I missed the staff meeting but the minutes show Ernie Leimkuhler
wrote back on Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:40:14 GMT in
rec.crafts.metalworking :
Seattle's problem is Boeing.
They have laid off so many machinists over the last few years that
there just aren't any machining jobs in the whle Northwest.
With no job prospects, there is little insentive for kids to go into
the field.
It is the same reason they shut down the Avionics program and the
Automation Controls program over the last 5 years.

The guys coming out of Boeing have many years of experience and kids
fresh out of school can't compete.

I call bs (even if I agree that the downsizing of Boeing is making
Machinists a drug on the market.). The kids fresh out of school have no
bad habits to overcome. (The kids out of school also have no idea what
they could demand in terms of pay, so ... .)

Secondly, how many of those Boeing Machinists are going to be retiring
over the next decade or two? My Plan is to find one of those "old timers",
learn everything I can, and then when he retires, "take over". And become
in turn "the old guy who knows a lot."
This is, in effect, what a guy I know did some twenty plus years ago:
realized there were two "old timers" who knew everything, and one was about
to retire. Lon latched onto the other and learned everything he could,
reading the manuals in the evening rather than going to the bars, and
asking questions during the day. He got the book learning, and the
experience. Two years before he retired, the boss asked him what it would
take to keep him on. Turned out to be a $5,000 motor for Lon's boat. This
is a guy the company wanted to keep. But he started out a known nothing
punk kid (even if he was thirty something) willing to defer gratification.

Now, I will grant, there is a lot of corporate short sightedness which
doesn't see the utility of assigning a new worker to an old worker to learn
everything the old guy knows before he retires. But then again, the common
business practice is the quarterly report. (the Bank of Sienna, Italy,
issues "annual" reports every five years. Has done so for over five
hundred years, so it must work.)
--
pyotr filipivich.
as an explaination for the decline in the US's tech edge, James
Niccol wrote "It used to be that the USA was pretty good at
producing stuff teenaged boys could lose a finger or two playing with."