5 ms·

I interviewed at one; the picture says it all. Clean facility full of robots and perhaps one human per acre. More janitorial staff than production staff LOL.

by VLM 3y ago

I interviewed at one; the picture says it all. Clean facility full of robots and perhaps one human per acre. More janitorial staff than production staff LOL. Production staff is mostly QA/QC auditing as I understand their explanation. I was (or maybe will?) sysadmin their SCADA/IoT stuff. The article is behind a paywall I can't pierce so I didn't read it, they may have mentioned that but I'll never know.

bluGill 3y ago
America has plenty of cheap reliable electric, particularly in the interior, and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need. Non automated factories need lots of cheap labor, but when you don't hire thousands of people cost of labor isn't as important.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need. Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation. Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars. The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation. So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.
  - flatiron 3y ago
    They are all contractors. It’s contractors all the way down.
    - WJW 3y ago
      The contractors need education though, especially the ones designing the automated machines.
  - Espressosaurus 3y ago
    I've worked with the factory techs before, and my experience was the same. The techs move assemblies from point A to point B, and hit the big green go button, and occasionally hit the big red stop button. They know how to diagnose failures that they've been given a runbook for. New failures they're clueless about and don't have even the first idea how to diagnose. For that, there's the engineers that designed the station and the engineers that designed the underlying thing being assembled. Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product. Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    The engineering isn't in the factory, it happens behind the scenes. Often in different cities from the factory . One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  Does America have a great education system? I was educated in eastern Europe through grade 10 as a bright but somewhat lazy B+ student. I then completely sailed through grade 11 and 12 in Minnesota as an A++ student (battling for 1st GPA), and NOT due to my own brilliance :). We simply covered USA grade 11 and 12 material in greater depth in grade 10, whether physics or Shakespeare (calculus was the only thing slightly new so I took grade 12 2nd semester calculus in grade 11, then again grade 12. These were ap and ib courses in usa too). By the end of my North American computer science university, I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends from the old country. I could barely understand what they were talking about. Today I am reasonably successful, and have a job that's a multiple of their salary, but I would never claim it's due to my education or that I am smarter / better educated - I just live in a "better place" (for that very specific criteria). That's personal anecdata of course, but by most metrics, USA education is a poor return on the money invested whether compared to fellow developed or other countries. I've rarely seen education brought up as our competitive advantage. In fact there's a sibling post on front page right now detailing the myriad issues with usa education system and how far we are falling behind the global norm :-(
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    To quote South Park, there are gods and clods. A Production Tech who is maintaining, cleaning, and repairing electronics would attend a vocational program/community college in the US. Admissions to such a program doesn't need knowledge beyond Pre-Calculus/Algebra and basic literacy. American education really shines at the Tertiary level, which matters more to US competitiveness. We need people to design automation (physical and computational) for existing processes, develop new technologies and processes, and manage said technology and processes. All that comes from a college education, training programs such as within the armed services, research programs and labs within the federal government, or vocational programs taught by community colleges (which are almost free in most states). All these educational programs in the US teach and remediate the skills deficiencies that you pointed out at the high school level. A lot of the differnce is also due to the fact that High Schools in the US increasingly don't provide vocational education, whereas Central and Eastern European educational institutes too. Also, did you go to a vocational high school or a gymnasium equivalent school? In the US, Vocational Education and Gymnasium/College-Track education is clubbed into the same program in high school. To specialize in either a vocational or white collar field, the American system forces you to directly go to some form of tertiary education, whereas in the CEE educational model, you can jump straight into skilled trades after graduating vocational high school. Based on your username, I'm going to assume you were from Croatia. The Croatian educational model (which is ultimately based on the German model) sorts and places students in White Collar and Blue Collar tracks around Grade 8, with competitive exams to enter Gymnasium (so realistically you start prepping around grade 6 or 7). The North American system (US/Canada/Mexico) doesn't do that until Grade 12.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  > a great education system There's ongoing STEM/skilled shortage for existing demand for years. US education system is "great" to small/medium tier countries but not relative to her needs. Even immigration leaching talent from world isn't enough to plug gap so far. IMO overall underperforming and one of the weaker but more resolvable issues.
bityard 3y ago
What's the salary range for this kind of job?
- great_psy 3y ago
  (Canada perspective) - it’s on the lower end of the software engineer. If a software eng makes 80-120k in non faang, you are looking at 70-100k. Those are just example numbers, it’s been about 5 years since I worked in that industry. There are two paths in this industry though, work for the factory itself, very cushy job, sometimes unionized. You’re responsible for fixing small things as they come, but overall I don’t think much is expected since you’re one of the few in the factory who can program those machines so if you give a time estimate there’s nobody to argue. You likely stay in the lower end of the pays scale. There is the consultant route, which can be gruelling, but you make closer to the higher end of the pay scale. Here it’s just a programmer shop, much is expected of you because you’re billing by the hour, also you will travel about 1/3 of your time, because you need to go from factory to factory to fix/install new code or machines.

by VLM 3y ago

bluGill 3y ago

America has plenty of cheap reliable electric, particularly in the interior, and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need. Non automated factories need lots of cheap labor, but when you don't hire thousands of people cost of labor isn't as important.

delfinom 3y ago
>and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need. Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation. Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars. The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation. So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.
- flatiron 3y ago
  They are all contractors. It’s contractors all the way down.
  - WJW 3y ago
    The contractors need education though, especially the ones designing the automated machines.
- Espressosaurus 3y ago
  I've worked with the factory techs before, and my experience was the same. The techs move assemblies from point A to point B, and hit the big green go button, and occasionally hit the big red stop button. They know how to diagnose failures that they've been given a runbook for. New failures they're clueless about and don't have even the first idea how to diagnose. For that, there's the engineers that designed the station and the engineers that designed the underlying thing being assembled. Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product. Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.
- bluGill 3y ago
  The engineering isn't in the factory, it happens behind the scenes. Often in different cities from the factory . One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
Does America have a great education system? I was educated in eastern Europe through grade 10 as a bright but somewhat lazy B+ student. I then completely sailed through grade 11 and 12 in Minnesota as an A++ student (battling for 1st GPA), and NOT due to my own brilliance :). We simply covered USA grade 11 and 12 material in greater depth in grade 10, whether physics or Shakespeare (calculus was the only thing slightly new so I took grade 12 2nd semester calculus in grade 11, then again grade 12. These were ap and ib courses in usa too). By the end of my North American computer science university, I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends from the old country. I could barely understand what they were talking about. Today I am reasonably successful, and have a job that's a multiple of their salary, but I would never claim it's due to my education or that I am smarter / better educated - I just live in a "better place" (for that very specific criteria). That's personal anecdata of course, but by most metrics, USA education is a poor return on the money invested whether compared to fellow developed or other countries. I've rarely seen education brought up as our competitive advantage. In fact there's a sibling post on front page right now detailing the myriad issues with usa education system and how far we are falling behind the global norm :-(
- alephnerd 3y ago
  To quote South Park, there are gods and clods. A Production Tech who is maintaining, cleaning, and repairing electronics would attend a vocational program/community college in the US. Admissions to such a program doesn't need knowledge beyond Pre-Calculus/Algebra and basic literacy. American education really shines at the Tertiary level, which matters more to US competitiveness. We need people to design automation (physical and computational) for existing processes, develop new technologies and processes, and manage said technology and processes. All that comes from a college education, training programs such as within the armed services, research programs and labs within the federal government, or vocational programs taught by community colleges (which are almost free in most states). All these educational programs in the US teach and remediate the skills deficiencies that you pointed out at the high school level. A lot of the differnce is also due to the fact that High Schools in the US increasingly don't provide vocational education, whereas Central and Eastern European educational institutes too. Also, did you go to a vocational high school or a gymnasium equivalent school? In the US, Vocational Education and Gymnasium/College-Track education is clubbed into the same program in high school. To specialize in either a vocational or white collar field, the American system forces you to directly go to some form of tertiary education, whereas in the CEE educational model, you can jump straight into skilled trades after graduating vocational high school. Based on your username, I'm going to assume you were from Croatia. The Croatian educational model (which is ultimately based on the German model) sorts and places students in White Collar and Blue Collar tracks around Grade 8, with competitive exams to enter Gymnasium (so realistically you start prepping around grade 6 or 7). The North American system (US/Canada/Mexico) doesn't do that until Grade 12.
dirtyid 3y ago
> a great education system There's ongoing STEM/skilled shortage for existing demand for years. US education system is "great" to small/medium tier countries but not relative to her needs. Even immigration leaching talent from world isn't enough to plug gap so far. IMO overall underperforming and one of the weaker but more resolvable issues.

bityard 3y ago

What's the salary range for this kind of job?

great_psy 3y ago
(Canada perspective) - it’s on the lower end of the software engineer. If a software eng makes 80-120k in non faang, you are looking at 70-100k. Those are just example numbers, it’s been about 5 years since I worked in that industry. There are two paths in this industry though, work for the factory itself, very cushy job, sometimes unionized. You’re responsible for fixing small things as they come, but overall I don’t think much is expected since you’re one of the few in the factory who can program those machines so if you give a time estimate there’s nobody to argue. You likely stay in the lower end of the pays scale. There is the consultant route, which can be gruelling, but you make closer to the higher end of the pay scale. Here it’s just a programmer shop, much is expected of you because you’re billing by the hour, also you will travel about 1/3 of your time, because you need to go from factory to factory to fix/install new code or machines.