I run a company doing hardware R&D in China, after only basic shop experience in high school (my grandfather was a successful metal factory operator). It's a pr

I run a company doing hardware R&D in China, after only basic shop experience in high school (my grandfather was a successful metal factory operator). It's a privilege being here because you can literally summons any component with a few clicks and a couple of days waiting, and costs for precise external fabrication in a wide range of processes are low. So far it's surprisingly hard to find competent multidisciplinary mechanical designers capable of working across processes. We offer a pleasant design office environment as an alternative to a shop floor, which means real estate is more central and quality of life for design engineers goes up. We find this more effective than a self-run shop and it means any design fabricated is known reproducible via outside parties. It has been such an education getting to grips with the production costs and prototype iteration expenses (time and money) on a range of materials and processes. I wish there were an up to date book on this, if there is I haven't found it. As an example, we don't use our own 3D printers because having someone else print, pack, and deliver guarantees engineers stay focused. When you see the big metal shops here, each aisle of machines is often 20 machines and 100+ meters long. They have enormous presses, sheet working areas, laser cutters, many CNCS (Italian, Japanese, German, Korean, etc.) ... it's awesome. Then there's the plastic factories ... massive injection gear sunk in to subterranean concrete grottoes and staggering galleries of client molding stretching hectares.