Absolutely untrue. I've been told many times I'm the best PCB designer engineers have worked with, and I do know the biggest tool in the industry, Cadence. Now that the economy is crashed, everyone wants Altium experience.

The reality is that I'm a stubborn and very naive person, I persisted in doing PCB design even though I know that Montreal is dead and finished in high tech. Or in *that* kind of high tech. There's an abundance of startups working on increasingly baffling (to me) products that obviously have no meaning or use whatsoever. Yes, yes, that intelligent internet enabled wearable t-shirt is the future of mankind. Fuck me.

I've worked on all kinds of materials to 12GHz, I've done 24 layer multi-material boards with blind and buried vias, I came up with novel power-bypassing schemes, I can solder, prototype, write scripts, automate boring CAD tasks, worked with suppliers, ordered prototypes, etc..

I'm not just a PCB designer, I can handle all kinds of tasks.

"Oh but we see a gray hair, and you don't know the ARM architecture? What's this? Cadence? Buh bye!"

The few contacts I still have left here don't like me. One guy said I "betrayed" him when he hired me as a technician but then I was drafted (ha) to PCB design by *his* boss because of my previous experience. What did he expect? Blood ties after a year of work soldering wires?

Then this guy left to start his own company which apparently isn't a betrayal. I can't deal with the kind of soap-opera drama that people bring to the table.

The double-standards, the back stabbing, the fact that people will hang on to a bad joke I made 15 years ago but forget the 100 hour weeks I can do to finish a project, I'm barely able to get work to stack boxes in a warehouse. (I really did do that, the guys there are kind of scary, they're all on prison-work programs with tattoos and broken noses, and they see me with my baby face and lady fingers.... get it?)

Sorry, my quality of life is miserable here. I tried to get a simple job with the government for 14$/hour, which is lower that I made 20 years ago, they wanted to do a RCMP background check on me, I then asked them how come Arthur Porter was able to be hired at the CHUM to defraud the government out of millions of dollars even though everyone knew he screwed over the Detroit hospital. Why check me and not the real robbers? People who lose millions are OK, lose a pen and HR escorts you out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.montrealgazette.com...

Needless to say, I didn't get far there. I'm fed up of being robbed and defrauded by people who will suffer no consequences while I pay their retirement with my taxes for the rest of my life with my 14$/hr job.

I'm more and more outraged by where we are heading as society, excuse me if I don't have the same eagerness that I had at 20 about yet another microprocessor, yet another LED, yet another logic gate, etc.

I am outraged that employers don't even offer long term employment but then have the gall to say "but with your experience, if we hire you, you won't stay!"

OF COURSE I WON'T STAY YOU COCK KNOB, YOU'RE NOT OFFERING ANYTHING WORTH STAYING FOR!

I need to EAT, what am I supposed to do? LIE?

Is that it?

"Oh yes, I saw your website and am very excited to work on yet another disposable tech bauble while we are being robbed daily! Sure!"

There are no more large hardware electrical engineering companies in Montreal. Forget it. You want an example?

OK, here goes, there's a company that builds simulators for large equipment here. My friend, an engineer, had to go through three interviews, including one with the CTO. He had to make a whole song and dance routine. The company acted like they are building a Tokamak.

The job? Wiring joysticks. A switch, a connector, a cable, a light, maybe a second connector. Ooh, and then making a drawing. Yeah, exhausting.

My cat could do that job, yet the job had three pages of "requirements".

I can't deal with this kind of Kafkaesque theatre of the absurd anymore. Let's just say I understand depressed people, and I look at old people and I'm more and more sure I'll never make it to that age. And knowing that my parents definitely have longevity genes, I can't even count on a nice, fat heart attack to take me out.

With you on that. This province is getting more surreal and absurd by the minute, and judging by the rightful student protests, it's not just old-man grumpiness talking here.

I've been disappointed with Montreal and Quebec in general for a long time but always fell back on the cop-out "it's not better elsewhere" loser mentality.

It is better elsewhere. But where do they still hire PCB designers?

I'd say the person doing that hired him was an even bigger fraud.

One day I'd like to understand why a company with 30 people needs THREE human resources "people".

Musk is confident and realizes he has little time to waste. I wish I were like him instead of the neurotic, depressed introverted mess I am at the same age.

You don't live here...

We are worse than the US I believe, we combine the worst aspects of laissez-faire capitalism with the high taxes of a socialist state, but with the benefits of neither.

That all new solar panels must have a house on them.

But having an economic underclass of humans designed to be disposable cheap labor is fine? We don't need any specific technology to act in scandalous ways towards each other.

In theory, but the state has unlimited resources. You don't.

you have nothing to hide, right? What's good for the pig is good for the swine, no?

You should have listened to Don Lancaster.

You just need to follow some simple recipes and follow the datasheet. EE is mostly solved problems, with known solutions that can be applied by anyone.

Oh, you too? In Quebec we're swimming in surplus hydroelectricity, yet they're building turbines everywhere and increasing our rates as much as they can.

There have been so many demos on the Commodore 64 exploiting a new software video mode called NUFLI that basically tweaks the video chip on every video line with data from a big memory add-on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That NES stuff didn't even look good. It's easy to put 16G on an old computer and just stream a bunch of images to memory for the video chip to display.