What are the manufacturing business options for a person having Computer Science and Electronic background ?

Thread Starter

mack38

Joined Nov 29, 2019
21
What are the manufacturing business options for a person having Computer Science and Electronic background and also having roughly 7000 $ with him?
I am giving some idea so that you will get the correct track
e.g :
1) PCB manufacturing (require expensive machinery so not feasible)
2) Industrial Electronic item retailers for small manufacturers (In India where I am staying there are not many electronic manufacturers and they have a direct link to Chinese Raw Material manufacturers)
3) Assembling to create Drones and selling them (In India nobody buy drones as it require a licence and there is no culture and interest in people to buy drones)
4) Designing own processor and selling it a core IP (not at all possible as if it was then big companies have hired that guy instead of paying to ARM)
5) Designing Automobile Engines and selling them (this is my dream but with my current profile it is difficult) and also it will be challenging to sell them to big Automobile companies. As they prefer to hire a person and ask him to create new designs for there current problems in engines.
6) Biometric devices manufacturing (by assembling china parts) but in India, nobody will buy as their market itself is less when compared with other types of Industries.

based on the type of above tracks can somebody please suggest me any idea and also if he/she is already successfully running that business.
 

dl324

Joined Mar 30, 2015
16,846
based on the type of above tracks can somebody please suggest me any idea and also if he/she is already successfully running that business.
If you have to ask someone what business you should start with $7000, you've already lost the game.

A $7k investment is nothing. You need to be able to fund 2-5 years of operations with no profit. Anyone with more money, knowledge, and initiative will eat your lunch.

Forget about being able to compete with any Chinese company. Forget about designing anything using off the shelf parts and being competitive with companies that are more established than you'll be. You need to have a volume of 10's of thousands of units to be able to sell an ARM single board computer at a competitive price. Plus, you need to be able to differentiate yourself from the crowd.

As an example, I bought a Linux based ARM single board computer with a 1GHz single core ARM processor, 512MB, 8GB FLASH, WiFi, Bluetooth, composite video out from a Kickstarter company (called NTC) for $9 plus shipping. After they went out of business (after selling 10's of thousands of units), someone tried to do his own design of that product (it was open sourced). In single quantity, he couldn't get the cost below $90 and he didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting of getting a Debian port to run on it.

RPI Foundation tried to compete at that price point and they came up with RP0. For $5 (plus shipping) you had to add a $5 SD card and $10 WiFi adapter to even be in the same ballpark. For $20 you could get something that almost competed with a $9 product. But you can only order in quantity 1 because the profit margin is so small. At least with C.H.I.P., you could order 5 at a time to amortize the shipping cost over more units.
 
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Thread Starter

mack38

Joined Nov 29, 2019
21
If you have to ask someone what business you should start with $7000, you've already lost the game.

A $7k investment is nothing. You need to be able to fund 2-5 years of operations with no profit. Anyone with more money, knowledge, and initiative will eat your lunch.

Forget about being able to compete with any Chinese company. Forget about designing anything using off the shelf parts and being competitive with companies that are more established than you'll be. You need to have a volume of 10's of thousands of units to be able to sell an ARM single board computer at a competitive price. Plus, you need to be able to differentiate yourself from the crowd.

As an example, I bought a Linux based ARM single board computer with a 1GHz single core ARM processor, 512MB, 8GB FLASH, WiFi, Bluetooth, composite video out from a Kickstarter company (called NTC) for $9 plus shipping. After they went out of business (after selling 10's of thousands of units), someone tried to do his own design of that product (it was open sourced). In single quantity, he couldn't get the cost below $90 and he didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting of getting a Debian port to run on it.

RPI Foundation tried to compete at that price point and they came up with RP0. For $5 (plus shipping) you had to add a $5 SD card and $10 WiFi adapter to even be in the same ballpark. For $20 you could get something that almost competed with a $9 product. But you can only order in quantity 1 because the profit margin is so small. At least with C.H.I.P., you could order 5 at a time to amortize the shipping cost over more units.
Yes 'dl324' you are right and what every you are telling is a very practical and real thing and I already know this but I am in a very bad situation (I am from India), I am out from the job from almost 4 years. (after having 10+ years of experience) even after having :-
My Academic Qualification : [3 Masters of which 1 in computer 1 in electronic and 1 in management, 2 diploma, 1 bachelors degree]
Experience (10+ years) :- already worked as a contractor with Cisco, Avaya, IBM, NetApp, Canal+, Cognizant, CapitalOne
Already expertise and worked as/Skill : - ERP Integration Developer, Solution Architect, Business Analyst, Software Tester/QA, Java/C/C++/C#, MCU programming (less), Cloud Computing and Administrating (AWS).

I am tired and exhausted (also de-motivated) as today in India IT Service Market is so worst even if you are a scientist you won't get job (and few of those who are getting that is because either they are ready to work on a bigger salary 139$ per month which I think it shouldn't be considered as a salary), and number of Job requirement gone severely down. But people who are from Medical background are surviving and earning good money.

So after all this, I started thinking to do business although I know it would be close to impossible and you are telling me very genuine and practical things but what can I do then ?
And I also want to quit India and settle down in Europe or USA but not finding anyway.
Can you please give any suggestions or options based on your life experience as well as if you would be in my situation then what you would have done ?
 
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Ian Rogers

Joined Dec 12, 2012
1,136
Are you including the schooling in your 10+ years experience? Not that it matters..

Looks like you have lost your way.. Contracting can earn you money, but I suspect India is over full of candidates that will step in for a few rupees lees than you... I notice that the "IT" in India was saturated several years back.. I also suspect the "Electronic field" has gone the same way..

I have helped many ( and I mean many ) Indian trained EE students over the past 5~6 years.. All seem to be searching for that "product" that will bring food to the table... But! With hundreds of technical people in India to choose from, its difficult for the average man to flourish.. I notice virtually all are trained to the hilt, sporting many qualifications... Truth is, you only need one and the wherewithal to use it...

I was always told! Find something that people need, make it better than anyone else! Dennis hit on the kickstart.. If I made a "Thing", as I do everything I could make it pretty cheap... That's because it was my idea and its all in my head... Companies would need me to mass produce ( until the lesson were learned and I was ousted ).. Cruel world.

We are looking to develop a system in Mumbia India... Ask yourself why! Surely there are trained professionals nearby, why would this be sought here in the UK..

I'll tell you... Having a "thing" is okay... But! as I said, having the nouse to use the thing is where the money lies..
 

dl324

Joined Mar 30, 2015
16,846
And I also want to quit India and settle down in Europe or USA but not finding anyway.
Do you have any local contacts who are employed? Intel has a site in India, but I have only one contact I knew well and he left Intel to work for Microsoft. Networking is how I got my last half dozen jobs (all internal transfers in the same company). None of the jobs had an open requisition for my skill set, but they made a position for me based on recommendations from personal contacts and/or my reputation. I still had to go through the normal interviewing process.
Can you please give any suggestions or options based on your life experience as well as if you would be in my situation then what you would have done ?
I can't be helpful there. From the time I graduated until I retired, I was never unemployed. I changed companies several times, but I always had a new job before I quit the old one.

When I was younger, I tried to think of new products for the market. In the mid 70's, I thought of a radar detector that would broadcast a specified speed when it detected a radar beam. I didn't know how to get started because anyone I talked to about it thought it was a dumb idea.

Then I thought about something to fool radar; attenuate or redirect. Never got very far.

In the mid 80's, I thought about a windshield that had an LCD in it so transparency of some portions could be changed. This would have eliminated the need for visors and tinting. I didn't know how to get started, but I wrote down my ideas and had a colleague initial them. A decade or two later, someone came up with the idea and turned it into a product. My colleague emailed information to me and asked if that was the idea we had talked about years earlier. It was, but I never patented the idea (which is hard to do now). I came up with that idea based on some work I had done in a research lab at a SF Bay Area company using liquid crystals, laser diodes, and fiber optic cables that my lab was developing (a decade earlier). I was working on an optical pulse generator project and my part was to experiment with using an LCD as an optical attenuator.
 
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Thread Starter

mack38

Joined Nov 29, 2019
21
Are you including the schooling in your 10+ years experience? Not that it matters..

Looks like you have lost your way.. Contracting can earn you money, but I suspect India is over full of candidates that will step in for a few rupees lees than you... I notice that the "IT" in India was saturated several years back.. I also suspect the "Electronic field" has gone the same way..

I have helped many ( and I mean many ) Indian trained EE students over the past 5~6 years.. All seem to be searching for that "product" that will bring food to the table... But! With hundreds of technical people in India to choose from, its difficult for the average man to flourish.. I notice virtually all are trained to the hilt, sporting many qualifications... Truth is, you only need one and the wherewithal to use it...

I was always told! Find something that people need, make it better than anyone else! Dennis hit on the kickstart.. If I made a "Thing", as I do everything I could make it pretty cheap... That's because it was my idea and its all in my head... Companies would need me to mass produce ( until the lesson were learned and I was ousted ).. Cruel world.

We are looking to develop a system in Mumbia India... Ask yourself why! Surely there are trained professionals nearby, why would this be sought here in the UK..

I'll tell you... Having a "thing" is okay... But! as I said, having the nouse to use the thing is where the money lies..
Thanks for replying to me,
No, I didn't lost my way but we don't have choice as 99% job requirement are contract base.
and to clear your doubt regarding my experience: - I have 12 years of Schooling + 3 years of graduate study + 2 years of masters degree (MBA) + 3 Years another Master's (MCA) degree parallel one diploma. after that 10+ years of Real industry experience (as designation explained in my post) with companies such as Cisco, Avaya, IBM, NetApp, Cognizant, CapitalOne.
Normally Academic study is not considered as experience so I thought that nobody can even think and reply to me that "If you are considering 10+ of experience that including your academic" that is not at all, my age is 40.

and there is one more biggest misunderstanding regarding Indian engineers are that they are not experts in one area but have lots of degrees and education. Here/India IT industry is majorly run by service-based companies which are very cunning and do not have any ethics, Here selection are not happened based on quality of expertise rather than who can join in least salary and then they eat all our salary as an agent as they are nothing but a staffing company along with that these company slowly start giving work which are from different area than the one for which they hired us and then it is obvious output won't be good then people from outside India get the wrong impression, the other reason is because we people get salary equal to beggar salary so we intentionally do not deliver quality work and we are de-motivated also mentally depressed.

I am very thankful that you reply to me and sorry if anything hurt from my words but we/engineers are mature and people good people facing with a genuine problem (it is not that we don't have quality expertization) but we are surrounded by few big Service-based IT MNC which do not have ethics and humanity when compared to any other country in the world (as I interacted other country employers also).
 
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dl324

Joined Mar 30, 2015
16,846
Here/India IT industry is majorly run by service-based companies which are very cunning and do not have any ethics,
I'm glad you recognize the lack of ethics in that "industry". I think it's also unethical for US based companies to employ people in India (or Malaysia and China) for significantly less money by "outsourcing jobs" (another way of saying firing US employees) overseas to improve profits.
 

Ian Rogers

Joined Dec 12, 2012
1,136
and there is one more biggest misunderstanding regarding Indian engineers are that they are not experts in one area but have lots of degrees and education.
Please don't misunderstand me... I respect that there are absolutely fabulous hard working Indian IT / Engineer, My point was one of the saturated market.... It was once thought that India were to become the largest technical industry outside USA.. Unfortunately red tape gets in the way and it was rather underestimated.. I feel for the overly trained people stuck over there, It must feel impossible at times..
 

Thread Starter

mack38

Joined Nov 29, 2019
21
I'm glad you recognize the lack of ethics in that "industry". I think it's also unethical for US based companies to employ people in India (or Malaysia and China) for significantly less money by "outsourcing jobs" (another way of saying firing US employees) overseas to improve profits.
Yes, I agree with your point and I am really sorry if because of us your country is facing unemployment problem But you also think about why it is happening because all these US-based companies want cheap labour. So instead of sitting without salary people are ready to work on a cheap salary in India as our Gov dose not provide any un-employment fund so what can we do at least a US person can reject any offer with less salary as in US Gov is good and they support unemployed employee by funds.

But the interesting thing is nobody knows what in reality happening here. Let me explain you.

These US-based company who outsource work to India based Service-based companies (not the engineers) then here what is happening wrong is, these Indian based IT service company ask 70$-80$ per hour from these US-based companies for one employee salary and these US-based companies think it is profitable so they agree on that but they don't know that the actual engineer who is delivering the work he won't get 80$ per hour instead of that he only gets 0.79$ to 1.59 $ per hours which means for 22 working days in one month he earns 139.91$ to 279.8$ and these Indian IT Service (Moderator) eat rest of our 92% to 99% salary (14000$ roughly) they feed their stomach and then do lots of marketing that they are well-wisher of this society and all bullshit nonsense talk (this am talking about Indian service-based companies).

So the point is, You are right and we both are suffering because of the way how commercially these companies approach to do something but in the later run, they lost respect among people and that is the reason why an engineer (from any country) start thinking to do his own business.

And Please don't min-understood us we don't have any intention to make other country people un-employed it is just happening because of these both side companies and our side Indian Gov... who do not pay un-employment fund or create employment opportunities from within own country.
 

GetDeviceInfo

Joined Jun 7, 2009
2,192
Only a suggestion;
With your expertise and the realization that there are many in a similar position, I would consider creating a referral system that matched skilled workers with employer needs. Sales is one activity that can be successful without large capital outlays. Knock on doors and find out what people with money want.
 
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