4 ms·

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

jackyinger 2y ago
Exactly. This is the problem with throwing all the money into “hot spots”. Growing the heck out of a few hot industries virtually ensures established ones will decline.
whatshisface 2y ago
The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, without the ability to buy stuff from overseas those people will all have to quit to work on final assembly for digital wristwatches. They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - DebtDeflation 2y ago
    The factories of today are nothing like the 1980s factories this administration thinks they are going to bring back. Go to FRED or any other economic data site and plot manufacturing output and manufacturing employment on the same chart. The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. Meanwhile, manufacturing employment is around its all time low and declines every year.
    - caycep 2y ago
      "manufacturing as a service", however that may look, might be more of a fit for the modern economy...unless we really regress back to 1930
      - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
        MaaS is definitely a thing and has been for a long time. Contract manufacturers abound in the US.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - michaelt 2y ago
      > The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > Is that what you dream of for your children? This feels like a justification for slavery and slave-like conditions. I assure you the conditions and salary in most manufacturing countries would cause riots in the US; but as long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, who cares what happens to their children. Imagine if I used this argument for 1850s plantations (the conditions in many factories not being much better). “Do you really want your children working on the plantations? Is this what you dream of for your children?” The answer is, of course not; but that sure as hell doesn’t justify enslaving other people (whether literally in chattel; or implicitly with meager wages, long working hours, no other opportunities, and no time to learn alternative skills).
    - KerrAvon 2y ago
      Two things can be true: - you shouldn't want that for your children - you shouldn't want that for their children In a geopolitical context, those are separate discussions. It's not really fair to accuse someone of promoting slavery when they did no such thing.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    Yep. People with this wild nostalgia for manufacturing are missing what actually produced those lifestyles. It wasn't the factory. Pundits are going on fox news and saying that having a job where you primarily use a computer turns you into a woman. These people are not coherant.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    The thing is you don't need to run a grueling factory that runs you ragged in the modern day unless you are trying to undercut the poorest economies in the world. People don't want manufacturing back here to try and dominate the world in manufacturing capabilities, they just want some minimal amount of local capacity for it, and for the people that do it to make a decent wage and have basic safety standards. Its not like the US is struggling to barely survive and couldn't afford the cost. But in order to do that and not have it become some grift by the owners from the government there would need to be hard limits on how much owners and investors can extract from it, which is straight up anti-capitalist and of course capitalists are vehemently opposed to any industry or business not operating under capitalist principles, doubly so if it is a state-owned business.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/25/ycombinator-startups-surveillance-backlash-garrytan/ https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/25/ycombinator-startups-surve... I would argue they know..
- justonceokay 2y ago
  Fred Flintstone wasn’t just looking to work behind a desk though. He was looking for a promotion to management. In those days a desk job meant that you had some authority. You had worked your way through the ranks and put in your time. It was a sign that the company values you and you would be taken care of. Gold wristwatches and all that. Plenty of people still work in the data entry mines, even though that’s a desk job. In a lot of ways being an Uber driver about as cushy as a desk job in terms of physical demand on the body, but it certainly isn’t a status position.
- Teever 2y ago
  I don't understand why everyone on HN is so enamored with beautiful looking Apple hardware but doesn't understand that this stuff is made by people and machines that are also made by people. At the end of the day if you want quality products and innovation you need to pay for it. Outsourcing this ability to other countries saves you money up front but it costs you the institutional knowledge to do it at home and all the costs that losing this entails.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Because nobody would buy 3000$ apple products and we wouldn't be even discussing them. Apple got premium price, but not because they manufacture in US, they just have much higher profit margins, hence the valuation of company.Every buyer approved this with their wallets, knowingly or not
    - Teever 2y ago
      People do buy $3000 Apple products. You're going to be more specific and talk about price difference as a percent not an absolute value to make your point. But let's be charitable and assume that you're saying that the price of Apple products will double if the cases are machines in America -- I don't think that would be the outcome. What percent of the cost of an apple product goes to towards the aluminum case? What percent of that cost is the material, what percent of that cost is the milling machine, and what percent is the labour? It's not foolish to want to maximize manufacturing capacity in America and minimize it in China. If you want to be able to beat China in an armed conflict then manufacturing is what will do it -- not software development.
      - XorNot 2y ago
        The price of Apple products in the US is literally doubling as of today, so we get to test this hypothesis in real time.
        Teever 2y ago
        My comment was regarding the manufacturing of the aluminum cases of Apple products, not the manufacturing of the entire device.
- arcbyte 2y ago
  There are an enormous number of people who would love to make $50k working a lathe in the US. Enormous amounts of them. But they can't. They're working at Walmart making minimum wage.
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    No one will take the risk of educating them to work the lathe. Working the lathe is probably not any easier to learn than "vibe coding" or generic office work like customer support or data entry. The unspoken problem is that it's enormously expensive to re-educate adults to do something different. Adults just have worse brain plasticity and don't pick things up as quickly as younger workers. Some just refuse to learn thanks to the pervasive culture of ignorance that permeates USA. And adults cost more as well (even just the basics such as food, which children eat less of) and if they have aging parents or kids, have additional responsibilities that distract them from learning. No one is taking this risk on and why should they? If I was starting a company, and you suggested to me that I should indiscriminately hire minimum wage workers to work in a machining workshop, but first I have to educate them about machining from scratch, you'd be (rightfully) laughed out of the room, because you're dooming this business to failure. Once you break that link (e.g. skip a generation of a profession), it's incredibly hard to bring that back. It's like losing institutional knowledge, because your genius employee was hit by a bus, or moved countries.
    - creato 2y ago
      The modern equivalent of working a lathe is running a CNC machine tool, and I would bet that if we suddenly killed off the tech industry and ramped up CNC machining in the US, the CNC machine industry would have far more former SWEs than former "lathe workers".
    - convolvatron 2y ago
      learning to operate a lathe for alot of the low-precision work that goes on for mass market production is really pretty easy. but those job are _never_ coming back, anywhere except places that lack sufficient capital or prototyping/research environments. you can program a swiss machine to take in stock from behind the head and dump completely finished parts in a tray at the bottom. depending on parts complexity you can easily vomit out 1000s of parts per hour with a single unskilled operator dumping out trays and loading new stock across several machines.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. Or a lawyer. For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.
- neogodless 2y ago
  This is the eternal evolution of individual labor. But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution? Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing. You'll be self sufficient, but you won't be able to afford a phone or television! It's going to be a difficult problem (always) solving for the future of individual contributions to society as labor gets replaced by automation, and even knowledge work gets replaced by machine learning. But I still think great minds (and also the minds that get put in charge) should look forward and try to build a good future, rather than cling to a dying past.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    It would take you 10+ years of skilled labor savings in any case to afford a homestead capable of sufficient farming and hunting output to sustain a family. Because you are competing not with homesteaders but rich professionals or pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city. Even if all of US became homesteaders this would likely still be at least a little bit the case, because foreigners would simply buy the property instead. Take a look at places like Spain, Portugal, etc and the high land prices are based on global competition not vs the low local wages.
    - palmotea 2y ago
      > pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city. What is this stereotype? Government retirees aren't some elite wealthy class. IIRC government pensions haven't been anything to write home about since 1982 (or something), and are roughly equivalent to private sector retirement benefits.
ty6853 2y ago
The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage. It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Currency rates are also a factor. https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump-economic-advisory-team https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump... > Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.” https://archive.is/uvL5w https://archive.is/uvL5w > The deepening trade war is raising speculation in financial markets that China may resort to aggressively devaluing the yuan against the dollar in a break of their policy of pursuing a stable currency.. A weaker yuan would make Chinese goods cheaper abroad, offsetting some of Trump’s tariff impact, and make it costlier for local consumers to buy US goods.. One big consideration for Beijing is the risk of foreign investors pulling their money out of China if the currency sinks.
- absolutelastone 2y ago
  I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
hagbard_c 2y ago
If you, as a machinist, can get to live in a lower-price region, go hunting and fishing or just traipsing through the woods instead of doing that next release drive, build or repair your own HVAC or PV array + storage and get to raise a family while doing so I'd say that's worth quite a bit of that discrepancy in salary. You'll get the added advantage of seeing your handiwork being used and lasting for years to decades instead of being replaced in a few months or never used at all. Replace 'machinist' with a choice of other hands-on 'blue collar' professions for the same effect. Even better is to replace it with a profession which allows you to combine manual dexterity with software development. Or do as I did and buy a farm which allows you to flex all your muscles - mental as well as physical.
slicktux 2y ago
I know laborers that make well above most “software monkeys” and don’t even get me started with how much heavy machine operators make!
- digital_sawzall 2y ago
  > don’t even get me started with how much heavy machine operators make! $40 an hour in Austin Tx, a city with construction going on in every corner.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    >$40 an hour in Austin Tx Less than I make currently, and I don't live in one of the S/HCOL cities either.
- AngryData 2y ago
  And I know many laborers that work for wages that most "software monkeys" wouldn't do just to shit in a pot. If you are in software development you are far more likely to live in a more expensive area of the nation where trades have a much higher than average value. In places that aren't employing many software developers trades don't pay nearly as well.
wil421 2y ago
No you wouldn’t. The trades will take your body. I work with field techs who are close to 50 and they tell me their bodies are not going to make it past 50 and not even close to retirement age. Office work is so easy on the body compared to almost any job.
- esafak 2y ago
  And techies face the prospect of becoming obsolete, with ageism rife.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Get out of sf and old techies are appricated. Of course many go into management but there are a few who retire and are doing just fine. some places like it when we remind the kids that this new thing has been around several times before under different names.
  - wil421 2y ago
    I’m not in the SF or start up bubble so this is not really a concern for me.

jackyinger 2y ago

Exactly. This is the problem with throwing all the money into “hot spots”. Growing the heck out of a few hot industries virtually ensures established ones will decline.

whatshisface 2y ago

The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, without the ability to buy stuff from overseas those people will all have to quit to work on final assembly for digital wristwatches. They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.

tmpz22 2y ago
[flagged]
- DebtDeflation 2y ago
  The factories of today are nothing like the 1980s factories this administration thinks they are going to bring back. Go to FRED or any other economic data site and plot manufacturing output and manufacturing employment on the same chart. The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. Meanwhile, manufacturing employment is around its all time low and declines every year.
  - caycep 2y ago
    "manufacturing as a service", however that may look, might be more of a fit for the modern economy...unless we really regress back to 1930
    - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      MaaS is definitely a thing and has been for a long time. Contract manufacturers abound in the US.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > Is that what you dream of for your children? This feels like a justification for slavery and slave-like conditions. I assure you the conditions and salary in most manufacturing countries would cause riots in the US; but as long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, who cares what happens to their children. Imagine if I used this argument for 1850s plantations (the conditions in many factories not being much better). “Do you really want your children working on the plantations? Is this what you dream of for your children?” The answer is, of course not; but that sure as hell doesn’t justify enslaving other people (whether literally in chattel; or implicitly with meager wages, long working hours, no other opportunities, and no time to learn alternative skills).
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    Two things can be true: - you shouldn't want that for your children - you shouldn't want that for their children In a geopolitical context, those are separate discussions. It's not really fair to accuse someone of promoting slavery when they did no such thing.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  Yep. People with this wild nostalgia for manufacturing are missing what actually produced those lifestyles. It wasn't the factory. Pundits are going on fox news and saying that having a job where you primarily use a computer turns you into a woman. These people are not coherant.
- AngryData 2y ago
  The thing is you don't need to run a grueling factory that runs you ragged in the modern day unless you are trying to undercut the poorest economies in the world. People don't want manufacturing back here to try and dominate the world in manufacturing capabilities, they just want some minimal amount of local capacity for it, and for the people that do it to make a decent wage and have basic safety standards. Its not like the US is struggling to barely survive and couldn't afford the cost. But in order to do that and not have it become some grift by the owners from the government there would need to be hard limits on how much owners and investors can extract from it, which is straight up anti-capitalist and of course capitalists are vehemently opposed to any industry or business not operating under capitalist principles, doubly so if it is a state-owned business.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/25/ycombinator-startups-surveillance-backlash-garrytan/ https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/25/ycombinator-startups-surve... I would argue they know..
justonceokay 2y ago
Fred Flintstone wasn’t just looking to work behind a desk though. He was looking for a promotion to management. In those days a desk job meant that you had some authority. You had worked your way through the ranks and put in your time. It was a sign that the company values you and you would be taken care of. Gold wristwatches and all that. Plenty of people still work in the data entry mines, even though that’s a desk job. In a lot of ways being an Uber driver about as cushy as a desk job in terms of physical demand on the body, but it certainly isn’t a status position.
Teever 2y ago
I don't understand why everyone on HN is so enamored with beautiful looking Apple hardware but doesn't understand that this stuff is made by people and machines that are also made by people. At the end of the day if you want quality products and innovation you need to pay for it. Outsourcing this ability to other countries saves you money up front but it costs you the institutional knowledge to do it at home and all the costs that losing this entails.
- jajko 2y ago
  Because nobody would buy 3000$ apple products and we wouldn't be even discussing them. Apple got premium price, but not because they manufacture in US, they just have much higher profit margins, hence the valuation of company.Every buyer approved this with their wallets, knowingly or not
  - Teever 2y ago
    People do buy $3000 Apple products. You're going to be more specific and talk about price difference as a percent not an absolute value to make your point. But let's be charitable and assume that you're saying that the price of Apple products will double if the cases are machines in America -- I don't think that would be the outcome. What percent of the cost of an apple product goes to towards the aluminum case? What percent of that cost is the material, what percent of that cost is the milling machine, and what percent is the labour? It's not foolish to want to maximize manufacturing capacity in America and minimize it in China. If you want to be able to beat China in an armed conflict then manufacturing is what will do it -- not software development.
    - XorNot 2y ago
      The price of Apple products in the US is literally doubling as of today, so we get to test this hypothesis in real time.
      - Teever 2y ago
        My comment was regarding the manufacturing of the aluminum cases of Apple products, not the manufacturing of the entire device.
arcbyte 2y ago
There are an enormous number of people who would love to make $50k working a lathe in the US. Enormous amounts of them. But they can't. They're working at Walmart making minimum wage.
- antisthenes 2y ago
  No one will take the risk of educating them to work the lathe. Working the lathe is probably not any easier to learn than "vibe coding" or generic office work like customer support or data entry. The unspoken problem is that it's enormously expensive to re-educate adults to do something different. Adults just have worse brain plasticity and don't pick things up as quickly as younger workers. Some just refuse to learn thanks to the pervasive culture of ignorance that permeates USA. And adults cost more as well (even just the basics such as food, which children eat less of) and if they have aging parents or kids, have additional responsibilities that distract them from learning. No one is taking this risk on and why should they? If I was starting a company, and you suggested to me that I should indiscriminately hire minimum wage workers to work in a machining workshop, but first I have to educate them about machining from scratch, you'd be (rightfully) laughed out of the room, because you're dooming this business to failure. Once you break that link (e.g. skip a generation of a profession), it's incredibly hard to bring that back. It's like losing institutional knowledge, because your genius employee was hit by a bus, or moved countries.
  - creato 2y ago
    The modern equivalent of working a lathe is running a CNC machine tool, and I would bet that if we suddenly killed off the tech industry and ramped up CNC machining in the US, the CNC machine industry would have far more former SWEs than former "lathe workers".
  - convolvatron 2y ago
    learning to operate a lathe for alot of the low-precision work that goes on for mass market production is really pretty easy. but those job are _never_ coming back, anywhere except places that lack sufficient capital or prototyping/research environments. you can program a swiss machine to take in stock from behind the head and dump completely finished parts in a tray at the bottom. depending on parts complexity you can easily vomit out 1000s of parts per hour with a single unskilled operator dumping out trays and loading new stock across several machines.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. Or a lawyer. For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.

neogodless 2y ago
This is the eternal evolution of individual labor. But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution? Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing. You'll be self sufficient, but you won't be able to afford a phone or television! It's going to be a difficult problem (always) solving for the future of individual contributions to society as labor gets replaced by automation, and even knowledge work gets replaced by machine learning. But I still think great minds (and also the minds that get put in charge) should look forward and try to build a good future, rather than cling to a dying past.
- ty6853 2y ago
  It would take you 10+ years of skilled labor savings in any case to afford a homestead capable of sufficient farming and hunting output to sustain a family. Because you are competing not with homesteaders but rich professionals or pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city. Even if all of US became homesteaders this would likely still be at least a little bit the case, because foreigners would simply buy the property instead. Take a look at places like Spain, Portugal, etc and the high land prices are based on global competition not vs the low local wages.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city. What is this stereotype? Government retirees aren't some elite wealthy class. IIRC government pensions haven't been anything to write home about since 1982 (or something), and are roughly equivalent to private sector retirement benefits.

ty6853 2y ago

The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage. It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.

walterbell 2y ago
Currency rates are also a factor. https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump-economic-advisory-team https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump... > Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.” https://archive.is/uvL5w https://archive.is/uvL5w > The deepening trade war is raising speculation in financial markets that China may resort to aggressively devaluing the yuan against the dollar in a break of their policy of pursuing a stable currency.. A weaker yuan would make Chinese goods cheaper abroad, offsetting some of Trump’s tariff impact, and make it costlier for local consumers to buy US goods.. One big consideration for Beijing is the risk of foreign investors pulling their money out of China if the currency sinks.
absolutelastone 2y ago
I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.
- no_wizard 2y ago

hagbard_c 2y ago

If you, as a machinist, can get to live in a lower-price region, go hunting and fishing or just traipsing through the woods instead of doing that next release drive, build or repair your own HVAC or PV array + storage and get to raise a family while doing so I'd say that's worth quite a bit of that discrepancy in salary. You'll get the added advantage of seeing your handiwork being used and lasting for years to decades instead of being replaced in a few months or never used at all. Replace 'machinist' with a choice of other hands-on 'blue collar' professions for the same effect. Even better is to replace it with a profession which allows you to combine manual dexterity with software development. Or do as I did and buy a farm which allows you to flex all your muscles - mental as well as physical.

slicktux 2y ago

I know laborers that make well above most “software monkeys” and don’t even get me started with how much heavy machine operators make!

digital_sawzall 2y ago
> don’t even get me started with how much heavy machine operators make! $40 an hour in Austin Tx, a city with construction going on in every corner.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  >$40 an hour in Austin Tx Less than I make currently, and I don't live in one of the S/HCOL cities either.
AngryData 2y ago
And I know many laborers that work for wages that most "software monkeys" wouldn't do just to shit in a pot. If you are in software development you are far more likely to live in a more expensive area of the nation where trades have a much higher than average value. In places that aren't employing many software developers trades don't pay nearly as well.

wil421 2y ago

No you wouldn’t. The trades will take your body. I work with field techs who are close to 50 and they tell me their bodies are not going to make it past 50 and not even close to retirement age. Office work is so easy on the body compared to almost any job.

esafak 2y ago
And techies face the prospect of becoming obsolete, with ageism rife.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Get out of sf and old techies are appricated. Of course many go into management but there are a few who retire and are doing just fine. some places like it when we remind the kids that this new thing has been around several times before under different names.
- wil421 2y ago
  I’m not in the SF or start up bubble so this is not really a concern for me.