Liars don't figure amen

[Scicards]

Question.. Who has the most seats ?

Do believe the figures ???

Figures don't lie and liars don't figure...

Mom and Pop's software needs to die !! so we can get paid like professionals and work on Mentor & Cadence Tools...

RIP.. POWERPCB V4.01 RIP !!!
just like the Cadnedix was the low end leader
with just 5 buttons, and your Engineer can design PCB's
in an hour.. hehehe

Scicards aka Encore out

Please take the poll..
How many people want Pads to die?????

[cadpro2k]

Say scicards, go figure this simple question. How do companies pay designers as "professionals" (by your definition of Mentor designers) when they have to pay such outrageous amounts of money for new seats and yearly maintanence? Companies will always be looking to pay the least for the most experience people, and want to pay the least for the "best tools on the market". Go figure.

As for me, I'm more than happy to be using Cadence tools (with their "true" online DRC checking), and have been for many years. But, I still wish for a tool like HP's PCDS product (much like scicards of past), that was so much more easy to use, and gave me tremendous "viewing" capabilities (WYSIWYG thermals).

Yes, I get paid a hell of a lot more than most PADS designers I know (no pun intended PADS guys), but I've often times had to justify why Cadence is more expensive than PADS or Protel or Eagle or whatever. I feel that I'm well skilled in a highly effective tool, and if you feel the same way with PADS or Mentor or Protel, Great.

If you're truely not replaceable, you'll never be a manager... :) HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Mitch

[randychase]

You have to spell like a professional if you want to be PAID like a professional. :)

By the way, I think level of pay has more to do with the expertise and value of the designer and less to do with the tool. I think more expensive higher end tools attract ON AVERAGE, a higher level of designer.

But that does not mean you can't do the same thing as a designer on a lower end tool. There is not that much I can't do on PowerPCB, and I doubt I would make more by using a different package. If I did get paid a lot more, that would be a good reason for me as a manager to not use the higher end packages, unless I could justify the performance increase for the cost.

[cadpro2k]

Ditto Randy. :)

[Scicards]

R..

Where's the spell checker button ??

I know it's in the next release..

Cheers

[Mark Larson]

you lost your credibility with me when you stated Cadnetix was a low cost tool

[Skip Yutkus]

Okay,

Now you got me going! Mentor is a tool that allows you to design printed circuit boards, Pads is also a tool that allows you to design printed circuit boards - 1 seat in Mentor or Cadence Expert costs about $80,000, 1 seat in Pads costs between 4K and 10K depending on the frills, the Mentor package mentioned above is the stripped-down version, absolutely no signal integrity tools - they'll cost you between 100K - 250K - you can't even export DXF and if you have it, the HPGL export is not to scale. If you are versed in the signal integrity issues then the choice is a no-brainer, go for value versus un-deserved reputation.

Skip

[mhowell]

Hourly Rates a designer charges are figured a formula similar to this, not based on assumptions stated elsewhere in this thread:

1. Let Total Cost = SUM [ cost of tools (software & hardware) +
cost of office expenses (rent, etc...) +
yearly cost of design staff (salary, benefits, etc...) ]

2. Let Burden Rate = Total Cost divided by No. of Hrs per year (usually around 2000).

3. Let Charge Rate = Burden Rate multiplied by profit margin.

This is what it takes for a business to break even. Thus, a really experienced Orcad service bureau could make a much higher profit margin that the same service bureau using a higher priced tool. This assumption holds whether you are talking about a captive group or service bureau.

Here's a scenario to illustrate the point:
A design group has 5 people - 3 designers earning $65K, 75K and 85K; 1 administrative person earning 40k; and 1 person that splits time between sales and design earning 100k. On average a full time designer has 2000 billable hours per year, with 3.5FT designers, these 5 people total 7k design hrs/year. Office expenses are $5k/month or $60k/yr, SW and HW are $120k/yr. With a profit goal of 15%, we come up with a standard design rate of $90/hr as follows
Wages $365k
office $60k
HW & SW $120k
Total1 545k

Design hrs 7000
Rate = total1/design hrs = 77.85/hr
15% Profit adder: 11.65/hr
Rate/hr=89.53 rounds up to 90.

This is how I figure it. If you have another way to get hourly burden rates, let me know.

Expenses do vary as mentioned elsewhere. Usually it depends on what the customer needs, competition, and other market factors.

The problem with assumptions made elsewhere is that a customer will pay if resources are scarce, which they are not right now.

Also, a PADS or OrCAD designer can charge half of what a Mentor operator charges and have a much higher profit ratio!