Maybe Foxconn almost makes everything. Dell and Asus don't buy from them as far as I know though, and I can still get detailed engineering tech manuals with circuit board diagrams and parts lists for any Dell motherboard.

Apple and Foxconn won't release that information, even for authorized Apple service technicians... I'm pretty sure they make them go-go boys hot swap the boards and then ship them back to China, or simply throw them away completely replacing the motherboard. It's eminently profitable to trash the environment with toxic waste, plastics, and heavy metals that are loaded into about every circuit board manufactured.

Asus makes their own motherboards, but they don't make tech and engineering manuals available for technicans except for their own in-house techs.

IBM still custom designs Hybrid and Computer Circuit Boards in Albany, Austin, Yorktown Heights, Poughkeepsie, Essex Junction Vermont, and in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

There are still plenty of U.S. based Circuit Board designers. I actually learned how to etch custom designed circuit boards about twenty-five years ago, but any homemade design pale in comparison to the nano-scale multi-layer etching used in advanced modern PCB manufacturing these days.

Some U.S. circuit board and PCB manufacturers

Littlefuse
DCS
Intel
Fairchild Semiconductor
Pike Corporation
Raytheon
Apple - (All that remains are in Santa Clara now)
Northrop-Grumann
Jabil
SpaceX
Microsoft
L-3 Communications
Encore-Semi
Qualcom in San Diego


NCR still designs boards too, all their board design facilities are in India though now.

I would be surprised if anyone on this board didn't have at least one thing (and more than likely many many more) manufactured by Foxconn. They are everywhere.

Every game current game console (and the entire last generation as well), large percentages of phones (not just Apple, Nokia, Huawei, Motorola and more), tons and tons of computer parts (I have an Asus laptop, but I'll make a bet that at least one component in it is Foxconn manufactured). Televisions (Sony, Sharp, and Vizio I believe are manufactured by Foxconn).

Seriously, they are everywhere.

Funny thing about most job descriptions that people seem to utterly overlook before they take a job - that last line item under "Duties and Responsibilities":

Other duties as assigned.

Yup, you might sign on as a Content Creative, or Quality Assurance Manager, or Lord High Muck-a-Muck, but they can still make you clean the toilets, or clean out your desk.

.....

Anyone remember when we were "employees", or "personnel", instead of "resources"?

I do, but only just.

Quote from: Werekoala;814456Yup, you might sign on as a Content Creative, or Quality Assurance Manager, or Lord High Muck-a-Muck, but they can still make you clean the toilets, or clean out your desk.

So?

At a certain level of professionalism, you do what's required to make your team successful.  And if the most useful thing you can do is clean the toilets, then clean the damn toilets.  "That's not my job" is about the crappiest thing an employee can say.

If that *is* the most useful thing you can do, though, it doesn't say much for you.  The way to not do menial crap isn't a contract saying you don't have to do it.  It's being useful enough that the company doesn't want to waste your time with menial crap.

Quote from: GameDaddy;814447At the time, they were more interested at Apple in the Japanese slave worker Kanban mentality than producing quality PCs. It almost killed them as a company. Then Steve Jobs came back, but I was already happily gone, and never looked back.

The irony there is that Japanese companies made great, reliable products when they did listen and respond to feedback from the floor.

Quote from: robiswrong;814457So?

At a certain level of professionalism, you do what's required to make your team successful.  And if the most useful thing you can do is clean the toilets, then clean the damn toilets.  "That's not my job" is about the crappiest thing an employee can say.

If that *is* the most useful thing you can do, though, it doesn't say much for you.  The way to not do menial crap isn't a contract saying you don't have to do it.  It's being useful enough that the company doesn't want to waste your time with menial crap.

I agree completely - I wasn't personally complaining, I was just pointing out how people tend to miss that important bit.

Quote from: robiswrong;814457At a certain level of professionalism, you do what's required to make your team successful.  And if the most useful thing you can do is clean the toilets, then clean the damn toilets.  "That's not my job" is about the crappiest thing an employee can say.

There are a lot of people incapable of understanding the value of a team except as a temporary springboard to personal aggrandizement.

Work is a two way street. You are agreeing to show up and work a certain job that you've agreed on, and they agree to pay you.

If you are a coder and someone is asking to clean toilets, 'that's not my job' is nicer than saying 'what the fuck is wrong with you, you psycho shithead. YOU clean it.'


Again, it's one thing if it somewhat fits in your purview, and yeah, you help out the team (we're going to fill balloons for Ed's birthday, you in?), but, again, if the boss has time to tell you to clean the toilets, why isn't the boss doing it?

Bullshit, maaan.

Quote from: robiswrong;814457So?
At a certain level of professionalism, you do what's required to make your team successful.  And if the most useful thing you can do is clean the toilets, then clean the damn toilets.  "That's not my job" is about the crappiest thing an employee can say.

Quote from: LynnThere are a lot of people incapable of understanding the value of a team except as a temporary springboard to personal aggrandizement.

Ahh, that brings back memories of my disastrous stint in the indie film industry.

Also, Team Fortress 2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8KxC74h-X0

Gotta love a "team" where everyone thinks, secretly or out loud, that they are the true diva being held back by the peons and losers.

Also, it's kind of fucked up for a business to expect you to really round things out, be a team player, etc... because when push comes to shove, if things get tight you're hitting the bricks.

There's a razor thin line between team player and being a chump.

Quote from: Lynn;814458The irony there is that Japanese companies made great, reliable products when they did listen and respond to feedback from the floor.

We had the KanBan meetings... That seemed to be a brown-nosing festival at its very best.

The issue wasn't in-house quality control. The assembly folks working on the surface mount machines had exactly zero electronics repair or test skills. They did have a certified NASA soldering course, and a in-house training in keeping the SMT machines properly stocked and running well. They did their jobs very well, It was extremely rare for me to get more than ten bad boards in a batch because some surface mount machine had run out of components to place. ...and those were easy fixes taking just a few minutes each.

The board test guys had good training too, and could usually flag a board that was missing a cap or resistor or IC or other component with few problem, and I would have about a 2 minute repair job for that.

We were all ISO certed and knew what we were doing. As the senior tech on the line I would fix anything that no one else on the line could fix.

The real quality control  problems came with the motherboards and PCBs that were sourced out of house. If its missing one lead trace, the circuit don't work. The trace has to be laid by hand. If it's missing a grommet, that requires the board test guy (or me) to replace the grommet too, and any component that may be attached to the grommet probably needs to be resoldered or replaced as well.

 When a board comes with 200 missing grommets because it was shipped from the outsourced PCB manufacturer that way, that's at least a 4 hour repair job for one board. We would build anywhere between 500 and 1,000 PCs on one assembly line in a 12 hour shift. We had 18 build lines in our plant.

With properly specced and well built motherboards,  I would end up with one to three dozen PCs during my shift to repair. I could handle that, would fix ten to thirty a shift, usually ended up scrapping one or two that was too badly damaged to invest repair time in, and leave four or five motherboards for the next shift lead tech to work on.

if I didn't have anything to do, I could spend time improving my test and troubleshooting skills by experimenting on scrapped boards, or check out the engineering and tech manuals on the next gen motherboards that we would be seeing more of a bit later on. Or I could develop new more efficient board test and repair procedures for PCs we were currently building.

There were nights when they ran defective PCBs and I would get 500-800 fails... After working there for six weeks I simply shut down my entire line if there were more than 50 bad boards in a single shift because something was wrong.

That's about the time I started tangling, ...unfavorably, I would add, with the engineers and design teams. They wanted production numbers, and we had shipping quotas to hit, and they were delivering inherently defective designed PCBs to accomplish this with.

Quote from: GameDaddy;814466We had the KanBan meetings... That seemed to be a brown-nosing festival at its very best.

Those processes worked brilliantly in Japan because Japanese culture is all about harmony and perpetuation of the group. What's funny is that many of those processes originated outside of Japan and were then successfully adapted to Japanese culture. Business culture is still culture; it sits on top of the societal culture.

A Japanese manufacturer (of that era) would not have allowed known defective parts in the door; Japanese suppliers wouldn't have knowingly provided them either. The sword of humiliation always falls on the neck of the CEO in the end.

Quote from: JonWake;814434They work people to death over there. You get hired without any clear job description, they promise all kinds of bonuses and new opportunities for people who are 'team player' and put in 60 hour work weeks, but those opportunities are usually vague and best and lies at worst.

Sounds like the old Arthur Anderson Consulting.  They used to recruit heavily from freshly-minted MBAs.  Yeah, it was a job, but in two years they'll throw your shriveled husk away.

How does anyone even run those businesses if everyone gets canned after two years.

Quote from: Lynn;814472Those processes worked brilliantly in Japan because Japanese culture is all about harmony and perpetuation of the group. What's funny is that many of those processes originated outside of Japan and were then successfully adapted to Japanese culture. Business culture is still culture; it sits on top of the societal culture.

A Japanese manufacturer (of that era) would not have allowed known defective parts in the door; Japanese suppliers wouldn't have knowingly provided them either. The sword of humiliation always falls on the neck of the CEO in the end.

Well, THERE's the difference from American business culture right there.

JG