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One of the things I appreciated about this article was the subcurrent of lack-of-knowledge. Ok, there was the pandemic, manufacturing problems, supply chain iss
by scop 3y ago
One of the things I appreciated about this article was the subcurrent of lack-of-knowledge. Ok, there was the pandemic, manufacturing problems, supply chain issues, etc. However it sounds like there was a chronic lack of people who had done this before.
When you move manufacturing overseas, you’re not just eliminating jobs: you are eliminating knowledge.
- tom_ 3y agoIf the foreigners can manage it, clearly there must be other ways of doing it, and they could be copied. The knowledge that has been permanently destroyed was not obviously vital.
- alphabettsy 3y agoWe’ve been offshoring manufacturing for decades now. That’s decades of experience to be found.
- tom_ 3y agoWait, I thought the knowledge had been permanently destroyed? Forever lost, with no hope of ever figuring out whatever it was? Simply rediscovering what was previously known seems reasonably achievable!
- pessimizer 3y agoYou can't teach 20 years of experience in a year. The people we once had with 20 years of experience found other work.
- breezeTrowel 3y agoWhy not?
- steve1977 3y agoI guess the problem is more that experience is often implicit knowledge and intuition that is hard to teach to others (or even put into words)
- mcpackieh 3y agoYou can teach 20 years of experience but it takes 20 years.
- nine_k 3y agoWhy can't you teach a language to a native proficiency in a year? There's quite a lot to know, and the speed of learning is limited. Answers to advanced questions which you are ready to provide must be met by the actual questions from the student, which must first form in their head as a result of processing the previous servings of knowledge.
- breezeTrowel 3y agoThe corpus of a language is a lot larger and more complex than 20 years of experience in manufacturing especially when a lot of the techniques become dated as new ways of doing things are discovered. Also, we teach thousands of years of experience in mathematics within the scope of 10-20 years. The problem isn't that you can't teach 20 years of experience in a year - you can. The problem is that this knowledge isn't stored anywhere that's easily accessible and that makes propagation next to impossible.
- peteradio 3y agoYou aren't gaining experience every second of those 20 years. There is definitely a large condensation factor to be had here and knowledge can be transferred in written word. What are we saying here? The only method of communication has to be done via hip thrusts and eye brow waggles?
- agentgumshoe 3y agoAside the hyperbole, yeah, it's now decades of 're-learning' ahead again, that's permanently destroyed for a generation or two (considering the existing decades of loss) who it won't be there for.
- specialist 3y agoIn some cases, that's true. There's stuff like weapons where the knowhow is truly gone. So the DoD has to reverse engineer the remaining artifacts and attempt to recreate the entire stack.
- leptons 3y agoSure the skills can be taught to people, but who wants to do it for slave wages? If the CEO's salary were cut in half, and the other half distributed among the employees, people would be clamoring to learn these skills. The CEO would still be doing extremely well and workers would be getting paid a real living wage. But nobody wants to do most of the jobs it takes to bring manufacturing back if the pay isn't there.
- twoodfin 3y agoI think you have a mistaken impression of the scale of CEO pay for large corporations vs. total payroll. Tim Cook is one of the highest compensated CEOs in the world. In his best years he’s paid something like $100M all-in. Apple has around 165,000 employees. Dividing up half his salary amongst them would be about $300 each.
- bombcar 3y agoPeople are really, REALLY bad with large numbers.
- flangola7 3y agoYou're not wrong on that specific point, but it still misses the forest for the trees.
- leptons 3y agoThat's called cherry picking. Most of Apple's employees aren't slaving away in factories, and they already get paid well. Apple also outsources the really shitty manufacturing work to people making slave wages in other countries where they don't even have a choice not to work. If you can cherry pick, then I can too. Rivian's CEO made $422,140,679 in 2021, and they have 14,122 employees, so half that salary divided by number of employees comes out to $14,946 per employee. Not a bad bump in pay especially if you're in a factory putting together car parts. The CEO of "Lucid Group, Inc." made $565,591,512 in 2021 and they had 7,200 employees, so the figure there is $39,277 per employee. Trust me, Peter Rawlinson will do just fine making only $282,795,756 per year. The CEO of "Bright Health Group, Inc." makes $180,813,849 per year and they employ 1500 people - split in half and distributed to the employees they would get a pay bump of $60,271 per year. So yeah. You can cherry-pick all you want, but the fact is that CEO pay is too damned high, and it's no wonder people don't want to go slave away in factories making a few dollars while the CEOs can afford 3 mega yachts and 12 vacation homes.
- jimbob45 3y agoThere's a high chance AI significantly lowers the barrier of gaining experience with these things.
- izacus 3y agoI wonder what kind of thought process makes you write this kind of nonsense.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y agoExactly the kind of thought that can be replaced without a loss.
- jimbob45 3y ago“Oh no, all the training materials for this technique/tool are in Chinese and are spread out across a variety of media. If only we had a tool that could slurp up all this training data easily and teach it to me not only in my own language, but also via my favorite method of learning”.
- alphabettsy 3y agoThe best schools for training are still in the US, but you can’t replace experience.
- nine_k 3y agoHow well does ChatGPT operate a lathe? Construct a mold that produces a plastic cast not prone to defects? Tweak a process that suddenly started to produce too much defective output to avoid defects? Possibly the current approaches to AI can be used in these areas. But I'm afraid we're very much not there yet.
- jdietrich 3y agoThe problem isn't knowledge, it's skill and understanding. Plenty of people spend three years doing a CS degree, read a stack of textbooks, learn how to recite all the right buzzwords and still come out unable to write FizzBuzz. Manufacturing is really hard. Getting good at it requires a lot of hands-on experience. China (and Japan before them) didn't just Xerox a bunch of American knowledge and become world-class manufacturing economies overnight; it took decades of investment and hard work to build up a skills base. If America wants to reverse the decline of their manufacturing sector, it'll take an equally determined effort.
- mikrotikker 3y agoI've been computering for 20 odd years, now an SRE and I have no idea wtf a FizzBuzz is. Is that one of those bullshit interview questions given at places that would be horrible to work for?
- inemesitaffia 3y agoYou can search HN for FizzBuzz. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=36846400 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=36846400 https://joelgrus.com/2020/06/06/ten-essays-on-fizz-buzz/ https://joelgrus.com/2020/06/06/ten-essays-on-fizz-buzz/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664879 https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/amp/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26286239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26286239
- usui 3y ago> The problem isn't knowledge, it's skill and understanding. Sorry, what? What are you saying knowledge is, then?
- ChatGTP 3y agoThe world is wiggly and unpredictable not square. Knowledge is mostly square. As many experienced people will tell you, Murphy's law is a bitch.
- K0balt 3y agoWhen US companies offshored, they typically sent teams of subject matter experts to get the offshore operation up and running at something like the spec. These were the best and most experienced from the US factory. Those guys retired a while ago now. So now we build a shiny new factory, but are we getting the best and brightest from our now-competition to help us get it up and running? Of course not. The expertise of offshoring is often a one way street, and once the people that knew are gone they are gone. It takes a few years to get a factory running well from scratch without the kind of experience and domain knowledge that can’t be obtained from education alone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thumbuddy 3y agoDing ding ding
- K0balt 3y agoI think that people tend to underestimate the actual complexity of manufacturing. It’s hardly turnkey. Every process has its idiosyncratic interactions with other processes, whether it is variability in feedstocks, interactive variability in various product stages, getting the bugs worked out of a newly installed machine, buggy intersystem comms, structural vibration of the factory structure itself, process timing to deal with those vibration issues, etc etc etc etc. The overall system complexity of even a modest modern factory is orders of magnitude above say, 1940s style manufacturing which is what most people visualise when they think of a factory.
- inglor_cz 3y agoDuring WWI, the French deployed a really good field gun, Canon de 75 modèle 1897. Late at war, the US adopted this design as well and started manufacturing those guns at home. Nevertheless, even with all the blueprints at their disposal, early American-manufactured 75s were inferior to their French counterparts. It took a personal visit of the senior French engineers in the US plants to correct various subtle flaws in the manufacturing process. Experience counts.
- breezeTrowel 3y agoDocumentation counts. The problem is a lot of insider and seemingly-common knowledge is never written down and is usually spread through word of mouth. Any sufficiently lengthy disruption means that knowledge is lost.
- inglor_cz 3y agoSome knowledge is hard to write down. Imagine trying to teach yourself karate from books only. It might be similar with some mechanical or artistic skills that are best taught in person. Arguably, nowadays, with cheap recording devices everywhere, it is easier than before to produce comprehensive documentation even for such activities that are hard to write down.
- robomartin 3y ago> When you move manufacturing overseas, you’re not just eliminating jobs: you are eliminating knowledge. Precisely right. And, contrary to what uninformed commenters are saying, that knowledge and experience is lost over time and is incredibly difficult to get back. Even worse, we don't know that knowledge and experience for the manufacturing for a number of modern technologies.
- ChatGTP 3y agoThought the same, maybe a bit of denial going on, but there's no way if America was the manufacturing powerhouse it's claimed to be, this would've happened. They seemed to struggle getting the expertise to finish the job in any reasonable time frame.