10 ms·
As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a E
by tcherasaro 1y ago
As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a EE.
“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”
“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”
“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”
So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.
- skort 1y agoThe audio of the interview is on the page. The "Surface Mount Technology" bit is at 7 minutes in.
- brookst 1y agoWhat, you’ve never dip switched the manufacturing process despite investor resistors?
- DonHopkins 1y agoQuick, fetch the firewall extinguisher! The AmeriPad is having an unplanned thermal excursion!
- tdeck 1y agoYou're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100% EDA automation with full Verilog over there. By doing the reflow process (it's a way of building integrated circuits) they're able to offer complete impedance right here in the USA.
- dragontamer 1y agoThanks. I hate it. Have my upvote.
- turtledragonfly 1y agoGo back to /r/vxjunkies/, and take your retro-encabulator with you :Þ
- hn_go_brrrrr 1y agoI was fully expecting "inverse reluctance" to make an appearance somewhere in there.
- esperent 1y agoIn case anyone need it. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4zzfp4/what_is_rvxjunkies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4zzfp4/what_i...
- Taniwha 1y agoYou're mixing your processes - is he making his own circuit boards (reflow) or making his own chips (verilog) - and I have no idea what "complete impedance" even means in this context - HN really needs to stop AI posting here
- igor47 1y agoWoosh
- squigz 1y agoGP was a joke, mate.
- tomalbrc 1y agoWe really should not be doing jokes like this in times like these where the US president makes those kinds of remarks on a daily basis while being 100% serious
- tdeck 1y agoBuddy that was exactly the joke. I do proudly make up my own nonsense without relying on AI, though.
- simonh 1y agoGenuine home grown artisanal nonsense, delivered by devices assembled in China.
- _fizz_buzz_ 1y agoToo much impedance is outsourced to Asia these days …
- tdeck 1y agoIt's a complex problem, there's a lot of resistance from consumers who react badly to the price of domestic goods. Maybe tariffs will induce more demand, but I'm not sure the capacity is there in the first place.
- camillomiller 1y agoYeah I think OP should relax, do some yoga or meditating. Repeat with me: Ohmmmm
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoYou couldn't resist it could you.
- wvh 1y agoNot sure watt you guys are on about. Not to be too negative here or polarise the debate, but I remember the electrifying experience as a child to source local products instead of relying on imports from faraday countries. I guess technology has lost some of its radiance and has just become a mains to an end, to feed the addiction.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
- Tade0 1y agoBefore retirement my father was employed in a company certifying medical devices. Half the descriptions provided by those who made the devices were this sort of word salad because they concerned products which were obvious scams[0]. On person in particular was editing the description on the fly and was looking for a word so dad jokingly suggested "impedance". "Yes, thank you!" replied that person - her face lighting up as she added the word. [0] Like a vacuum cleaner which was supposed to dispense a mist of medication. Initially rejected as there was no dosage control whatsoever, but I heard that eventually somehow it was certified.
- apercu 1y agoAmazing. I'm not an EE and the first half of that sentence had be believing you.
- croemer 1y agoI hope you're joking - what you wrote makes no sense at all.
- protocolture 1y agoMy guess: The guy who paid the bill for the Hanwha surface mount machines was interviewed.
- Saigonautica 1y agoI was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks! I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.
- fooker 1y ago> There are indeed a lot of people like me. Are there a lot of people like you that are willing to do this as a minimum wage job? Because that's the real ask.
- suzzer99 1y agoHow hard can it be? Just tell them where to put the solder.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y agoThere's more to it https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.33R86KF https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.33R86KF
- camillomiller 1y agoThat’s not what they do. As Tim Cook said multiple times the engineers are needed as floor and line managers, to coordinate parts of the process, to set up new lines quickly etc… those are not the ones doing the actual soldering.
- thenthenthen 1y agoDo what? There are literally thousands of shops here in SZ where ppl are manually hot air reworking phone pcbs 24/7. For maybe 150 dollar a month?
- 1y ago
- Animats 1y agoIndeed. There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board. Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way. The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts. See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that. So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce. For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down. [1] https://puri.sm/posts/manufacturing-the-librem-5-usa-phone-in-the-united-states-of-america/ https://puri.sm/posts/manufacturing-the-librem-5-usa-phone-i... [2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+13+Pro+Teardown/144928 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+13+Pro+Teardown/14492... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQZycjXZAKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQZycjXZAKI [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5t7zgoQRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5t7zgoQRM
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>More robots, fewer people. It would be amusing if after all this turmoil the work came back to the US but it barely increased manufacturing employment.
- snotrockets 1y agoIt won’t come back, as it never were in the US.
- bildung 1y agoYour scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/manufacturing-output https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
- donnachangstein 1y agoNo one ever said he was an EE? It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title. I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't. There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows. Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed. Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.
- dmix 1y ago> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well
- thenthenthen 1y agoThere are even more than a million of those in SZ haha
- danso 1y ago> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.* Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?si=GK5NvbyND1xriiYm https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?si=GK5NvbyND1xriiYm
- the__alchemist 1y agoI suspect this is a case of Gell-Mann amnesia. This article is not inconsistent with the quality of articles in blogs, the news etc. I believe you (And I) notice this due to expertise in the area.
- amatecha 1y agoThe interviewee is described as "Purism's founder", who even says "we took our own electronics engineers (EEs)", implying (though not explicitly stating) he doesn't include himself in that category.
- somenameforme 1y agoIt extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand. Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.
- watwut 1y agoI don't think this is true. Knowing something well and being able to explain it in simple terms are unrelated skills. Plenty of people who know their domain super well just can't explain to lay person.
- vacuity 1y agoYou're right. Recently there was a thread about how some (many?) people know a field well but can't teach well, and some people know and teach well.
- elzbardico 1y agoI think the journalist think the people who solder components in a assembly line are Engineers.
- karel-3d 1y agoHe is originally a software engineer that only later started a hardware company
- thehappypm 1y agoA quick Google search shows that there are somewhere in the range of 20,000 electrical engineers who graduate US universities every year. Even if not all of them do electronics, and not all of the ones are considered “skilled” (by this author’s definition), there are not a “countable” amount.
- StefanBatory 1y ago... that seems to be, a really small number. I always thought it's going to be way more.
- thehappypm 1y agoI mean that’s just one STEM major—-there are way more engineers!
- timcobb 1y agoMy read on this that they don't mean EEs as in IEEE, but "engineer" as in "sanitation engineer", i.e. people who assemble electronic devices in factories.
- killjoywashere 1y agoI do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds. If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired. Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride. Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance. And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.
- Liftyee 1y agoThis is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities": 1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right? 2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion) 3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad). Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.
- 1y ago
- kees99 1y ago"PCBA assembly" is up there with "IQ quotient" and "ROI on investment". No editor writes like that either.