and cost $50 in parts... Aside from now learning how to change the capacitor on my unit so I don't need to hire him anymore......The more important lesson I learned? Why the hell did I become an engineer again, hoping for that 2-4% pay increase every focal review cycle?
5 replies (most recent on top)
50$!!!! More like 35$!!!! Learn a little youtube life will be cheaper.
when you're hot/cold or the toilet doesn't flush, who you gonna call?
That's right, a TECHNICIAN. We GET IT WORKING.
Well, the $450 was what you were willing to pay to have your AC running again. The tech probably got very little of it. Maybe $50K a year salary. But given that median household income in Portland is around $60K a year, if the spouse works and they don't blow all their cash like an RCG at Kuni BMW, they'll be fine.
You (unlike a huge corporation) can't bribe congress to let you bring in slave labor to work for you, and you don't have the economy of scale to make it worthwhile anyway, nor subcontract it out to avoid the blame. It doesn't make sense for you to ship the A/C to India or China for a cheap fix, so you're stuck having to pay for local talent.
The defining reality in our "no borders" economy, is that if what you do today can be done somewhere else cheaper, it will be.
Software can be written anywhere, tested anywhere and shipped anywhere.
Hardware design, be it RTL development, full custom "perfection", Verification, emulation, back-end, all the way to tape-out can be done anywhere and shipped electronically anywhere.
always@posedge(Murthy) begin
layoff();
end
Manufacturing and assembly follows the same mantra.
It's a race to the bottom kids, so prepare, and vote, accordingly.
At least you still (kind of) have to be a US Citizen to vote.
My HVAC is on a roof. It's not so much I don't understand how it works, I just didn't want to climb up there. BUT, now that I know it's $450, I'll be climbing a roof. And besides, not all of us are EE. Some of us are software. In other words, we don't know anything else useful.
That is the starter cap. If you can poke a stick to the fan and get it started, then it is your starter cap. You become an engineer so that you can solve problem. If you couldn't learn HVAC on your own, how could you work on the most complicated crap created by men?