Ever since the firing of the Psycho Colleague back in September, our analog circuit design team has been down a person. We've been asking for a replacement ever since and my director has been promising it to us ever since.So what happened last week? Well, there's now a new employee at FluxCorp Canada. He's an analog circuit designer hired to help with the design of the Flying Flux. Just not our Flying Flux. In fact, he was hired by another Flux-building team based out of the western reaches of the American mainland. As I later found out, my director had misled us. We won't be getting a replacement after all. And to rub salt into our wounds, a highly qualified analog designer here in Ottawa was hired into FluxCorp ... to not work for our team. Thanks!
We gave the new guy the most friendly welcome on his first day. We were simply delighted to have another person diminish our weekly supply of free food and drinks. He's Russian. Or Ukranian. Whatever. As they say, if you've met one Slav... or is it just me that says that. Anyhow, looking up at my hiring-of-minorities scoreboard, here are the current standings of all my Ottawa analog circuit designing colleagues*:
By Ethnicity:Our new friend has shifted the balance of power. The Slav-bloc has doubled in strength and the average age just got skewed higher. Basically, our office of analog designers are a bunch of old foreign guys.
Slavs: 2
Chinese: 2
Muslims: 1
By Geographic Origin:
Europe: 2
East Asia: 2
Middle East: 1
By Sex:
Gents: 5
Ladies: 0
By Age:
56-65: 2
46-55: 2
36-45: 1
* Not including yours truly, as I would never subject myself to such silly workplace classifications.
I keep wondering, where are the locally born engineers? Perhaps I'll address that in a future post.
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The local (Well, north-american in my case at least) engineers with a passion for analog design (and in my case testing) all quickly found out that there is no longer such a thing as an entry-level analog job; and so we all got forced into other lines of work/volunteer projects.
Someone will probably point out (ok I guess it's me) that Muslim is not an ethnicity. I wonder what the average age of a working engineer is, seems like it skews kind of old, even with strong numbers graduating every year.
@FrauTech: Yes, I know it's not an ethnicity. Still, it's often used as a short hand for Middle Eastern, which is also not an ethnicity. I could've written Persian, but I thought that would be too narrow. And if you want to nitpick further still, Chinese isn't just one ethnicity. There are many many Chinese ethnicities out there. Thus, for all the complexities in trying to classify someone, I have refused to classify myself, because we all know, there is only one Fluxor in the world.
@Anonymous: While it's certainly not impossible to find an entry-level analog job, it is harder these days. Most of the entry level analog jobs are going offshore. I'm not sure if you have a graduate degree, but even when I started, if I didn't have my master's, it would've been pretty impossible to break into my field.
Indeed, there is only one Fluxor. Thank goodness :-p
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