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A good engineer provides value to society. If they fulfill requirements that are bad for others then they are not good engineers. I seems to me that there is a

A good engineer provides value to society. If they fulfill requirements that are bad for others then they are not good engineers. I seems to me that there is also a social dynamic to things. If consumer grade products become a race to the bottom then it is going to become more difficult for regular people to purchase products which aren't low quality. There's also a degree to which society (e.g. in the form of government policy, cost of living adjustments, etc.) factors in differences in prices.

kube-system 2y ago
The fact that poor people can now afford to own some household appliances isn't a huge value to society? It completely changed the way our societies operate. I think it is a good thing that people have the option to buy crappy washing machines, rather than being forced to use the washboard and bucket my grandmother used. Yeah, they sometimes do develop a bad belt, or the timer mechanism might fail. But it beats being unwillingly forced into homemaking as a career. The world only has so much wealth to go around, and that isn't the moral quandary of the engineer picking an item on a BOM on Tuesday morning to fix. If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted that could have been spent elsewhere.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. If it squeezes a small but solid chunk out of product lifetime too, then it's also likely to harm people on the fringes. If they can buy it with one less month of savings, but then it breaks a couple months earlier, they're probably worse off. (For actual pennies divide both of those numbers by some orders of magnitude.)
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Yeah, walk up to someone in the hood and tell them that for 15% more they could have got [insert product] that last 2x as long. You're gonna get punched in the face, because they already know that. They're not dumb. What you're missing is the time-value of owning something now, which is greatly amplified when life is tough. People don’t want to walk their clothes basket down to the laundromat for one more month while they save for the nicer washer that lasts a little bit longer. They want the cheap one now, because they just got off some shitty shift at work, and they’re sick and tired of lugging their laundry down the street. Having a quality washer [x] years from now is not a desired part of the equation. Immediacy is of higher value.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      1. Immediacy doesn't help once it breaks and you can't buy a new one for years. 2. If everything lasts twice as long for 15% more, you can get a half-expired used one for even cheaper. > they already know that. They're not dumb. I think they're not dumb and they already know it's extremely difficult to figure out which brand fits that criteria, if any, so it's not worth it because it's such a gamble.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        > it's not worth it because it's such a gamble. That's also true. At the individual unit level, small differences in MTTF/MTBF are negligible because product failures are naturally distributed anyway. The mean time is just a mean, and nobody gives a shit about a good mean product failure rate when theirs happened to fail below the mean. That's true no matter how much you spent.
- xp84 2y ago
  (Butting into your 2-person conversation to point out:) > At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted This also is a counterpoint to your position though: of everything that goes into say, a fridge, it’s all wasted in 5 years now because Samsung chooses to put a PCB that is barely fit for purpose and will just fail with an error code, and because instead of putting such a failure-prone part behind a door and using an edge connector so it can be swapped in 5 minutes, they bury it God-knows-where in the chassis requiring an $800 labor charge, and charge $300 for the part. (As though that PCB is actually more complex than an iPad logic board, lol). So the whole 600 pounds of steel, refrigerant, insulation, glass, ice maker, and the compressor goes to the dump since who would invest $800 in a fridge that could have the same failure in a month and only the part is warrantied (you have to pay labor again). The poor people you’re worried about are buying these components over and over again because the appliance makers like this system. All this is done in bad faith. They’re morally bankrupt compared to their grandfathers who made appliances that lasted decades.

kube-system 2y ago

The fact that poor people can now afford to own some household appliances isn't a huge value to society? It completely changed the way our societies operate. I think it is a good thing that people have the option to buy crappy washing machines, rather than being forced to use the washboard and bucket my grandmother used. Yeah, they sometimes do develop a bad belt, or the timer mechanism might fail. But it beats being unwillingly forced into homemaking as a career. The world only has so much wealth to go around, and that isn't the moral quandary of the engineer picking an item on a BOM on Tuesday morning to fix. If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted that could have been spent elsewhere.

Dylan16807 2y ago
> If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. If it squeezes a small but solid chunk out of product lifetime too, then it's also likely to harm people on the fringes. If they can buy it with one less month of savings, but then it breaks a couple months earlier, they're probably worse off. (For actual pennies divide both of those numbers by some orders of magnitude.)
- kube-system 2y ago
  Yeah, walk up to someone in the hood and tell them that for 15% more they could have got [insert product] that last 2x as long. You're gonna get punched in the face, because they already know that. They're not dumb. What you're missing is the time-value of owning something now, which is greatly amplified when life is tough. People don’t want to walk their clothes basket down to the laundromat for one more month while they save for the nicer washer that lasts a little bit longer. They want the cheap one now, because they just got off some shitty shift at work, and they’re sick and tired of lugging their laundry down the street. Having a quality washer [x] years from now is not a desired part of the equation. Immediacy is of higher value.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    1. Immediacy doesn't help once it breaks and you can't buy a new one for years. 2. If everything lasts twice as long for 15% more, you can get a half-expired used one for even cheaper. > they already know that. They're not dumb. I think they're not dumb and they already know it's extremely difficult to figure out which brand fits that criteria, if any, so it's not worth it because it's such a gamble.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      > it's not worth it because it's such a gamble. That's also true. At the individual unit level, small differences in MTTF/MTBF are negligible because product failures are naturally distributed anyway. The mean time is just a mean, and nobody gives a shit about a good mean product failure rate when theirs happened to fail below the mean. That's true no matter how much you spent.
xp84 2y ago
(Butting into your 2-person conversation to point out:) > At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted This also is a counterpoint to your position though: of everything that goes into say, a fridge, it’s all wasted in 5 years now because Samsung chooses to put a PCB that is barely fit for purpose and will just fail with an error code, and because instead of putting such a failure-prone part behind a door and using an edge connector so it can be swapped in 5 minutes, they bury it God-knows-where in the chassis requiring an $800 labor charge, and charge $300 for the part. (As though that PCB is actually more complex than an iPad logic board, lol). So the whole 600 pounds of steel, refrigerant, insulation, glass, ice maker, and the compressor goes to the dump since who would invest $800 in a fridge that could have the same failure in a month and only the part is warrantied (you have to pay labor again). The poor people you’re worried about are buying these components over and over again because the appliance makers like this system. All this is done in bad faith. They’re morally bankrupt compared to their grandfathers who made appliances that lasted decades.