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Is there a building industry equivalent of build the machine that builds the houses? You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to

by Fordec 5y ago

Is there a building industry equivalent of build the machine that builds the houses? You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to hand solder every board to have a great, skilled, outcome. I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.

wrycoder 5y ago
Actually, the electrical engineers that I’ve worked with didn’t know how to solder. They had technicians to do that. OTOH, I, a physicist, used to be a certified NASA solderer. That was in the days before surface mount.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  All the EEs of my generation knew how to solder. Interestingly, no electrician I've used knew what inductive coupling was. :-(
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    Well, I’m about fifteen years older than you are. You must have worked with a different class of EEs. The one I knew weren’t hams and probably didn’t grow up building kits and stuff like we did. Inductive coupling is one of the most fascinating topics in EM. And, is all the power really flowing in the air between the wires? The electricians don’t know that, either.
- analog31 5y ago
  I'm a physicist too. The electrical engineers at my workplace know how to solder. However, if someone needs a noise budget, they bring it to me. I'm the one who teaches the chemists to solder. ;-)
jacoblambda 5y ago
Well there's the tools industry and robotics in general but the issue ultimately comes down to cost and speed. You can use heavy automation and tooling to reduce the tax on a person but that equipment is incredibly expensive and often times is slower than a person or a few people just doing the job by themselves or with more "manual" tools.
nkingsy 5y ago
Apprenticeship. Good small time subcontractors show up to the job themselves but train others to do most of the work. Subs I worked with had pretty healthy markup over what they were paying their workers (>100% when invoicing hours). The catch is they all had spent years learning the trade, and that part is definitely dangerous. I saw a guy ruin his back being over eager pouring concrete.
baybal2 5y ago
> I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor. Suburban housing is very easy to build. Building 1 storey houses is not a challenge anywhere in the world, and it is possible to build it super cheap even without any capital equipment. Steel housing is a prime example that even a double digit percentage cost advantage, with it being a very straightforward, and overwhelmingly superior, replacement for wooden framing, doesn't seem to been enough to drive new technology adoption in USA.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I had an interesting experience, I did electronic engineering but i completely misunderstood how to solder - i was trying to melt the solder onto the iron and drop a drop of molten solder on the board with the wire. The technicians were laughing their asses off and said "if you cant solder maybe you shouldn't be here" It was in 2nd year when I watched a youtube video when some guy actually explained thay you need to heat up the pad on the board, then add solder. I was totally flabbergased. Soldering was a very minor part of my degree, so it didn't really matter, but still.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  It helps to put a small amount of solder on the tip of the iron before you touch the pad - it improves the heat transfer. The main amount is added into the part/pad interface, as you saw on YouTube. I’m thinking that, when you first learned to solder, you remembered the first step but not the second one, and thus got off on the wrong foot.
CalRobert 5y ago
Well, houses are literally built by cnc increasingly often. There's a whole industry in the Baltics of building houses in a factory and shipping them around Europe.

by Fordec 5y ago

wrycoder 5y ago

Actually, the electrical engineers that I’ve worked with didn’t know how to solder. They had technicians to do that. OTOH, I, a physicist, used to be a certified NASA solderer. That was in the days before surface mount.

WalterBright 5y ago
All the EEs of my generation knew how to solder. Interestingly, no electrician I've used knew what inductive coupling was. :-(
- wrycoder 5y ago
  Well, I’m about fifteen years older than you are. You must have worked with a different class of EEs. The one I knew weren’t hams and probably didn’t grow up building kits and stuff like we did. Inductive coupling is one of the most fascinating topics in EM. And, is all the power really flowing in the air between the wires? The electricians don’t know that, either.
analog31 5y ago
I'm a physicist too. The electrical engineers at my workplace know how to solder. However, if someone needs a noise budget, they bring it to me. I'm the one who teaches the chemists to solder. ;-)

jacoblambda 5y ago

Well there's the tools industry and robotics in general but the issue ultimately comes down to cost and speed. You can use heavy automation and tooling to reduce the tax on a person but that equipment is incredibly expensive and often times is slower than a person or a few people just doing the job by themselves or with more "manual" tools.

nkingsy 5y ago

Apprenticeship. Good small time subcontractors show up to the job themselves but train others to do most of the work. Subs I worked with had pretty healthy markup over what they were paying their workers (>100% when invoicing hours). The catch is they all had spent years learning the trade, and that part is definitely dangerous. I saw a guy ruin his back being over eager pouring concrete.

baybal2 5y ago

> I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor. Suburban housing is very easy to build. Building 1 storey houses is not a challenge anywhere in the world, and it is possible to build it super cheap even without any capital equipment. Steel housing is a prime example that even a double digit percentage cost advantage, with it being a very straightforward, and overwhelmingly superior, replacement for wooden framing, doesn't seem to been enough to drive new technology adoption in USA.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

I had an interesting experience, I did electronic engineering but i completely misunderstood how to solder - i was trying to melt the solder onto the iron and drop a drop of molten solder on the board with the wire. The technicians were laughing their asses off and said "if you cant solder maybe you shouldn't be here" It was in 2nd year when I watched a youtube video when some guy actually explained thay you need to heat up the pad on the board, then add solder. I was totally flabbergased. Soldering was a very minor part of my degree, so it didn't really matter, but still.

wrycoder 5y ago
It helps to put a small amount of solder on the tip of the iron before you touch the pad - it improves the heat transfer. The main amount is added into the part/pad interface, as you saw on YouTube. I’m thinking that, when you first learned to solder, you remembered the first step but not the second one, and thus got off on the wrong foot.

CalRobert 5y ago

Well, houses are literally built by cnc increasingly often. There's a whole industry in the Baltics of building houses in a factory and shipping them around Europe.