Any pics from China trip or new facility?

[Pdelcast]

Originally Posted by nitrostarter

Patrick, need any accountants/beta testers? I'd love to move to Kansas and work for you, especially if Castle pays room and board!

Funny you should ask. We have an opening for an accountant. Seriously.

Contact kate at castlecreations dot com

Send her a resume. We'd love to have an accountant who can also beta test. :)

[magman]

Originally Posted by Pdelcast

+1 -- sometimes I'm surprised at how young the people look in our plant.

However, we don't have anyone working who is under 20 years old. We require people to be at least 20 years old even to apply for a position.

The average age of assembly-line workers in our plant is about 27 years old.

If you look at the picture with Jonathan in the center (the tall white guy who looks really out of place) you can see the tiny chinese woman standing next to him. That's Rose, and she's our engineering liaison, and is 26 years old (but she looks 17 or 18!). She has college degrees in English language and physics. She's the youngest person we have working in our offices (but speaks perfect English and understands at least as much about engineering as our best engineers!)

We really try hard to promote a fair and safe work environment for our workers in China. We pay about 50% higher than average wages in the area AND we pay room and board for the assembly line workers -- we want to KEEP good people, and keep a very well trained work-force.

We don't have to use under-age workers, we don't have to have poor working conditions, we don't have to cut corners everywhere because we can't afford to. We have to produce a very high quality product, with very high consistency. We have enough margin in the product to afford to treat our employees well, and make sure they have everything they need.

We also run our company a little differently than many Asian manufacturers. Our engineers work closely with the production employees, and we've worked hard to break down the class division between management and workers. We want our managers and engineers to listen to the assembly line workers, and learn from them. We are constantly improving quality through communications.

well done Patrick!