It's intended to be hackable. The base phone is pure WiFi, but there will probably be an LTE add-on.

That's exactly the motivation behind this phone, which has a simple OS and a connector on the back of it for hardware expansion:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/338898127?re...

It's less powerful than a smartphone, but designed from the ground up for hardware hacking.

disclaimer: I am part of the WiPhone project

Also seems like if you're going to rate a painting purely on how much of a rush it gives you to see it, having a subject matter like war that kicks right at the base of your humanity and then comparing it to an abstraction is a bit of a rigged game... I mean even I could probably write a country song dealing with really simple subject matter that would make my mom cry, it's how people are built to react to stuff like that. But it doesn't mean I'm a great artist.

It could potentially be done as a daughterboard.

It's not on the immediate priority list, but especially if businesses start buying these and using them on corporate networks it might become important. I feel like most hobbyists aren't that interested in DECT. Too old. LoRa is apparently the hot thing if you are a hobbyist. :)

These gateways will give you a free SIP account:

- linphone.org

- iptel.org

- opensips.org

- sip2sip.info

Do you have QoS enabled on your router?

Well, it is called WiPhone...

There is a pretty clear issue with people getting grumpy once they learn it's not a bleeding edge smartphone. I don't know how to solve it. Open to suggestions, but I think calling it a phone is perfectly reasonable and doesn't imply it's a smartphone. Just because all the big phone makers have sold us the idea that LTE and an OS you can play games on is absolutely essential doesn't mean this isn't a phone.

under $100

Yes, right now we use G.722. Possibly others later.

You're right as well :) But I think it's the stuff we did to take it from ESP32+LCD (which there are thousands of) and make it more like a phone are what makes it useful. Not having to build your own power supply and battery charger every time you start a new project is pretty useful. Or a nice enclosure with buttons that work right, feel nice, and are splash proof, etc., etc.

It is technically a phone. Just not one many people would want to replace their smartphones with. Home phone or backup phone maybe. We aren't marketing it as a smartphone replacement. The mobile form factor is useful and not just an evil marketing trick.