Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

You're begging the question; there is a country beyond Silicon Valley, and Grove's argument is that what is best for Silicon Valley (meaning, the bottom lines of a few tech firms which together only employ a small percentage of the U.S. population) isn't necessarily what is best for the country as a whole.

Put more directly, it's not clear that there are enough IP-based jobs to keep the United States at or near full employment. To do that, which we need for social stability, because high unemployment is intensely corrosive, we need to capture some of those manufacturing jobs. And it might be worth doing things that hurt tech companies' profitability in the short term -- taxing outsourced manufacturing, for instance -- in order to achieve that.

If we don't, the "rational business climate" might drive all the manufacturing overseas, leaving the U.S. with a very small number of employed people doing the design work, and hordes of disaffected, unemployable people with nothing to do. As you point out, once you have the production line set up in China, it makes sense to just scale it out there rather than build a second one here.

The long-term social effects of such a 90/10 split would be very bad, and would in all likelihood eventually make it very hard to be very profitable at all. So it might make sense for IP-centric design companies to take a short-term hit and try to maintain something closer to full employment, lest they find themselves first up against the wall when the welfare proletariat they created revolts.

The book is sort of a meandering opus covering basic machining techniques but also talking about the history of the company and how the business was built. A lot of it involves finding ways to use technology and advanced manufacturing methods to keep U.S. manufacture competitive with Asian imports.

E.g., the Sherline mill is built on an aluminum extrusion filled with some sort of epoxy/concrete for rigidity. Most Asian lathes are built on castings which are machined to final specifications. The Sherline method is more difficult and requires more capital investment, but requires less labor.

Basically in every case he mentions, the way you keep a U.S. based company competitive with Asia is by engineering away all the labor. What you do with 15 people in an Asian factory using 100-year-old methods you do with one guy and millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art tooling in a U.S. one. And even then it might only buy you a few years of competitiveness, until that machinery can get moved over to Asia and installed, and then they beat you based on the cost of the one guy.

Anyway, it's an interesting book if you're interested in that sort of thing but doesn't do much to restore my confidence that we're not engaged in a race to the bottom as a country.

(Link to book: http://www.sherline.com/bookplug.htm)

I suspect war will remain a popular pastime.

As more and more jobs require less and less work performed by humans, the obvious solution is to work less hours. Instead of family providers working a total of 60-90 hours per week, they should be working closer to 40-50 in the somewhat-near future, with that number continuing to drop over time.

We obviously have 3 possible paths:

  1. We return to the single-provider days of old
  2. We scale back "normal" hours to be 20-30 hours per week per person.
  3. We have high unemployment while many are working 70+ hour weeks.

I think an average of 25 hours per week would hit a nice sweet spot. It would allow companies to have 10-hour work days, either alternating 3/2 10-hour days per week, or 5-hour shifts 5 days a week. Jobs like programming could be designed to have 2 8-hour shifts per week (to perform actual development) along with 3 3-hour shifts (to address meetings, squash bugs, perform customer service, etc.). What is keeping us from this?

Instead, we have something like 15-20% of the population overworking themselves while another 15-20% are under- or unemployed. Something's gotta give.