[MandoBear]

  You can almost hear the sweat dripping down their face as they try to say the company name knowing that "this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes."

Very funny - and a great point.

 

[judmarc]

  How do we keep the Schiit culture alive as we bring in more people and by necessity start giving our original employees supervisory responsibilities?

 
Only two pieces of advice on this:
 
- There is no advice.  No one really knows.  Whether it works out in any given instance is close to a coin flip, and you're just trying to use all your instincts to make the odds run a little more in your favor.
 
- Don't think of it as "the Schiit culture."  Think of it the way a guy who once hired me put it: "I think (the other leading candidate) could do just as good a job, but you seem like you'd be more fun to work with."

 

[catspaw]

I think its something that depends on the person you hire:
 
If a person is adaptable, and honest, most likely its a process that will happen alone. It is human nature to live by the rules and standards of those that are around us. This is the basic formation of social behavior after all.
 
That means that if everyone in Schiit work this way, its a natural process for others to adopt it as theirs. It takes some time, and how much time depends on how well a newcomer is treated.
 
This goes for both in seriousness in the products as well as humor in the workplace.
 
Of course there will be a few bumps along the road, but mainly corporations loose in this aspect due to not closely working with people who have an influence in the quality of your own work.
 
This is of course my opinion only, but I found it to be valid most of the times. (There was one notable exception, but in this case the person who I could not get along with simply didn't trust me).

 

[Ableza]

  When you work for Schiit you need to have a certain attitude.  We are dead serious about our products and not so serious about everything else.  We have a good time.  We joke. We tell stories.  We even play the occasional prank on each other.
 
For me, hiring an outsider is a bigger transition than moving from the garage to the Schiit Hole or from the Schiit Hole to the Schiit Box.  How do we keep the Schiit culture alive as we bring in more people and by necessity start giving our original employees supervisory responsibilities?

This is a similar issue as I've been having lately.  I work for a small silicon valley company and we all share common attitudes and goals.  Finding new engineers or product managers who can both be serious about their work while maintaining the fun (and sometimes salty) atmosphere is a challenge.  No one at my company would have any problems with the name Schiit, or at least they shouldn't based on the common language around the office.  Many of us are ex-Navy and, well, let's just say that I can easily demonstrate the "f-word" as all parts of speech.  Indeed, I find that letting a few expletives "slip out" during an interview and watching the interviewee's reaction is often a good way to gauge if a candidate will fit in.  And fitting in is often far more important than their resume or education. 

 

[jacal01]

I watched a young up-and-coming female engineer from afar just this morning flip the bird while telling a story in a cubicle bay to some other engineers.  How's that for a fun environment?  Love our working Fridays.

 

[Ableza]

One of my engineers is nicknamed Spock because he's fairly cold and unemotional.  Most of the time.  Then one day someone brought in a Spock figurine and super glued it to his desk.  After two years it's still there, and "Spock's" emotions are more freely expressed these days.

 

[aamefford]

  One of my engineers is nicknamed Spock because he's fairly cold and unemotional.  Most of the time.  Then one day someone brought in a Spock figurine and super glued it to his desk.  After two years it's still there, and "Spock's" emotions are more freely expressed these days.

Someone?.........
 
Spock seems alright then if he took it as he seemed to.
 
Engineers aren't bad.  We are just mild to extreme social misfits in some ways.  I'm a decent engineer.  Before going back and finishing my engineering degree, I spent 10 years in front of the house restaurant management.  That is a good way to get over some of the social misfit stuff for sure!

 

[jacal01]

As opposed to an indecent engineer?  No club dues for you! 

 
I always thought that the Humana HMO name begged the question...

 

[aamefford]

Beware of anyone who tells you they are a good engineer....

 

[Jason Stoddard]

  Beware of anyone who tells you they are a good engineer....

 
Oh yeah, that's just asking for your next design to:
 
(1) Have at least two dozen bonehead mistakes, including, say, mirroring a couple of 80-pin, 1mm pitch connectors.
(2) Be the one design where the PCB prototype's electrical test compressed 8 vias just enough to contact and pass, but are open when the board isn't in the test fixture.
(3) Feature at least 5 wrong package sizes, including, say, something fun like a QFN.
(4) Take out the single prototype transformer on first power-up because you put it in backwards.
(5) Catch on fire.
(6) Immolate your favorite shirt in the process.
(7) Burn your office to the ground because your fire extinguisher hasn't been checked for proper charge for 15 years.
 
"Decent," sure. "Good at some things," fine. "Good," be very afraid. "Great," run. "Unsurpassed," call the asylum.

 

[aamefford]

   
Oh yeah, that's just asking for your next design to:
 
(1) Have at least two dozen bonehead mistakes, including, say, mirroring a couple of 80-pin, 1mm pitch connectors.
(2) Be the one design where the PCB prototype's electrical test compressed 8 bias just enough to contact and pass, but are open when the board isn't in the test fixture.
(3) Feature at least 5 wrong package sizes, including, say, something fun like a QFN.
(4) Take out the single prototype transformer on first power-up because you put it in backwards.
(5) Catch on fire.
(6) Immolate your favorite shirt in the process.
(7) Burn your office to the ground because your fire extinguisher hasn't been checked for proper charge for 15 years.
 
"Decent," sure. "Good at some things," fine. "Good," be very afraid. "Great," run. "Unsurpassed," call the asylum.

One who is a bit humble (or cagy) often tends to over deliver.  One who is boastful, has not left room to perform above expectations.  I like to sandbag a bit, and I like those with enough sense to do a bit of the same.
 
Plus, as you have alluded above; every time you don't sandbag, you end up feeling like Cypher - "why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?"

 

[sludgeogre]

  "Decent," sure. "Good at some things," fine. "Good," be very afraid. "Great," run. "Unsurpassed," call the asylum.

Absolutely and completely true. Engineers have a very high probability of letting their degree get to their ego. I'm a chemical engineer, which represents only 1% of all engineers. At my company, we have around 400 people on site and only about 10 of us are chemical engineers, so we have to tell people how and why thinks work very frequently, including managers that don't believe us or believe they're smarter/more experienced than we are, even if their degree is in a completely unrelated field. As engineers see management failures and get frustrated by lack of knowledge and teamwork, they begin to develop the "I'm better than any person ever born" attitude. Every single engineer that I've worked with that thought remotely highly of themselves has been an utter failure. They then convince themselves that they're infallible and blame their disasters on everyone except themselves. Equipment operators are the first ones thrown under the bus most of the time, which propagates a hostile mentality towards engineers and makes discussion, teamwork, and compromising exponentially more difficult as time goes on.
 
I have to say that it is really difficult to not go on a rampage of "I told you so" and "this is why you do it this way" tirades when plans go poorly, but you have to realize that you're only going to be measured by what you've done and how big of an impact you can make within the boundaries you're given. No one is going to care when you throw their failures or lack of knowledge in their face. You just have to keep trying to steer the ship in the best direction possible and hope that someone is listening and taking notice. If they don't, oh well, keep trying, just don't let it get to your head and become a dick about it.

 

[Ableza]

In my world, worse than a major disaster design is when everything works, but just barely and not quite to spec and you pull your hair out for the next 90 days trying to figure out what went wrong.  Or when the prototype works far better than the specs and orders exceed expectation, but no production model ever comes close.    (I call that the magic breadboard effect.)

 

[GBechz]

Of the Schiit coming down the pipe that we know about I'm most interested in Mani, by a wide margin. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my hands on a Raggy and Yggy someday; but my bank account can't handle the projected prices. Now a reasonably priced MM/MC phono preamp in a Magni shell that I can use to get in to vinyl, along with a say U-Turn Orbit, that's fantastic.

A very high pleasure to price ratio.

Keep the little Schiits coming!

I agree with this. I have wanted to start listening to my dad's vinyl collection for a while now and with some new Schiit and the U-Turn Orbit I may finally be able to get into decent sounding vinyl without breaking the bank.

On the subject of applications and experience, this is something I have struggled with lately. I work with some truly excellent people who make the managers look great. This is difficult to put in a resume, and I have received feedback that I tend to be too humble. Interviews have been non existent for me, but I hope that employers' HR departments will begin to recognize that individuals such as my excellent coworkers and myself have value.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

  In my world, worse than a major disaster design is when everything works, but just barely and not quite to spec and you pull your hair out for the next 90 days trying to figure out what went wrong.  Or when the prototype works far better than the specs and orders exceed expectation, but no production model ever comes close. 

LOL, be VERY afraid of something that "just starts up and works," is my motto.
 
I was recently working on something that "just ran," and would have been very easy to give a pass through to production and crack the champagne bottles...when in fact it was so out of balance the DC servo was just barely holding things together. The only evidence of this was a larger-than-average glitch when switching gain--nothing at all was apparent on the analyzer. 
 
Or a new thing I'm working on now, which is much more complex than the average Schiit product, which similarly "just started up and ran." It was almost a relief when I found I'd reversed the polarity to the relay coils...specifically, to 10 very small SMD relays, to be exact. On a 4-layer board with the relay traces buried. Yeah. Argh.