On Thu, 10 Nov 2005 19:11:32 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

Eric R Snow wrote:

SNIP
Don't misunderstand, Eric. I think you did something very
good-----particularly the pay. I started in the trade, in the missile
industry, for $1.50/hr. Your $14 is far better, at least I think it is,
even considering inflation. I think the point I'm trying to make is that
you could have offered $50/hr, you wouldn't have received any better from
this individual. People have been programmed to expect rewards for no
effort.

If he offered $50/hr vs. $14/hr he would have had more qualified
candidates to choose from and would not have hired this particular one.
The gamble he made was that he would be able to find a less experienced
candidate that he could train to do the job and that he could pay less
than he would have to pay for a candidate that already possessed the
necessary skills. He lost the gamble, simple as that. If the had offered
an appropriate wage for a reliable experienced machinist, he would have
been able to hire one. Had his gamble paid off his profit would have
been the ability to have this worker perform a given job at a lower than
market rate for some period of time. He would eventually have to pay
this worker the going market rate or they would leave to work somewhere
else.
SNIP

Pete,
You obviously missed the point of my decision to hire the trainee in
the first place. Maybe you didn't read the thread from the beginning.
I wanted to pass the trade to the next generation.

Yes and that is also a form of profit. It may not be cash in your
pocket, but you would still have gained by accomplishing something that
made you feel good. It's certainly a worthy goal.

I think the USA
needs skilled machinists.

Absolutely.

And the lack of skilled manual labor is now
hurting the USA and in the future will cause even more problems.

Big time. I try to maintain as diverse a skill set as I can.

The
reason I hired this guy in the first place was to teach someone to be
a machinist. At least, what I know about being a machinist. He would
eventually have to work at other shops to get a better education. So
the gamble was not that I thought I could train someone for cheap and
reap the rewards of this cheap labor.

Not in your case, but certainly a common situation. In your case you
were looking for a different form of profit.

The gamble was whether the guy
would learn and whether he would put forth the effort to give me 40
hours a week of his time while I paid him to both make parts and to
learn the trade. In fact, I lost money on several of the jobs he did.
I expected this. I had planned for this.

Low productivity for a short while is inherent to just about every new
employee. Even the most qualified still need some time to adapt to the
new environment and it's process flow.

That's why I carefully
interviewed him and why I called his last employer. He was
enthusiastic at first, but after a while it apparently was too much to
ask him to be at the shop 40 hours a week. Hopefully the next person I
hire will have a better work ethic.

Interviews and even contacting a previous employer don't necessarily
give you a good picture. Besides the obvious fact that previous
employers are afraid of giving any subjective assessment of the
employee, good or bad for fear of lawsuits, employees are not static and
life situations can change drastically (good and bad) between jobs
making the previous assessment worthless.

Big personal problems can occur that hurts an employees performance even
though at their previous job their performance was stellar. By the same
token, big personal problems that cause poor performance on a previous
job and be resolved and the employees performance on the new job may be
stellar.

In the future please make sure
that you really know what you are talking about when you assign
motives to me.
Eric R Snow,
E T Precision Machine

The motive still remains profit, even if it is emotional vs. monetary.

Pete C.
Well Pete, you can parse it any way you want.
ERS