What were you up to in 1996? 

That was the year I graduated college from Marquette. My degree was in mechanical engineering. I was living in the suburbs and working for the International Truck and Engine Corporation in the design group. I bought my first new car, the Saturn SL2.

Favorite band/movie in 1996 vs. now

In 1996, my sister stumbled on some tickets and I attended a Kenny G concert with her. The last big concerts that I attended before the pandemic were Shakira at the United Center and Lady Gaga at Wrigley Field.

How did you join DMC?

I had previously known Frank from International Truck and Engine. Prior to working full time, I was an intern and he was a research fellow, doing a project for his master’s degree in control systems.

After I left college, I no longer had an email account. This was before cell phones and email addresses were common. Frank called the receptionist at International and asked if I worked there. That’s how he found me again.

He said, “I’m starting a company. Do you want to get in on the ground floor?” I considered the opportunity to be a springboard. Being an engineer in a big corporate setting seemed like a slow but predictable path. Being a partner in a small company seemed like it had growth potential.

How has DMC changed over the years? What hasn’t changed?

Growth. We are a lot bigger now. There are so many more team members. The magnitude of the customers and many projects are so much bigger. Our capacity to take on larger, more impactful projects has grown.

The constant is the relentless nature of the business. To quote Newman from Seinfeld, “The mail just keeps on coming, it never stops.” Another constant is that we’ve always had great people to work with.

Best/worst updates in technology since 1996?

There were a few controls products that didn’t make it. No one is going to be bothered by me saying that Think and Do software was one of the worst. It was an attempt to use an Office-optimized environment, raw Windows 95 or 98, to do controls with. The interface wasn’t great. It didn’t follow any standards. That might have been before the good standards were out there. Expectations were too high for the product.

DVT cameras were ahead of their time and made a damn good mousetrap. They were bought out and put under by their competitor and their best ideas forgotten. They best straddled the tradeoff of being highly capable and easy to use. Those are the two things that vendors in automation are always fighting against each other about.

How has your field changed since you started at DMC?

Automation and test and measurement have vastly increased modularity. Solutions are now built by assembling highly developed components from a software and hardware perspective. At the beginning, a lot of development started with a blank slate clean sheet of paper every time. Over 25 years, we have internally developed and vendor-supplied components that we use to jump into a project from the midpoint instead of the beginning.

What’s the most surprising thing about working at DMC?

The sense of admiration that I feel from so many of my very capable colleagues. If that’s not a humblebrag, I don’t know what is.

Favorite DMC event?

Our holiday parties. We’ve had a lot of good venues. The glassblowing demonstration at Ignite Glass Studio was intense, but I gave the most rocking speech at the Lincoln Park Zoo party.

Best place traveled for work?

I’ve had a lot of good ones. I enjoyed doing a project Poznań, Poland and attending the Hannover Messe in Germany. Traveling to Austin, Texas is always a good time too.

Favorite DMC project?

The National Radar Test Facility. It pushed some technological boundaries and was a very large project with a lot of little pieces that all had to come together. It was like putting together the 1500-piece puzzle instead of the 200-piece puzzle.

Learn more about DMC’s company culture and contact us today for your next project.

The post 25th Anniversary Interview with Ken Brey appeared first on DMC, Inc..

What were you up to in 1996? 

I was working at the National Institute for Petroleum Energy Research in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The town is famous for having the only skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I had never yet left Oklahoma.

What was your favorite movie in 1996 and what is it now?

My favorite movie is the same now as it was in 1996 – a Christian Slater movie called Pump Up the Volume. It came out in 1990, and it beautifully captured the moment and Gen-X attitude. I identified strongly with the main character, but as a young, socially awkward geek I strongly expect I wasn’t actually cool like Christian Slater.   

How did you join DMC?

Accidentally. I was working for NIPER in Bartlesville. They sent me to LabVIEW training in Austin. Frank was sitting in the seat behind me. The training was slower than I needed, so I was working ahead. Apparently, Frank saw that and gave me his card. A few months later, the government decided to farm out its research lab contracts so I gave Frank a call. He brought me out to Chicago and interviewed me. He checked my references when I was in the car with him! I was employee number six.

How has DMC changed over the years? What hasn't changed?

There are approximately one-hundred-something more employees now then there were then. We have had to grow up as a company. The six of us getting in a room and making a decision doesn’t work with 180 people. It’s no longer a small company where everyone is intimately aware of everything going on.

I’m going to be cheesy and bring up the core values. The core things, the important things, have been the same since day one. The specific technology of how I work with my colleagues has changed, but the actual interaction of everyone working together to make things happen is the same. I can call somebody and they will help.

Overall, the people are still awesome. I used to say we could form a 50-person Mensa chapter. Now we could form a 180-person Mensa chapter. Everyone is brilliant and amazing. That’s a huge consistent quality from the beginning.

In your opinion, what are the best and worst updates in technology since 1996?

The best update is cell phones, now having smart phones. Imagine going to the movies in 1996. You probably didn’t have a cell phone. If you did you were fancy. You had to buy a ticket at the box office. My partner at the time didn’t want a cell phone. It was raining, so I dropped her off at the box office, parked the car, and trudged through the rain. The movie was sold out. Now, with a smart phone I can get a ticket and any information I want to know is there in my hand at all times. Most people are probably not aware of how transformational smart phones are in our daily lives.

The worst thing is ads everywhere. It was bad enough on your tv. The way that everything is monetized through ad revenue and tracking is a big social problem that we haven’t begun to tackle and is to our detriment overall.

How has your field changed since you started at DMC?

Technology was rudimentary in a lot of ways. In automation, if you were programming a PLC then you were worrying about bit masking, working with bytes, things you had to do to get performance, and logical tricks to make things happen. Now, the programming languages have caught up to the standards of computer development. Our technology and tools are way better. We have more power and more capabilities.

DMC started on the cusp of this revolution. In those days, people would say we couldn’t use ethernet as a control system because, “It’s not deterministic and things will explode.” They were using bus protocols based on RS-232 or RS-435 that were slow, but you had control over how the packets were done. It was better to say, “It’s reliable every 100 milliseconds,” not, “You’ll get it every five minutes but sometimes it won’t be there.” DMC came on the scene when ethernet came on the scene, and we evangelized that every system should be built on it not the old school field buses. Those are rare legacy systems now. We were always pushing those boundaries from the beginning.

Doing machine OEE is common today. It’s relatively recent, but we were doing that diagnostic by writing programs in Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic was game changing and terrible at the same time, making programming accessible to a lot more people. Ken wrote statistical processes and data analytics programs that connected to an early customer’s machines and now that kind of data analytics is what everybody wants. It’s kind of awesome that 25 years later people are still figuring this stuff out and we were doing it then.

What are you looking forward to at DMC in the years to come?

Mostly taking over the world. When we divide it up, I'll take France. I’ve never been there and I’ve always wanted to go.

I think that we have built up a unique group of really smart people. We always push boundaries on what we do.

What haven't we done as well? The big company things of defining standards and stuff. I think that as our capabilities increase and we grow we will be able to do things that will help change the industry. We can’t drive ISA standards or build a product that changes the way people program now, but maybe we can at 500 employees. It will be interesting to see what we can do.

What's the most surprising thing about working at DMC?

Well, I’ve only had one other real job. It’s a little cliché that startup culture is all about company culture and everybody playing ping pong. What we do well is avoiding superfluous ridiculous perks and boiling them down to make a sustainable culture as we grow.

Long ago, I remember interviewing for a company and being depressed when I walked in. It was a silent room of carpet and cubicles. Even the guy interviewing me was depressed. When you walk into a DMC office, it is very vibrant. I hope that as we grow, we maintain that vibrant culture and really amazing people.

Favorite DMC event?

I always loved going out for lunch when we were a small enough company to hop in three cars and race to the lunch place. Whoever got there or back first won. That was very much a community. We were a team that got lunch together. We can’t do that today, but we do a lot of other things like it including happy hours and activity fund events.

What is the best place that you have traveled to for work?

The White Sands Missile Range. We got to work on a massive system and see (and work on) equipment that was instrumental in helping create the first stealth aircraft. Also, the desert landscape was beautiful.

Learn more about DMC's company culture and contact us for your next project.

The post 25th Anniversary Interview with Leon Grossman appeared first on DMC, Inc..

What were you up to in 1996?
I was in college in 1996. I was studying mechanical engineering and working on the solar car team. It was pretty cool to build a solar car and race it across the country. I had super long hair back then. 

I always had a passion for electronics. While I was studying mechanical engineering, I did that on the side building electronics and stuff. That’s what I do now at DMC. 

A guy sitting in the corner at a booth with a demo box full of spinning motors caught my eye. I went over to talk to him because I was working on project trying to make my own pan tilt head for a camera in my aspiring filmmaker days. I talked to him about motors and learned that he was from Yaskawa. At the time, Yaskawa sent promising candidates to DMC.  

I interviewed at DMC, but they had just hired someone the day before. At the time, they couldn’t hire two people at once. It was about seven employees total. They said, “We’ll get in touch when we have an opening.” I got another job, but four months later I heard back from DMC. I bailed on the other job. 

The other job I had was also consulting, but it was focused on the pumps and fixtures inside of chemical plants. I liked that DMC was working with motors, motion control, and robots. The programming aspect intrigued me. Even though I studied mechanical engineering, I liked programming things. The small size of the company was interesting to me. It felt more like a club than a corporation where “We just work on projects and hang out.” 

When DMC was smaller, we were much scrappier it was always about the next project. Now we have more breathing room. 

What are the best or worst updates in technology since 1996?
The world wide web was awesome in 1996. You could go on a web page and look for information and learn things. Now, every page has a million ads and the content is buried in SEO garbage. There's so much marketing around web pages now, and I miss the raw web of 1996. You didn’t need ad blockers, but maybe a pop-up blocker. 
 
From an electronics standpoint, things have gotten insanely cheap and accessible. My first cell phone at DMC was also my first cell phone ever. It was one of those Nokia phones. It's like a brick. 
 
How has your field changed since you started at DMC?
Embedded didn’t exist at DMC when I started. It has changed a lot. We started it and took any project that came our way to begin building a portfolio. We took on risky projects to get our feet wet with a service area. We were learning as we went. Our very first embedded project with a microcontroller was back in Evergreen office. Our first real embedded project was in the Kingsbury office around 2009. 

Do you have a favorite DMC project?
UL Hazloc is one of my all-time favorites because we got to blow stuff up. I also liked working on this medical product that produced electrical stimulus for muscles. The R&D & testing phases were fun. We all took turns seeing who could handle the highest power setting the most.

What's the most surprising thing about working at DMC?
I tell my kids; I literally learn something new every day. The most surprising thing is that we are consultants, so we never know who is going to call with a cool project that they need help with or what kind of interesting technology that we’ve never heard of before we get to help with. There’s a day-to-day surprise of learning what’s out there and what we get to touch. 

I tell people who are considering whether to work at DMC, if you’re not sure what you want to do working as a consultant is a great way to get super wide exposure. It’s like working at 25 different companies in a year and seeing all the things they do and how they do it. You get a taste of all these aspects of the engineering world. You get to peer under the hood at all these companies. If you’re unsure what you want to do it’s a great way to figure out what you want.

What's your favorite DMC event?
I am a huge fan of DMSki. I've been on almost all of them.

Do you have a favorite DMC Moment?
Launching a cheap party balloon from our deck with a makeshift transmitter on it and tracking for it over 100 miles.

What are you looking forward to at DMC in the years to come?
I’m always looking forward to hiring new people straight out of school. They’re drinking from the firehose and absorbing information, making mistakes, and figuring this out. It's a lot of work. It feels good when you see someone turn the corner from “I am just figuring it out” to “I am good at this, I am a professional. I'll never stop learning, but I am super good at this.” You see people turn that corner and it makes you feel good when you know that they can then start to teach the next person.

Do you have any other reflections on DMC turning 25?
I’m super proud of how far we've come. No company is perfect and we don’t always make the right decisions. There are always regrets, but in general we've done a good job of getting DMC where we are today and the future is very bright for DMC. 

Learn more about DMC's company culture and contact us for your next project.

The post 25th Anniversary Interview with Tim Jager appeared first on DMC, Inc..

Learn more about DMC's company culture. 

The post Employee Spotlight: Curtis Weir appeared first on DMC, Inc..

In this video, David shares what it’s like to complete the Chicago Triathlon and why he loves the variety of work at DMC. “I chose DMC because it was a smaller company that would allow me to have a big impact right away and allow me to see a lot of manufacturing processes I haven’t seen before.”

Learn more about DMC’s company culture.

The post Employee Spotlight: David Berno appeared first on DMC, Inc..

In this video, Caleb shares his thoughts on DMC's open and collaborative culture and emphasis on social events. "When starting at DMC, I never thought I'd stay after on a Friday and stay at the office and just hang out."

Learn more about DMC's company culture. 

The post Employee Spotlight: Caleb Stoll appeared first on DMC, Inc..

Learn more about DMC's company culture.

The post Employee Spotlight: Heather Talbert appeared first on DMC, Inc..

The post Employee Spotlight: Nikhil Holay appeared first on DMC, Inc..

The post Employee Spotlight: Jimmy Brady appeared first on DMC, Inc..

In addition to working on UI design in LabVIEW, Steven enjoys playing volleyball and skiing. He’s an active contributor to our DMC Cares initiative. Currently, Steven is heading up another DMC Thanksgiving Food Drive. Learn more about Steven in the video below!

Read blogs by Steven.

Learn more about DMC’s company culture.

The post Employee Spotlight: Steven Dusing appeared first on DMC, Inc..