On Friday 29 April 2016 23:07:00 Todd Zuercher wrote:

>  More proof, you get what you pay for employee wise.

I think the operative phrase is TANSTAAFL, Todd.  I have worked for 
people who did not understand that, for short periods of time.

I have worked for those that did understand it well for much longer 
periods of time, like 18 years at my last position.  For those that did 
understand it, I never had to ask for a raise, I just got them, and 
generally well above a COLA raise.  When I retired 2002/06/30 the 
average CE's salary in the market 160-170 bracket was about $38k 
according to surveys the trade rags published about annually.  Yet the 
last IRS year I worked, I had to admit to about $57k.  About a year 
before that, I knew KTLA was looking again, but they were offering about 
$65k, and that would have been about $200k short of what it would have 
taken to make me even want to be in the same state as LA. I'd already 
seen too much of kalipornias crazy legal system in the times I succumbed 
to the lure.  I asked around as discreetly as I could when the next NAB 
came around, and the opinions of KTLA from the real engineers were 
pretty uniformly poor.

Funny thing, we had bought the video production switcher from the Penny's 
production house in NYC about 16 years before, and that thing was a 
nightmare because of its complexity AND the fact that it had lived in 
NYC's poor air, causing a lot of corrosion.  But I kept it going until 
several years later I was offered essentially the same switcher out of 
the KTLA studios.  Cali had the better air so it was in much better 
shape in terms of pollution caused damages.  So we made the swap, and 
only once it had been integrated into our system, did I realize that 
apparently none of the circuit failures it had ever had, they didn't 
have anyone who was sharp enough to fix it. Took me about 6 months to 
find most of it, at one point writing code in Basic09 running on a 
TRS-80 color computer, to reach in and exercise every signal path in its 
control circuitry. So the day we retired it as I was retiring, it was 
working better than it did the day we dropped it into the console cutout 
12 years or so prior.  But we did get all the goody out of it I think.

That same color computer and a couple floppy drives, was also a 4x faster 
that the Grass Valley Groups EDisk that the technical directors used so 
that each one had his own "bag of tricks" personality he could load into 
the switcher 1 minute before a live newscast started, so that all the 
effects he was used to using were always on the same button when he 
pushed it.  I had about $250 in that, but GVG would have sold me their 
version that was 4x slower, and had 2 digit number filenames, so the 
limit was 99, while my version used up to 29 character English 
filenames.

But Grass wanted $20k for their version.  Never could figure that one 
out.  OTOH, I have serious doubts that Grass ever made the 50th one of 
those switchers as it was about $275k brand new in the late 70's or 
early '80's. It was at the time, plainly targetted at the top 10 market 
stations or production houses like Penny's or General Mills.  Facilities 
with millions a month for cash flow.

But it was fun while it lasted.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

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