By way of background, I worked at Audionics as an assembly person, repair jock, and then, as a full-fledged audio designer. Let me walk you through what happens in a small-scale audio company.
There’s typically only one repair person at even a medium-scale audio company. More often, in smaller companies, the most skilled tech takes time off assembling equipment to do the occasional repair. This is for a simple reason: you don’t pay the bills from repairs. You pay the bills by assembling new products, putting them in boxes, and shipping them. Repairs are more like janitorial work ... you gotta do it, but it doesn’t pay the bills.
The repair guy is not going to do several repairs at once, unless units are stacked up waiting for hard-to-get parts. This makes a huge mess, creates chaos in the tech area, and the tech will do everything they can to avoid a situation with multiple half-disassembled units all over the place. Big mess, very undesirable.
So in a normally operating factory, there’s usually only one unit getting repaired at one time, with others stacked up in a queue awaiting work. But ... I said in a normally operating factory. If the bills aren’t getting paid, vendors figure it out pretty quick, and parts are then hard to get, since word gets around amongst the parts vendors (they talk each other). Very hard to repair anything if the vendors won’t sell you parts because you don’t pay your bills. Even worse if the parts are exotic and hard to find.
Things get truly chaotic once the bills get past the 60 and 90-day mark. The assembly line shuts down, you get a huge pile of partly assembled units and you need to find space to park them without getting damaged, and repairs stop completely.
The most skilled tech, the repair guy, stops showing up at work once he or she misses their second paycheck, or if the checks bounce the second or third time. Once incoming parts are past the 60-day payment due date, and staff paychecks bounce more than once, the end is near.
The front office staff are usually the last to leave, again, due to missed paychecks. The lights get turned off when the last employee leaves ... by then, the place is stripped bare by the departing employees. Very hard to prevent the aggrieved techs from taking partially assembled electronics that are just lying around in random piles.
By the time the electricity and water is turned off, anything not tied down is gone. From personal experience, I should have taken my handbuilt prototypes home, because they are now lost and gone, leaving only a few scattered notes I took with me. This is how knowledge gets dispersed and lost.
Sorry to report the grim details, but I lived through this not just once, but several times at Audionics. I finally escaped to Tektronix after a few of these episodes.
I know this sounds gruesome. I can assure you, it is a lot worse when it happens to you, in a company you’ve worked at for several years. It takes several of these cycles in the tech industry before you learn how to read the signs and get out fast before the roof falls in.
