Making Waves--Commentary
Would the Last Person to Leave
Broadcast Engineering Please Turn Off the Lights?
Gary Stigall, CSTE
Chairman, Chapter 36
KFMB-TV Staff Engineer
XETV, KPBS, KGTV, KUSI, and UCSD-TV have something in common other than a channel allocation, some wire, and a few tape machines.
They all have help wanted ads, looking for maintenance engineers. And they're mostly having a hard time of it.
Trends are never black and white, in your face--they're trends. I'd love to tell you that all the San Diego jobs were created when ten engineers left to work at new dot-coms in Sorrento Valley. In fact, at least three went into manufacturing engineering, at least one went to Hollywood, and several of the openings, notably at XETV and UCSD-TV, are new positions.
A lake which looks perfectly still invariably has an outlet where water is leaking. Over time, the lake stays level as long as new water entering at one end equals water going out. Even if only three of those employees were going into manufacturing, we need three people to jump into the employment lake who have no broadcast experience.
Leon Messenie, Engineering Supervisor at KPBS-TV, says his PBS colleagues across the country are all seeing a shortage of new hiring prospects. His recent Help Wanted posting drew two applicants, one fresh out of the Navy and one from customer service at a broadcast equipment company--neither with any broadcast plant experience. And RF--let's not even go there. KPBS's RF maintenance position has gone unfilled for more than a year now.
Sherman George, UCSD Media Center Director, blames U.S. schools in part. "It's a great crime that high schools set it up so that everyone is forced to go through higher education and get a degree in order to be prepared to work." In Germany, vo-tech can land you a great job in high-tech after high school. In this country, vo-tech is for flunkies, if offered at all.
I was a product of this system. I really liked broadcasting and was lucky enough to land a very cool job at the local radio station and get some high school credit for it. However, when it came time to determine class ranking, I was severely punished because I had chosen a non-college prep course. Like the boys who quit Stanford to create Yahoo!, I was on my own. Though I got a BS in Journalism, I learned electronics largely by self-teaching with books, equipment manuals, and looking over smarter shoulders. In our high school, our administrators presumed that only those with low skills took electronics, mechanics, and agriculture courses.
Do you see any signs that this will change? Community colleges are the vo-tech educators, and only Palomar and Napa Colleges in California are recognized broadcast technician preparers.
What's so Bad About Broadcasting?
Well, for one thing, money. There was a time, oh not so many years ago, when a broadcast engineer was basically a fully employed ham radio op. He was self-taught, changed tubes (later transistors) and fuses as needed, adjusted ever-drifting critical voltages, knew how to troubleshoot just about everything from the microphone to the antenna. New puzzles every day. Interesting people around. Many have told me over the years they'd just about do this job for free.
Now this person is basically a network administrator. He swaps out suspect six-layer boards delivered via FedEx, installs new transmission muxes, terminates boxes and boxes of ethernet cable, changes the air filters in the solid-state transmitter a few times a year, and upgrades PC's and driver software almost continuously.
Until one day he reads the Help Wanted ads and realizes they're paying $70,000 a year plus stock options in a "growing, dynamic company" for people who swap boards, install muxes, string ethernet cable, upgrade PC's.
I had lunch the other day with a friend I had worked with 16 years ago. Back then, we had the same audio systems engineering tasks, neither of us had BSEE's, and we made the same money. We eventually went our separate ways--he with satellite field service, then to Qualcomm doing site studies--me going to video systems engineering and later back into "call lettered" broadcasting. Now with Ericsson, he's lousy with Qualcomm stock and making enough more annually in salary than me to pay cash for a new BMW every year. I didn't think my emotions were transparent until the waitress approached at the end of the meal and asked, "Sir, would you like some dessert with that envy?"
Sherman George at UCSD-TV says he gets plenty of applicants from qualified people. But when he tells them the state has allocated $35K for the job, the conversation dies a sad death. They go knocking on doors across the freeway at "Telecom Beach".
At KPBS, Leon tells me that in order to compete in the job market, they are working to reclassify broadcast engineers within the state system not as electronics technicians but as information technology specialists. Remember, a 12-bit studio camera puts out serial data, not video.
How high should salaries go? Mike Biltucci, KGTV Director of Operations and Engineering, wisely reminds us that the share of the audience of a single channel continues to sink against a tide of quality alternatives from countless satellite channels and the Internet. "Significantly increasing compensation is difficult in a business with an erosion of ratings, revenue and ever-growing expenses dictated by the conversion to digital," he says.
Not all is Sunny at Telecom Beach.
About ten years ago I spoke with the chief at KEYT in Santa Barbara about possible employment. Not now, he said, but ask again in a few months. We will have quite a few openings. "Really?" I asked, thinking there might be a turnover problem. "Yeah, we have a number of guys who joined when we signed on in 1954 and are all getting ready to retire."
Broadcast engineering has been like that--especially in television. The average operator or maintenance tech at KNSD or KFMB-TV has been around for more than ten years, many for more than twenty, and some over thirty.
Not so at Telecom Beach. Typically in high tech, you work project to project. At the end of a product development cycle, you must find another project in the company to charge your time to or you're out. It's like having to job hunt every year or two. Networking is crucial. Young employees who work 60 hours a week and have no other life are revered in startups. If their stock options don't work out, they leap to another company.
Broadcasting remains an interesting career. You're working with dynamic, perhaps funny, people. You may be part of a team bringing in breaking news. Most plants are small enough that your work makes a real difference--you're not a nameless, faceless worker bee. You deal with an endless variety of problems and solutions, so you'll never get bored.
About Finding Your True Value
It's really up to you. Looking at the competition for your skills, you may deserve a raise. A BIG one. But offering an ultimatum will only put your supervisor on the defensive. And you don't want that. Trust me. Instead, talk about it with your supervisor, and be prepared with some verifiable comps or offer from a similar job that you are ready to depart for. If you aren't ready to walk the walk, don't talk the talk.
The price of any commodity (you, for example) is precisely what the market will bear. No more. No less. If your supervisory feels he or she can readily replace you at what you are asking, your price is too high. If you are considered a very good deal, perhaps you left too much "on the table."
A bit of unsolicited advice: If the person you are negotiating with is made aware that you are shopping around for the right job, your value increases. Twice (accidently--I'm not a great negotiator) I let interviewers know that I was considering another offer in a very straightforward manner, and instantly their offers went up. Once this was accomplished simply by having the two companies share the costs of a recruitment flight. "You don't need to pay for the whole flight. I'm stopping off in San Jose and company H is paying for that leg."
Can the company afford your raise? Not really your concern when you're negotiating. Well, what are they paying your salespeople or hotdog on-air employees? Look around you and realize that technical types are finally getting some respect in our society.
Good luck to you.
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